In the debate on global warming, skeptics often try to undermine the credibility of science with comments like this (from another forum):
My question is, who exactly was saying this? To what extent were climatologists convinced that this was a likely threat? Was it over-hyped in the media? How did the degree of scientific certainty compare to that which is currently applied to global warming?
The leading proponent of the hypothesis that we were moving into another ice age was Dr. Stephen Schneider, at the time of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado, USA, but now at Stanford. He wrote many of the significant books promoting the notion. He is now a proponent of the problems with the greenhouse effect.
This site, hardly favorable to Dr. Schneider, does have a good précis of his cooling work:
Other scientists also jumped on the bandwagon, including John Gribbin, a ferociously fast writer who never met a fad topic he didn’t pump out a book about.
Even at the time, as I recall, the notion was treated as somewhat far fetched, but it was given seriously attention because Schneider was a serious working scientist. And even when serious scientists are wrong, you have to at least listen carefully to what they have to say. Because you never know.
The idea is still out there.
The gist is: The addition of fresh-water to the oceans could disrupt super-salty ‘chimneys’ of cold water, which could destroy some delicate ocean currents. The net result being that warmer water from the tropics doesn’t circulate as much, leading to colder climates, harsher winters, glaciers, etc. in non-tropical lattitudes.
A quick link which probably does a much better job of describing what I’m talking about, even if it doesn’t consider it too serious at the moment.
Thanks for the responses. Any other input to help flesh out answers to my questions?
Rasool and Schneider’s 1971 paper is put into context with the other research of the time in Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, particularly in this section. He also discusses some of the other contemporary predictions of imminent ice ages in this section on media coverage and public opinion about climate change in the early 1970s.
The site - or the published book version - is generally recommended as an account of how the controversies of the past led to the current broad scientific consensus.