There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.

So begins an excellent review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley, and John Fleck. I had blogged on this when USA Today reported it but just realized I hadn’t blogged on the article itself.

The BAMS piece is easily the most thorough explanation and debunking of the issue I’ve seen in a scientific publication. Any progressive who is engaged in the climate change arena must be able to quickly and assuredly respond to this myth because it continues to live on thanks to the deniers’ and delayers’ clever strategy of ignoring the facts.

Heck even commenters on this blog keep defending the absurd line in Crichton’s 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.”

The BAMS piece examines the scientific origins of the myth, the popular media of the 1970s who got the story slightly wrong, the deniers/delayers who perpetuate the myth today, and, most importantly, what real scientists actually said in real peer-reviewed journals at the time. Their literature survey, the most comprehensive ever done on the subject, found:

The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations.

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I’m quite interested in hearing your thoughts on two questions:

1. How much of your money, if any, should the government give to Detroit?
2. What should we get in return ?

That is, of course, beyond the $25 billion already promised the Big Three (Medium Two?) U.S. automakers to retool their factories (in theory) to make fuel-efficient cars.

Worth noting at the start is that anyone, including the feds, could buy GM right now for about $2 billion, its current market capitalization, which is about one third the market cap of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

My biggest concern with giving them any more money is, of course, that their existing management brought this upon themselves. In particular, for years they refused to listen to those who begged them to build fuel-efficient cars — heck they ran away from the hybrid vehicle partnership they started with the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s once W took office, ultimately giving Toyota and Honda a 10-year lead in the core drivetrain technology of the century.

Worse, if we give them more money, what is to stop them from using some of it to keep lobbying against tougher fuel economy standards and serious greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions standards. So obviously the money would have to come with serious strings attached? Indeed, I see little point in a true bailout that isn’t part of a genuine grand bargain to make a complete transition into hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and EVs, as Gore wrote.

I heard Governor Granholm of Michigan say on NPR this morning that GM had something like 17 models in development that get over 30 miles per gallon — but first off, who knows what “in development” means and second, I’m guessing she has adopted the auto industry euphemism that you can brag about the “highway” mpg of car as if that were the actual total mpg of a car. [Note to future Obama FCC: How about banning any greenwashing claims that just feature highway mpg.] And third, we need GM to have 17 models in production that get 60 overall mpg.

Granholm said that failure to save the Big 3/Medium 2 would cost the country three million jobs, but Diane Rehm and her guests demurred, since going into bankruptcy does not mean you shut down every auto related job in the country. The ever-cogent Steven Pearlstein explored all this in a recent Washington Post business column on the issue of whether the government should subsidize a GM-Chrysler merger:

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On Friday, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) announced his whip team, the members of the Democratic caucus who will attempt to wrangle the votes needed to maintain his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee when the Democrats make leadership decisions on November 17 and 18. In addition to the 26-member whip team, Dingell has received the support of House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY). Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who is challenging Dingell for the post, has not made the names of his whip team public, although Reps. Howard Berman (CA), Jim Cooper (TN), and George Miller (CA) have announced their support for his candidacy.

The oil and coal industries have overwhelmingly supported Dingell’s team, and the members’ voting records reflect that. On average, Dingell and his supporters have received nearly six times as much money from Big Oil as Waxman’s team, and nine times as much money from King Coal. Dingell’s supporters have voted with Big Oil’s agenda 2.7 times as often as Waxman’s people, according to Oil Change International’s vote tracker.

Twelve of the 26 members of Dingell’s whip team are Blue Dogs, the self-described conservatives of the caucus. Seven Dingell backers signed the Waxman-Markey-Inslee statement of climate principles last month: Robert Andrews (NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Jesse Jackson Jr. (IL), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Charlie Rangel (NY), Bobby Rush (IL), and Ellen Tauscher (CA).

UPDATE: Gristmill‘s Kate Sheppard notes that yet another industry representative has weighed in to support Dingell. “Dingell really has a very good understanding of the industry,” David Cole, chair of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, MI, told Bloomberg. Cole said a Waxman chairmanship would be “very unfortunate” and “the fur would really fly.”

Coal and oil industry donations from 2000 to 2008 to Dingell, Waxman, and their supporters: Read more

Nicholas Kristof’s terrific NYT column Sunday, “Obama and the war on brains,” opens

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.

Fundamentally, we have no chance whatsoever of avoiding catastrophic global warming if Americans remain as anti-intellectual and anti-scientific as they have been. Or perhaps I should say if Republicans remain as anti-intellectual and anti-scientific as they have been.

As I noted in “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP,” a large number of Republicans have effectively tuned out scientists. The percentage of Democrats who say (correctly) the effects of global warming have already begun has risen steadily in the past decade from 52% to 76%. But for Republicans there has been a drop from 48% to 42% — even though over the exact same time period, the percentage of Republicans who say that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring” has risen from 52% to 54%! In short, a significant and growing number of Republicans — one in eight as of 2008 — simply don’t believe what they know most scientists believe.

This is no accident. The leaders of the conservative movement stagnation have launched a sustained campaign against science and scientists — a war on science, as Chris Mooney labeled it. In some cases, like Inhofe and Crichton, they viciously attack not merely the conclusions of the scientific community but their motives and integrity. And the cleverest GOP presidential candidates along with their Rovian advisors have been able to associate intellectualism with being elite, out of touch, and untrustworthy, using the centuries-old tricks of rhetoric (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”).

Kristof notes:

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You know your party has run out of ideas when the media writes post-election stories headlined, “ENERGY POLICY: GOP message likely to remain the same as party looks to rebuild” (subs. req’d).

The motto of the conservative movement stagnation is apparently “They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.” According to the story:

But several prominent party officials said they believe the GOP’s message is fundamentally sound when it comes to energy policy, pointing to that issue as one of the few political bright spots in recent years.

No, seriously, this is not another Onion article. “Several prominent party officials” apparently are convinced that “Drill baby, drill” is “one of the few political bright spots” for the party. And you thought Sarah Palin was scary?

It shows you just how out of touch GOP leaders are from the imminent reality of peak oil and irreversible, catastrophic climate change — although, as we have seen, the entire GOP electorate is similarly out of touch (see “64% of GOP voters say Palin is their top choice for 2012, 69% say Palin helped McCain.”

The article is full of this kind of self-deception, which traditionally marks a party and an ideology in decline. So the whole piece is worth excerpting if for no other reason than its anthropological value to the FHA (Future Historians of America):

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