Alarmist climate letter contained misleading claims

The Opinion page (Daily Bee, July 14) included an alarmist letter about climate change which contained many deceptive and misleading statements. One thing the writer said was that the global cooling scare of the 1970s was a “myth.” In other words, there was no global cooling scare.

But I was in high school in the 1970s and I remember it very distinctly. The most likely reason for global cooling, according to the fanatics of the time, was air pollution caused by emission of particulates (called a brown cloud) from smokestacks and fossil fuels. This pollution was supposed to eventually block out sunlight, which in return would result in colder temperatures — even an ice age.

The source which the alarmist writer quoted was an ABC News article from Feb. 23, 2008, in which they admitted, “The '70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.” The source also stated, at the end of the article, “That was an unusually cold decade, especially the later years, across the Northern Hemisphere. In the USA, the winters of 1977-79 were three of the 11 coldest since the recording of temperatures began in the 1890s, according to climate center data. The winter of 1978-79 remains the coldest on record in the USA.”

Clearly, the scare of the 1970s was a real scare, not a “myth.”

MONTE HEIL

Sagle