Ever heard the one about all the scientists in the seventies who claimed the planet was cooling and that’s why we can’t trust scientists who now claim the planet is warming? Yeah, me too. Well, next time you hear it, you can point out it was never true in the first place. The consensus back then was that the planet was warming. We’re just more sure of it now after three decades of research.
Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends. The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. “A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”
The journal article can be found here [.pdf]. via RealClimate