Curtis Dahlgren
POPULAR MECHANICS, 1957: "What's happening to the weather?"
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By Curtis Dahlgren
February 1, 2017

"Science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term,'social science' to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own brand of socialism as 'scientific socialism.'" – Thomas Sowell (2009)

I'M NOT SAYING YOU'RE CRAZY if you are concerned a bit about pollution, but we have to get real too. Sowell also said, "People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global-warming crusade, massive programs are under way and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth. Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on any bandwagon . . "

"It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." – Mark Twain

Sounds like some professors I had. They saw their calling as "deprogramming" kids from Christian or conservative homes. That's bad enough ("save the world on your own time, not the taxpayer's dime"), but the crusaders are now telling kids in preschool that they are going to die of Anthropogenic Global Warming (to keep government grants coming?). That's child-bullying! And the teaching of AGW has priority over teaching the 3Rs (many public school kids don't even know what "the 3Rs" ARE).

WELL – I happened to run across a copy of the September 1957 issue of Popular Mechanics, and at the top of the cover was the headline "What's happening to the weather?" The sub-head of the article was "Are winters getting milder than in the good old days?" There were even photos of melting glaciers in Alaska!

Three of the "foremost weather experts" were interviewed, and their focus was on sun spot cycles. Surprise, surprise! Carbon dioxide wasn't mentioned at all, but some people blamed nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s (and later, rockets being fired into space). Here's the gist of the article:

PM QUESTION: Do these weather cycles tell us anything about future weather conditions?

A #1: No, because we know so little about the underlying causes.

A #2: These factors have some suggestion of recurrence.

Q: Does this mean we are near the end of a cycle?

A: In the 18th century it was quite warm in America and Europe. Following 1790, it turned colder in Europe and America. This seems to be happening now.

Q: To what extent are cycles related to sun spots.

A: They seem to occur in cycles of 40 years, like 1755-1795. We are now entering a period of much lower sun spot activity, meaning cooler and wetter weather ahead.

They were "spot on"! By the 1970s the alarmists such as TIME and NEWSWEEK were proclaiming a new Ice Age was upon us. Personally, I recall 80 degree-below-zero wind chill factors in the early 1980s before moderation set in again. By the late 1990s, the Chicken Littles were predicting we're all going to die! Either by drowning in the rising seas or by other unclear symptoms of climate "change." Then sunspots and northern lights almost stopped after 2005 and the planet hit a plateau in temps (some "experts" even used the P-word, PAUSE).

By the end of Obama's time in office, government "experts" were again touting record hot years, although America's hottest year was in the 1930s, before freeways and smog, etc. The beat goes on and so does the fund raising for the enviro-mental whackos, even though global warming is far, far below economic survival as a concern for the average citizen.

"One thing to remember is that the machine cannot be any more accurate than the information fed into it. We lack so much accurate weather data, from over the oceans -which are five-sevenths of the world – and from areas with inadequate weather observations." – climate expert in Popular Mechanics, 1957

Computers were called "machines" in those days, and even though our computers are "new and improved," science has not achieved perfection in the placement of temperature sensing devices on land (we also measure earth temps with satellites, and that data doesn't agree with measurements on land).

"When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big TV networks went for days without even reporting these facts . . " – Thomas Sowell (Whistleblower, February 2010)

He was referring to Climategate at East Anglia University, which many climatologists themselves have evidently never heard of. As for the many other "scares" we've been belabored with, Sowell says:

"'Global warming' hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is 'science.'"

Think of all the dietary fads we've literally out-lived! Milk will kill you. Coffee will kill you. Salt will kill you. Someone asked "If salt is bad for you, how do whales survive?" But seriously, "science" now says that a low-salt diet will give four times the chances of getting heart disease. Jerry Reed had the perfect song:

"Yo still gonna die."

But please, save the planet on your own time, not the taxpayer's dime, eh?


In 1970, Harvard University biologist George Wald predicted, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." Sen. Gaylord Nelson, in Look magazine in April 1970, said that by 1995, "somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals (would) be extinct." – Walter Williams column

© Curtis Dahlgren

 

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Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton... (more)

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