https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/04/10/from-global-warming-to-global-cooling-to-global-warming-n2621739
Here is an interesting quote:
“Snows are less frequent and less deep. They often do not lie below the mountains more than one, two, or three days and very rarely a week. They are remembered to be formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow about three months every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do now. [This] change…in the spring of the year is very fatal to fruits…I remember that when I was a small boy, say 60 years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter.”
That was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1799, before fossil fuels dominated the energy industry, and when the earth’s population was far smaller than it is today. From all indications, there was indeed notable warming in the 18th century from the previous “Little Ice Age” period.
But let’s move ahead to the 20th century. The weather changes, of course, and Paul Ehrlich, who was always wrong about everything he ever said, told us in 1969, “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.” Twenty years passed, no blue steam, people were still on the earth. I guess we were lucky. And Ehrlich was rich.
Global cooling was the craze then. Here are a few representative quotes from the 1970s:
Boston Globe (1970): “Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century”
LA Times (Oct. 24, 1971): “New Ice Age Coming—It’s Already Getting Colder”
Brown Science Dept. to the White House (1972): “Deep concern with the future of the world…falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age.”