If you missed Meet the Press with Chuck Todd this weekend you might want to go back and watch it. There were several "what the Hell" moments on the show. And while the short segment above with Pastor-Pundit Mike Huckabee didn't by any means top that short list, it was notable in what it says about the man's judgement or character:
"I know that when I was in college I was being taught that if we didn't act very quickly, that we were going to be entering a global freezing," he told Meet the Press. "Go back and look at the covers of Time and Newsweek from the early '70s. And we were told that if we didn't do something by 1980, we'd be popsicles. Now we're told that we're all burning up. Science is not as settled on that as it is on some things.”
Well, as luck would have it, we discussed Huckabee's 1970s global cooling myth this last weekend on Sunday Kos. And here's
the gist of it:
[W]e should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends—and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. -- Science Dec 1976
The paper surveys climate studies from 1965 to 1979 (and in a refreshing change to other similar surveys, lists all the papers). They find very few papers (7 in total) predict global cooling. So in fact, the large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. -- Connelly, Peterson, & Fleck
Scientists never predicted an imminent ice age in the '70s. They specifically discounted anthropogenic effects when estimating when conditions for another icy advance would occur thousands of years in the future. The consensus of climate scientists on a separate matter under study at that time was that greenhouses gasses would cause global warming. Huckabee fell hook, line, and sinker for a known zombie lie easily falsified by any first-year undergraduate science student at a community college. So, either he knowingly lied to millions on national TV, or he lacks the basic competence and conviction to get simple facts right. Decide for yourself which is more embarrassing, but either one should disqualify a prospective candidate from leading the most technologically advanced nation on Earth.