The Patriot Post® · Oh the Irony of It All!
Remember the winter of 1976-1977? Here was the Time magazine cover when things got real bad:
I went back and googled this. Now, when I was in school in the 1970s, there was certainly talk of a coming ice age. None other than our own current science czar to the president said this. Please read the article. I don’t want to be accused of taking all this out of context.
When I went back and googled this, I found it’s now all dominated by articles claiming there was never any of this going on. Which, if you actually loved the weather and were in school back then, at least at PSU, that is what was being bantered about. It’s all very Orwellian to me — erase the past and replace it with whatever who is in charge wants to go with.
But enough of that. It’s up to the reader to be challenged and try to find the truth. Here is something that can’t be denied: the colder world in 1976, when blocking developed over the pole because it was warmer over the poles, similar to what we see now.
This was preceded by major snow in the Northern Hemisphere, just like we are seeing now! In fact, currently only one year is ahead of the Northern Hemispheric snowfall this year, and it’s … 1976!
Since summer, because we knew we would be seeing major Eurasian snows develop in the fall despite the very warm fall we had forecast last spring here in the U.S (followers of us know full well we had an endless summer forecast), we have been saying a colder and snowier winter is on the way for the U.S. as a whole. We believe that this December, for instance, will be opposite the last two warm Decembers and that, if you are a big fan of snowy and cold run ups to the holidays, this is your year! But either way, it’s not CO2 that would cause it but a predictable pattern which one can see evolving simply by looking at what actually happened in the past.
In weather and climate or anything, the words of Abe Lincoln ring true: “History is not history unless it is the truth.”
The truth is that back in the 1970s there was plenty of talk about the globe cooling. Now there is plenty of talk about it warming (it is, just as it was cooling back then). Either way, if this winter turns cold and snowy, it’s not like the same signals were not there before, and CO2 had nothing to do with it. Research into the patterns that caused it is what we use, and there are similarities, no matter what someone wants to say today.
Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm, and contributor to The Patriot Post on environmental issues.