Death by Frostbite In the 1970 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, it is recorded that in early geological times, Earth's normal temperature was comparatively warm, with few temperature extremes. Polar latitudes were cool, with open seas. Britannica reported further that around the year 1550, glaciers began to grow and advanced steadily until a warm-up commenced in the mid 1880s. That warming continued until 1940, with Arctic ice retreating several hundred miles. Then Earth's temperatures again began to fall. Cooling continued for some years, and glaciers grew once more until the 1970s. Winter in 1962-63 was the coolest in four centuries in the northern hemisphere.               By the mid 1970s, 'scientists' were sounding               the alarm about Global Cooling. In April, 1975,               Newsweek magazine published an article titled               "The Cooling World," spelling out the grim               predictions of a frigid future. The impact of Global Cooling, it was said, would be most severe on agriculture industries. Wheat growing countries would be especially hard hit. The world's food supply was forecast to drop significantly in as little as ten years. That would have been by 1985, just twenty five years ago. The growing season in England was said to have shrunk by two weeks from 1950 onward, due to the increasing cold. Underscoring those chilling predictions, a 1974 survey by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported a half-degree drop in the northern hemisphere's temperature in the twenty-three years between 1945 and 1968. That's about .022° per year. Two NOAA scientists reported on a study that concluded sunshine in the USA diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972. Dr.George Kukla of Columbia University reported that satellite photos showed a sudden increase in snow cover in the northern hemisphere during the 1971-2 winter. Along with Robert Matthews of Brown University, Dr.Kukla convened an international conference that reached a consensus on the cooling crisis, prompting them to warn then President Nixon of the climate deterioration, said to be worse than anything that civilized mankind had ever experienced.               The cooling was compared to that which               brought on the last ice age, and a severe               winter in 1976-7 reinforced the prophesies               of Earth's impending doom.               The seemingly scientific validity of those               predictons, moved President Carter to sign               the Climate Control Program Act into law               to combat Global Cooling. Significantly, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO²) in the atmosphere at that time was 335 parts per million (ppm). The current level, 380 ppm, is a mere 45 ppm above that, well within the range of past variations. Historically, fluctuations of 45 ppm or more in atmospheric CO² have occurred frequently over various periods of time.

vostok

The Vostok Ice Core In 1988, the United States, Russia and France collaborated in an ice-drilling project at the Russian Vostok base in East Antarctica and recovered an ice-core from the deepest level ever reached up to that time. Scientific examination of that core revealed a record of Earth's climate for the past 400,000 years, and defined four major climate cycles during that period. Four times, at intervals of approximately 100,000 years, Earth's temperature peaked at about 3° to 4°C (37 to 39° F) then fell again to lows of minus eight to minus nine C (-8 to -9°C) or 16 to 18° F.               Coincidentally, the concentration of CO² in               the atmosphere rose and fell synchronously               with those temperature fluctuations. Four               times as the temperature peaked in those               100,000 year cycles, the CO² level topped               out at around 300 ppm, and four times as               the temperature bottomed, the CO² level               dropped to about 180. Within each of those 100,000 year cycles, there were repetitive shorter oscillations of both CO² and temperature, in lockstep. Those oscillations were often as great as 55% of the overall fluctuation range and variations in carbon dioxide levels were often as much as 60ppm. That is about the same as the change we've seen in the past fifty years.               Just as the Vostok ice core revealed the               parallel between temperature and the CO²               fluctuations, it also indicated that the rising               and falling temperature may have led the               rise and fall in CO² by about 800 years in               each cycle. Thus if there is cause and effect between atmospheric CO² and temperature, it appears that temperature changes cause CO² changes, rather than vice verse, so the present focus on carbon dioxide as the culprit would seem to be misdirected.               Even if some would debate that however,               one thing is certain; Earth's atmospheric               temperature and CO² fluctuations over               those 400,000 years were not man-made               (or anthropogenic, as scientists say.) We               were not even here in any numbers until               about 60,000 years ago.

Variations in Atmospheric CO² (ppm-v) --- red scale
and Antarctic Temperature °C --- blue scale
for 400,000 years prior to 1950.