The Cooling World

Newsweek, April 28, 1975
 

Here is the text of Newsweek’s 1975 story on the trend toward global cooling.
It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since
about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the
general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels.

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change
dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production –
with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food
output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined
to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the
North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent
upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
 

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively
that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen
their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss
in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the
average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction
that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating
outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused
half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
 

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of
fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters
of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling
down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well
as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous
in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines
could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments
on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because
the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly
dependent on the climate of the present century.”
 

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern
Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite
photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of
1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of
sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
 

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly
misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average
temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its
warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way
toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age”
conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600
and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on
the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
 

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of
the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National
Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but
in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
 

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the
last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers
of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over
temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather
such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature
increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
 

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic
and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even
five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries
make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during
past famines.
 

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for
the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular
solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic 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 government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of
stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections
of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope
with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
 

—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports

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