Old Weather News
How many remember any big scares about the world atmosphere getting COLDER? You would imagine that kind of thing would never be forgotten, but it has. In considering this matter it should be noted that humans keeping accurate records of long distant weather changes has only been going on a relatively short time, representing a split second in the billions of years of our atmospheric conditions. The local weather bureau is just over a hundred years old.
Somehow somewhere in my mind there have arisen several vague memories about Earth cooling happening in my lifetime of near 89 years. I wonder why someone in the scientific world and/or the big time media hasn’t produced an accurate review of those events. Maybe they have and it wasn’t successfully fed to us busy common folk.
One habit I have never developed in these many years of adjusting to life on planet Earth was keeping a diary. For a long time I felt cheated in not having a personal record of things that went on. Have noticed that the few diaries of others that I had some knowledge of now seem sort of petty … about the keeper’s private matters. No one seemed into atmospheric warming.
Get to the point Ostrom! The following story was run in the July 25th, 1974 Kalispell Weekly News, the week before I bought it:
“COLDER YEARS?”
“Tom Alexander, writing in ‘Fortune,’ says the world is probably heading into a colder era that began in 1945. The change is not a big one. From 1945 to 1974, it is estimated at one degree Fahrenheit.
“But even this one-degree change has already caused repercussions. Hay yields are reduced in Iceland, as an example. The growing season in England is estimated to be nine or 10 days shorter than in 1940, for another.
“The minor changes thus far might be only the forerunners of serious consequences, if the newest theory of the climatologists is correct. It is believed in the past 700,000 years it has been as warm as in recent decades only about five percent of the time.
“If change is occurring, and Reid Bryson of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin is one who thinks a very important climatic change is going on right now, it will be a slow change by human standards. A rapid change is one which takes place in a century or two.
“So there is not much to worry about really. But in the long run, colder weather and shifting patterns could aggravate the energy crunch.
“So enjoy the warm days while we have them – and we are having them.”
Thus ends the article from 1974. Maybe we could get Al Gore to look into this.
G. George Ostrom is an award-winning columnist from Kalispell.