The cooling scare of the 70's

Today, a student in one of my classes said she had heard that in the 70's everyone thought the world was cooling. She wondered if it was true. Of course, there were a few headlines about this idea in the 70's, and this is a commonly cited among doubters of climate change. Fortuitously, Real Climate had a post about this recently, which I was able to send around after class:

Here's a quote:

Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing.