'Scientists Agree World Is Colder,' New York Times Declared in 1961

Brittany M. Hughes | November 24, 2015
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“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.”

No, that’s not a recent quote from a group of global warming dissenters. It’s the first line of an article published in The New York Times on Jan. 30, 1961.

The article was topped with one bold declaration of a headline: “Scientists Agree World Is Colder.” Yep. Fifty years ago, before deciding to scare the world witless with prophesies of planetary heating, scientists were afraid of freezing to death.

The only problem was, the scientists in question couldn’t seem to reach a consensus on why the planet’s temperature was allegedly dropping.

In the article, scientists from America to Australia to Hungary blamed everything under the clearly-not-hot-enough sun for the impending glacial apocalypse, including the “shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun,” “the tilt of the earth’s axis,” the solstices, the sun, “changes in transparency of the atmosphere,” dust spewed from volcanic eruptions, industrial smoke blocking sunlight, and the presence of too much or not enough ice in the Arctic.

By November of 1974, the Earth’s chilling situation appeared even more dire. An article published in the Ukiah Daily Journal, and dug up by Climate Depot, reported the United States and Russia were considering damming up the Bering Strait in an effort to deliberately warm the Earth’s temperature and avoid a catastrophic ice age.

The newspaper quoted a former arms technologist named Lowell Ponte, who pointed to global cooling as “the primary cause of world food shortages.”

Sounds like he’d had gotten along well with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who likes to blame global warming for everything from droughts to famines to the number of terrorists running around with bombs.

Back in 1974, Ponte warned of a global ice age that could last anywhere from 200 to 10,000 years, and result in “rivers of solid ice again as far south as Yosemite in California and Cincinnati, Ohio.” The paper added that scientists had proposed about 60 theories to explain the cooling phenomenon.

According to Ponte -- who was basically the Al Gore of the 1970s – global powers needed to combine efforts and point a manmade space heater toward Mother Earth in order to “convert the American southwestern deserts into verdant green valleys” and “stave off worldwide famine.” He further detailed how the Earth would basically morph into the Planet Hoth in his book “The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive It?”

If the threats of global warming are anything like scientists’ cooling predictions of the 60’s and 70’s, we’ll probably survive it just fine.

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