“A new ice age would flood the world’s coastal cities and further lower temperatures to build up new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.” (1971)
The warming alarmists dismiss the cooling alarmists of yesterday as fringe and ignorant. But some of the biggest names of the day back then would not take too kindly to the know-it-alls of today.
Alex Epstein has coined the term catastrophicism to describe the age-old Malthusian itch. Back in the 1970s, top scientists such as NASA’s S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University, and Stephen Schneider of National Center for Atmospheric Research, were making headlines about future climate change–from people, not nature.
“Scientists have long debated whether man’s activity is actually heating or cooling the earth,” the Washington Post article below notes.
“Getting cooled air piped into the car while enjoying a meal at a drive-in restaurant. Houston, Texas. 1957” (Texas Chronicles)
Don’t whine, adapt. Just like in the last century–and before.…
“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in their 1983 primer, Tyranny of the Status Quo. And regarding government help for a developing business? “The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” the husband-and-wife team observed. “The so-called infants never grow up.”
Industrial wind power is certainly not an infant industry, having been demonstrated as grid electricity in the nineteenth century and again during World War II. [1] But it is dilute and intermittent, fatal qualities as against fossil-fuel generated electricity.
And so although the wind interests have claimed competitiveness (actual or impending) since the 1980s, and received a lifeline subsidy in 1992 (below), the U.S. industrial wind industry is as dependent on government largesse as ever.…