TLDR: The book "The Discovery of Climate Change" by Spencer Weart dedicates an entire chapter to fitting the global cooling coverage you remember into the wider history of today's consensus, and I think it will address that much more satisfactorily for you than anyone here can.

Edit: Or one quick one about cooling specifically:

>There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then...When the myth of the
1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary
discussion over climate change, it is most often in the
form of citations not to the scientific literature, but
to news media coverage.

[5]https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/11584/1/2008bams2370%252E1...

>the same game that all climate change alarmists play

I wrote a different reply and deleted it in hopes of taking a completely different direction rather than just try to argue the points here. My dad remembered the same new coverage and had (I think) the same questions as you, and eventually he got his questions answered in a way that satisfied him in understanding the present day scientific consensus about climate change.

On a board like this you're always going to get terse responses to what you are asking about because to most people here it is akin to demanding that they, individually, win a debate that electricity is safe before you will use your light switch. There is no shortage at all of literature by so many sources specifically to address what you are asking about. Highly qualified people have labored exhaustively compiling the present day evidence for climate change, how it was gathered, how consensus has changed over time. Many people remember the global cooling controversy of the 70s and have asked your exact kind of question many times before. A quick google found this reply on /r/askhistorians[0], and that reply just links a post from 2005[1] which itself cites Spencer Weart's History of Global Warming, since republished as The Discovery of Global Warming, which dedicates a whole chapter specifically to 1970s "global cooling" claims.[3] These kinds of sources are going to be much better equipped and better qualified to explain the facts to you than an internet commenter, and since they've already spent the effort, why should some stranger on this board do it? Especially since this information is already easily available to you! I am not a researcher, or an expert, I didn't have this all immediately on hand. I'm sure you will have stringent standards to apply to select your sources, but even still I suspect you will be able to find enough scholarly works you find sufficiently trustworthy to build a good understanding of how "global cooling" on cable news in the 70s fits into the bigger story of reaching today's scientific consensus about climate change, without somehow contradicting all of it.

Spencer Weart is not an "alarmist playing a game," he provides an extremely thorough analysis of how this science was discovered. The internet records many instances of these positions being investigated and debated without the door being slammed in anyone's face. The refusal of a random internet commenter to retread the exact same debate here today doesn't make them an alarmist and it doesn't say anything about the validity of the general consensus for climate change. The popular debate about climate change has been held and reheld so many times that today scientists ask why there is still such an ongoing popular debate despite so many years of such broad scientific consensus.[4]

The sources linked by the commenter you replied to would probably help too, and my hope is their offer of a "limited engagement" would include a discussion of those sources - which I would be interested to read. But personally, I am not going to debate the viewpoints of these sources with you, and it's not because I'm playing the game, it's because I can't explain this stuff half as well as the original authors, and I especially can't attempt to do that with anyone who's unwilling to even read what they have to say before debating the consensus viewpoint. I really think the Spencer book is a good place to start - he's a historian of science first and foremost, has been for decades.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7f8t9g/what_hap...
[1]https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-g...
[3]https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674031890
[4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXCdeR6iAgw&embeds_referring...