Murry Salby, plus Middleton Recycling memes at WUWT

Murry Salby and his strange ideas

There is nothing much on Anthony Watts' blog, WUWT to write about.  There was some initial swooning over Murry Salby (whose name Anthony got wrong).

According to Pierre Gosselin whose article Anthony Watts quoted: If anyone ever demolished the dubious CO2 AGW science, it’s Salby!  

If that's the best the fake skeptics can come up with then they'll be disappointed.



The presentation drew the usual gaggle of insightful comments such as:

• June 10, 2013 at 9:56 am  Go Murry!
• June 10, 2013 at 10:13 am Couldn’t have put it better myself :-)
• June 10, 2013 at 11:02 am A Man of science without a doubt.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:05 am Strong words of wisdom.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:10 am Great speaker, and impressive finale.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:24 am Brilliant.

I was a bit mystified by this question from Solomon Green.  I wonder what he's getting at here:

June 11, 2013 at 4:54 am ...why do so many commentators equate AGW with human release of CO2? Surely humans can increase temperatures, both locally and globally, without necessarily increasing CO2 levels? ...

Further down in the thread people started finding flaws in Salby's ideas.  I'm not going to waste any more space on Salby.  If you are curious about Salby and his odd notions, there is this article and more on SkepticalScience.com.

David Middleton resurrecting old Time magazine articles

And there was David Middleton, recycling the myth that "they said it was cooling in the 70s".  Which as far as I can gather may be another case of "the USA is the world world, nowhere else exists".

Here's the result of a 2008 study of the scientific literature, demonstrating the building up of the consensus on global warming and the fact that out of 71 scientific papers written between 1965 and 1979, there were only seven that "predicted, implied or provided supporting evidence" for global cooling compared to 44 for warming.

Source: Peterson et al (2008)

An Australian Perspective on Warming and Cooling

I've been looking at old newspaper clippings from Australia and have posted a few showing real concern about the possibility of global warming in the 1940s.  So much so that the first international collaboration of scientific experts was sent to Antarctica in 1949 to see if the warming trend seen in the Arctic was evident down there.

As for articles from Australia in the 1970s, there are a few.  They were a mixed bag.  Here is an excerpt from a much longer article in The Canberra Times on Tuesday 8 May 1973, right in the middle of the so-called cooling scare.  The main article was about the widespread droughts in Africa, India, Central America, Asia and Cyprus.  At the end of the article was some discussion of global temperature and climate.  Here is an excerpt (my bold):

Scientists agree that the droughts and freakish weather over many parts of the world might signal global changes in climate and some experts are even wondering if another ice age is on its way. 

The climatic situation is complicated by the largely unknown effects of man made pollution and there are contradictory theories. 

Heat pollution, as energy is consumed at an increasing rate, is sure to effect the weather to some extent by warming the upper atmosphere. But more dust in the atmosphere could balance this by reflecting the sun's rays back into space. 

Temperature 
Some American researchers have noted that in a five-year period the mean temperature of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere fell by more than half a degree Celsius, but were careful to say that this was likely to be a short-term fluctuation. 

Some Soviet meteorologists maintain that the climate of Northern Europe, Asia and America will get "markedly warmer" by the year 2000 and link this with the known recession of the polar ice. 

In Australia during the 1970s there was very infrequent speculation in newspaper and magazine articles mentioning the possibility of an ice age but not much.  It looks as if the spate of articles that WUWT-ers remember were probably mostly in the USA.  I don't know about Europe.

Australian newspaper articles on global warming - 1957 and 1972

Of more interest are articles like this one from 1957 on global warming from CO2 emissions associated with industry.  That's a couple of years before Keeling started to measure atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa.  And this one from 1972 on fears about melting of the Arctic sea ice.