Now we're going to pay for it. Scientists are telling us we're heading into a new... Ice Age? What? It's from Time magazine. Monday, June 24th, 1974. Yes, to quote the title of Penn and Teller's TV series, this video and the next will look at bullshit. Or to put it more politely, urban myths that have grown up around the subject of climate change. In the first two videos, I looked at the science of climate change and real research done by experts on both sides of the issue. Now it's the turn of the amateurs. Now I love Penn and Teller and I appreciate that bullshit is supposed to be entertainment. But this claim also pops up in internet blogs and even mainstream media. This is time magazine in 1975. Another ice age is from the wrong and a guy. And this is Senator James Inhoff, who not only cites time but also this 1975 story in Newsweek. George Will cites a 1975 article in The New York Times and Michael Criton makes the claim on page 315 of his book, State of Fear. In the 1970s he writes, all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming. But these are all popular newspapers, magazines and novels, not scientific journals. It's from Time magazine! So what Penn? Time magazine isn't peer reviewed. It's just as capable of misreporting and sensationalizing stories as any other magazine. Don't just take my word for it. Read the story and tell me exactly where this claim about an ice age comes from. Five people, all scientists, were named in the story. They all agreed that the Earth had been cooling, sure, that was evident from the temperature data. But not one of them substantiated time's line of an impending ice age, and one of them even said the period of cooling was about to end. So where did time get the idea an ice age was coming? Well, the magazine had to resort to an old journalist's trick of inventing a pack of unnamed and unquoted sources. Climateological Cassandraurs are becoming increasingly apprehensive. That may be. But why couldn't Time magazine find one of these climateological Cassandraurs? Perhaps because they weren't as numerous as the headline and the hype suggest. The question is, how many climatologists in the 1970s did accept this conclusion of a coming ice age? If you want to find out, it's no good thumbing through Time and Newsweek, boring as it sounds. You have to look at the scientific literature. The first thing you notice is an admission from a lot of scientific bodies that there was great uncertainty about the climate in the 1970s. Okay, but was there any kind of consensus? Well, if all or most climate scientists were predicting another ice age back in the 1970s, there should be lots of scientific papers from that time supporting that conclusion. After all, there are hundreds of scientific papers today supporting anthropogenic climate change. A review published in the bulletin of the American Meteological Society looked at the scientific literature rather than the popular press. Three climatologists search scientific journals between 1965 and 1979, and yes, they found seven papers predicting not an ice age, but global cooling. The only problem is, they also found 44 articles predicting global warming. Even though the world was cooling in the 1970s and had been for three decades, even so, six times as many climatologists predicted that the danger was global warming, not global cooling. The reason is simple. By that time the mechanism of global warming was understood, the probable trigger for ice ages was beginning to be understood, and the reason for global cooling was reasonably well understood. Climateologists suspected, and we now know, that it was caused by pollution, mostly particulates and aerosols, which blocked sunlight. Even with all the uncertainty, the majority of climatologists concluded that global warming caused by carbon dioxide would eventually overwhelm any global cooling caused by pollution. But if that's the case, why were all the media saying scientists predicted global cooling? Simple. They weren't. There were plenty of news stories in the 1970s reporting other conclusions. It's just that people like George Will chose not to mention the fact. It's not as if Will was unaware of the existence of these newspaper reports. How do I know? Well, remember that 1975 New York Times story? According to a George Will column last year, it reported many signs that Earth may be heading for another ice age. I tracked down the story and was astonished to find it was called, Warming Trends Scene in Climate. Could this be the same article that, according to Will says we're headed for another ice age? I checked the whole article. The quote about an ice age wasn't even there. At all. Here's the story. See if you can find it. Okay, maybe I made a mistake in attributing the quote to George Will. So I googled his name and the phrase, Earth may be heading for another ice age and found not one, but three columns in which Will makes exactly the same claim. He first made the claim in 1992. Then in 2004. And again last year. And remember Senator Inhoff? Well, he had at least one quote that came from a respected scientific body rather than the popular media. It was a 1974 report from the National Science Board, and here's the quote Inhoff used from that report exactly as it was written in his statement to the Senate. Judging from the record of the past into glacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end leading into the next glacial age period. But in the original report, the period came later. Inhoff left out some crucial words at the end of that sentence, leading into the next glacial age, 20,000 years from now. 20,000 years is close to the 16,000 years that's the current estimate for the onset of the next ice age. But for the purposes of propagating an urban myth, the claim about a consensus on an imminent ice age simply does the rounds unchecked even when it's dressed up as science. Welcome to headline Earth. The show that brings global warming back down to the basics, the science, a back in the 70s. There was this trend or the scare of that global cooling. The bottom line is there was no scientific consensus about the climate in the 1970s. There was a sudden realization that the climate was changing. But there was a lack of good data, a lack of technology, a lack of evidence, and admitted uncertainty about what was happening. Of course, it's important to show that climatologists have got this global warming thing wrong, and a great way to show this is to say that they predicted global cooling in the 1970s. Yes, I get it. But don't dress this up as science. If geologists found evidence that an earthquake is going to hit California or a tsunami is about to devastate the coast of Japan, what kind of individual would want to deliberately manufacture misleading information to discredit them?