USA Today reports on an important review article:

The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era….

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”

Now this isn’t really news to readers of Climate Progress or Real Climate (here and here) or William Connolley, but the global cooling nonsense is still the most common way people dismiss global warming to me. Michael Crichton repeats this attack in his novel State of Fear, when he has one of his fictional environmentalists say, “In the 1970′s all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming.“

This clever and popular attack tries to make present global-warming fears seem faddish, saying current climate science is nothing more than finger-in-the-wind guessing. This attack appeals especially to conservatives who want to link their attack on climate scientists to their favorite attack against progressive presidential candidates — that they are flip-floppers. But it just isn’t true, and it’s good to see this analysis is going to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). [I'll link to the study when it is up.]

Interestingly, USA Today gives famed denier Pat Michaels a chance to respond, but he makes a bizarrely lame argument, which, for anyone who understands the subject (or has read my book), should make one more worried about catastrophic global warming, not less:

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A major new study in Science by a dozen water experts, concluded humans are the primary cause of changes in Western river flow, winter air temperature and snow pack in the past 50 years — and things will only get worse if we don’t act soon. The abstract of the study, “Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States” (subs. req’d), led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, states:

Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.

The study’s conclusion is stark:

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