I have spent most of my time during the first six months of life over at Green Options in the background of the blog. I went from posting 2-5 stories a day on my personal blog to being lucky to get in 3-4 a week at Green Options. My time was well spent though because it allowed me to focus on things like creating new series. The one that I’m most proud of is Green Myth Busting. It’s been one of the best performers over at GO and continues to put the reality smack-down bat on some old school eco-myths. Today’s version is a great one- Green Myth-Busting: 70′s Ice Age Prediction by Jason Leggett.
Myth: These same climate scientists predicted a coming ice age in the 70′s. They were wrong then, so why should we trust them now?
Fact: No, they didn’t. The situation in the 70′s was very different from our current situation. There was no scientific consensus on climate change. There was no international body of scientists looking into the matter, no global effort to deal with climate change, and no daily news articles on the subject. There were maybe a couple of magazine articles, a book, and some sporadic newspaper articles.
Today, by contrast, we have the IPCC, an organization of the world’s top climate scientists and its four reports, the latest of which claims with 90% certainty that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are primarily responsible for our current warming. We also have other scientific bodies that agree with this assessment, such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Should one ask for a scientific paper from that time period that makes such a claim, one would certainly be left empty-handed. The most common example used is an article that was published in Newsweek in 1975, titled “The Cooling World”, which provides an excellent example of the sensationalist reporting that existed within some media reports.
Swing over to GO for the whole post, it’s a great read- especially if you can think of a global warming skeptic who you would like to shut up.
Noelle dEstries
Noelle d'Estries, an early GO employee who took on the varied roles of Community Manager, green celebrity blogger, and more. She currently runs worstcookever.com GO entered Noelle's life in February 2007 while she was burning tires in her backyard. A phone call from the green gods at GO, burnt out the fires. Now, Noelle happily wears her GO sweatshirt while eating organic veggies and asking for paper, not plastic. A regular at the local farmer's market, Noelle shuns raking leaves and lawn maintenance, while making gourmet foods constantly. When not staring at her computer screen, she spends time with her equally attractive dog, Tessa, cat, Tim and lover Paul. She currently holds all three point records at RIT and could eat avocados and drink wine for the rest of her life.