This winter has been one of the harshest in recent memory as a “polar vortex” caused much of the U.S. to be pummeled by snow storms and cold for weeks. The Obama administration, environmentalists and climate scientists argue that this is due to global warming.
Flashback to 1978 and Leonard Nimoy, aka Spock, warned that climate scientists were attributing the harsh winter of 1977 to global cooling.
“In 1977 the worst winter in a century struck the United States,” Nimoy said in an episode of “In Search of” from 1978. “Arctic cod ripped the midwest for weeks on end. Great blizzards paralyzed cities of the Northeast.”
“Climate experts believe the next ice age is on its way,” Nimoy continued. “According to recent evidence, it could come sooner than anyone had expected. At weather stations in the far north, temperatures have been dropping for 30 years. Sea coasts, long free of summer ice, are now blocked year-round.”
“According to some climatologists, within a lifetime we might be living in the next ice age,” Nimoy warned.
It wasn’t long after the harsh winter of 1977 that climate scientists began worrying that the earth was warming at an unprecedented rate because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. In June of 1988, NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress that mankind’s burning of fossil fuels was warming the planet, warning that the earth could warm by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 if nothing is done to curb emissions.
”Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,” Hansen said before Congress. “It is already happening now.”
But now that global surface temperatures have not warmed in the last 17 years, the climate argument has come full circle and some scientists are once again arguing that global cooling is on the way.
“Now an increasing number of scientists are swinging back to the thinking of the 1960s and 1970s,” Lawrence Solomon wrote in the Financial Post. “The global cooling hypothesis may have been right after all, they say. Earth may be entering a new Little Ice Age.”
Last year, the BBC reported that Professor Mike Lockwood of the Reading University argues that rapidly declining solar activity could plunge Northern Europe into another “Little Ice Age.”
“By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, [Lockwood] has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years,” The BBC reports.” Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.”
German scientists also found last year that declining solar activity and natural ocean oscillation will lower global temperatures during the 21st century.
“Due to the de Vries cycle, the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the ‘little ice age’ of 1870,” write German scientists Horst-Joachim Luedecke and Carl-Otto Weiss of the European Institute for Climate and Energy.
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