In yesterday’s post I tried to explain why I and others of my generation struggle with today’s apocalyptic predictions concerning global warming:
I suppose, as a child of the Sixties and Seventies, I can’t help remembering that some scientists were talking about a possible ice age in the not too distant future.
Younger generations might think I’m making this up but thanks to GB News presenter Darren Grimes here’s the evidence.
Darren has found a cover of Radio Times from November 1974 when it was possibly Britain’s bestselling magazine. Beneath a headline that reads ‘The ice age cometh’ the magazine declares:
It’s true, the weather is getting worse. Ice a mile thick has covered Britain 20 times in the earth’s recent past. It’s due again.
Broadcast on BBC2 on November 20, 1974, The Weather Machine was described as a ‘global investigation into the Earth's changing climate’.
1974 has been a bad year for weather, with disastrous floods and droughts, a failed monsoon in India, unprecedented tornadoes in America, a dismal summer and unseasonable gales in Europe.
The machine that makes the world's weather is changing gear - and the shift is downward, against mankind. The smallest change means loss of life in flood or drought, and the wholesale destruction of crops. For us, the price of food goes up; for millions more, it brings hunger or starvation. In the background looms the threat of ice, and the obliteration of northern lands - including Britain. The next ice-age is already overdue.
The trends are revealed in cores drilled from deep beneath the Greenland ice-cap; by instruments high on a volcano in Hawaii, acting as a breathalyser for our planet; by ships that probe the depths of the sea for clues to the weather of 18,000 years ago; and by satellites that look down from space to encompass the storms of half a world. In the Pacific and Atlantic oceans we see the beginnings of a concerted global assault on the problems of our ever-changing climate. Perhaps just in time, the nations are uniting in the war against bad weather.
A book, The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice, was published to accompany the series, a BBC co-production with several other broadcasters worldwide.
Two years later the UK basked in a two-week heatwave with record temperatures but even that wasn’t enough to dispel the notion that we might be on the cusp of a new ice age.
In fact, the record temperature set in 1976 wasn’t beaten until 2003, almost 30 years later during which the top temperatures fluctuated, much like Britain's weather.
Nevertheless eight of the hottest years since records began (my emphasis) have apparently been recorded in the past decade with new record temperatures in Britain being achieved in 2019 and again yesterday.
That and other evidence therefore supports the argument that our climate is getting warmer but you can see why people of my generation are more likely to question the scientists.
After all, if they got it wrong about a new ice age less than 50 years ago, why should we believe everything we’re now being told about global warming and the future of the planet?
That’s all I’m saying.
H/T Darren Grimes (Facebook)
