In the 1970’s there was a report called “the Cooling World” (pdf) that warned of a possible Ice Age like period of global cooling, that it’s own author later backed off from and apologized for its resulting exploitation by the fossil fuel shills to claim that Global Warming was a hoax. This global cooling meme remains a part of the republican climate deniers lexicon.
Today they’re back at it, cherry picking parts of a recent report out contributed to by two people as far as I can tell. Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and climatologist Kate Marvel (who also recommends this article on Climate change)
Here are the climate-deniers headlines just out. None of which provide a direct link to the NASA report they cite btw:
December 21, 2015
24 hours ago
December 21, 2015
The last of these three denier articles uses the identical NASA picture that I’ve embedded at the top of this post, so I’m pretty sure that this next story is the NASA article that is being referred as proof that the planet is “cooling”:
The NASA research article:
December 18, 2015
To quantify climate change, researchers need to know the Transient Climate Response (TCR) and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of Earth. Both values are projected global mean surface temperature changes in response to doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations but on different timescales. TCR is characteristic of short-term predictions, up to a century out, while ECS looks centuries further into the future, when the entire climate system has reached equilibrium and temperatures have stabilized.
[...]
...climate drivers other than carbon dioxide, such as tiny particles in the atmosphere known as aerosols, for example. It is well known that aerosols such as those emitted in volcanic eruptions act to cool Earth, at least temporarily, by reflecting solar radiation away from the planet. In a similar fashion, land use changes such as deforestation in northern latitudes result in bare land that increases reflected sunlight.
So, not being a scientist, or climatologist, I can’t elaborate on either TCR nor ECS, but can after reading all three “Cooling World” 1970’s re-dux articles, at least get to the heart of the climate-deniers argument — It’s bullshit
This is the thrust of the fossil fuel shills argument in layman’s terms (and imo):
Wherever there is heavy polluting industries as fossil fuels are burned, there are increased levels of smog which in turn, blocks the suns rays (and reflects them) which cools the world down. So in light of this revelation: Clear cutting forests, smog, burning fossil fuels, high clouds and Sahara dust are a good thing, and are proof that we must continue, no...increase burning fossil fuels and clear cutting down our forest lands in order to combat the elevated and increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere.
...that is the latest return of the “cooling world” fallacy that is once again being resurrected by the fossil fuel shills — mostly, but not limited to the corporate shell company aka the GOP
Some truth can be found here
One last thing: volcano eruptions that spew massive quantities of particulates into the atmosphere — another good thing to help keep our planet well balanced — Not