Newsweek April 28, 1975: Ominous Signs of Deadly Global Cooling

Global Cooling is going to kill us. Or, should I say Global Cooling was going to kill us.

From Newsweek a long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away:

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious implications for almost every nation on Earth.

...

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climate change, or even to allay it's effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the polar ice cap by covering it with black soot, or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that the government leaders anywhere are prepared to take even the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climactic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies.

The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climactic change once the results become grim reality.

From the Associated Press today:

WASHINGTON (AP) - When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid.

Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

"The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over," he said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. "We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way."

But there are powerful political and economic realities that must be quickly overcome for Obama to succeed. Despite the urgency he expresses, it's not at all clear that he and Congress will agree on an approach during a worldwide financial crisis in time to meet some of the more crucial deadlines.

Obama is pushing changes in the way Americans use energy, and produce greenhouse gases, as part of what will be a massive economic stimulus. He called it an opportunity "to re-power America."

"We need to start in January making significant changes," Gore said in a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press. "This year coming up is the most important opportunity the world has ever had to make progress in really solving the climate crisis."

Scientists are increasingly anxious, talking more often and more urgently about exceeding "tipping points."

"We're out of time," Stanford University biologist Terry Root said. "Things are going extinct."