“Y.M.C.A.” is back and badder than ever. President-elect Donald Trump helped to resurrect the 1978 disco icon. Yet some in the media are not hitting the dance floor and the sphere of “settled science” is trying to bury the cultural climate of the 1970s.
Today’s popular narrative about climate change that contends that the public and scientists in the 1970s were not all that concerned about global cooling during that decade can be categorized as disinformation, or at least misinformation.
I was an undergraduate student of meteorology at Penn State in the mid-70s and, even with published papers to the contrary, there was a real concern about the emergence of a new ice age. (Beyond Penn State, some nonscience students were warned that soon polar bears might be roaming New York City. That turned out to be true, but thankfully the bears have been confined to the Central…
