Spiegel 1974: “Temperatures Over Last 20 Years Have Dropped Faster Than At Anytime In The Last 1000 Years”

Looking back at the Spiegel archives, here’s another report warning of global cooling and that man was the cause: The desert is growing.

There are some very familiar sounding excerpts (my emphasis):

Undisputed is that the desert is growing…the Sahara in some places has expanded southwards by 48 km…24 million people in Mauritius, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad are threatened with starving to death.

Meteorologists and climate scientists have another reason for the catastrophe: the changing world climate.

…Not only in the Sahel region, but also in Northwest India and over Hokkaido…the summertime monsoons have been almost completely absent since 1970.

…The climate in the northern hemisphere, explained Dr. Reid Bryson, Director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, is cooling slowly but steadily. After the the mean temperature made a step upwards since the turn of the century, there’s been a comparably rash temperature drop over the last 20 years: On average temperature dropped from 16 to 15,7°C (see graphic).

For Iceland, which is considered to be a sensitive climate indicator, Bryson and Icelandic meteorologist Berg Torssen calculated the climate changes back to 900 A.D. … Since the middle of this century, average temperatures dropped faster than at any time over the last 1000 years, by around 1°C.

At the same time the climate in the huge cold zones of the North, Canada and Siberia are getting frostier…for Central Russia, where the year before last the ‘coldest temperature in several hundred years’ was registered.

The cold blocking in the north, the skeptics of the climate change theory argue, has caused the west wind zone, which supplies Europe’s middle latitudes with Atlantic lows, to drift southwards.”

In the report, Spiegel blames the monsoons on the breakdown of atmospheric circulation, adding:

Indeed the start of the dry periods coincides timewise with about with the northern hemispheric cooling. Monsoon precipitation in the Sahel Zone has dropped by more than 50% since 1857.”

So many weather extremes back then, too? Today the Sahel Region is greening. Spiegel saves the best for last:

The cold trend, calamitous forthe monsoon countries, is likely because of the industrial countries, according to US meteorologist Gene Wooldridge — through pollution of the atmosphere with soot and aerosols.

The veil of pollution allows less sunlight to shine through, which leads to fewer and fewer rain clouds forming over the oil-contaminated Atlantic.”

Climate changed naturally throughout history. But since about 1900, it’s all man’s fault. We live in an age of technical charlatans.

 

 

7 responses to “Spiegel 1974: “Temperatures Over Last 20 Years Have Dropped Faster Than At Anytime In The Last 1000 Years””

  1. Die Wüste wächst? | The Penn Ave Post

    […] What’s in the story?  Some familiar themes, as related by our translator P. Gosselin at NoTricksZone.com: Undisputed is that the desert is growing…the Sahara in some places has expanded southwards by 48 […]

  2. Ulrich Elkmann

    Nietzsche: “Die Wüste wächst – weh dem der Wüsten birgt” (The desert grows: woe to him in whom deserts hide). The “desertification of Africa” meme actually goes back longer; and the first one who blamed the worsening conditions of the environment on human mismanagement was Henry Livingstone in the 1850s:

    “The “fountains” of Kuruman watered the gardens of one of Britain’s earliest missionary stations in southern Africa. But when the great spring on the edge of the Kalahari Desert seemed to falter, the country’s most famous missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, warned that the continent was turning to desert. It was the start of a great spiritual and environmental panic that persists to this day — the myth of the desertification of Africa. The supposed cause has gradually changed from heathen religious practices to perfidious farmers. But this epic story of advancing sand dunes, lost soils and dried-up river beds has defied all the evidence for more than 150 years. And, always, the natives have been to blame. ” See: Fred Pearce, “Dr Doom-monger, I presume. (Histories).(African desertification myths),” New Scientist, 13 July 2002.

    1. Ulrich Elkmann

      The article Pearce refers to:
      “Drought, desiccation and discourse: missionary correspondence and 19th century climate change in central southern Africa,” by Georgina Endfield and David Nash, Geographical Journal, vol 168, p 33 (2002)
      http://www.jstor.org/stable/3451220

  3. Juergen uhlemann

    I found a LIFE magazine story from the 27th of Aug 1956 and the headline “Our new weather”. http://tinyurl.com/966ll46 – It starts on page 117.

    1956 higher temperature
    1974 lower temperature
    1987 higher temperature – Time Magazine “The heat is on” – 2001 “Global warming”
    today lower temperature or at least no warming in the last 10 years or so

    It’s a perfect trend of “natural” cause.

  4. August 31, 2012 | Another Slow News Day
  5. ArndB

    The SPIEGEL story followed the international trend in the mid 1970s

    • Science News, November 15, 1969 (The Earth’s Cooling Climate);
    • Washington Post, January 11 1970 (Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age);
    • Fortune, February 1974, pp. 90-95, (Ominous Changes in the World’s Weather);
    • Time, June 24, 1974 (Another Ice Age?);
    • Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974 (Earth Seems to be Cooling Off Again).

    The New York Times already raised the subject in 1961 by reporting that: “Scientists agree world is colder; But Climate Experts meeting here fail to agree on reason for change”. (NYT, Walter Sullivan; January 30 1961),…
    More at: http://www.seaclimate.com/g/g1.html, where the reason for the colder world, which started in winter 1939/40 and during WWII is discussed.

  6. DirkH

    Clint Eastwood at the RNC
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=933hKyKNPFQ
    h/t Amino Acid in Meteorites

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