@SeasonedRP Not sure about you, but I can REMEMBER news, current events, and pop culture back to the early-mid 70s. By the late 70s, it was spoken of in the past tense. "They USED TO say we were going to cause another ice age..." The mainstream environmental movement had long since "moved on" and threat of causing a new ice age was no longer on their radar. The big environmental issues of the later 70s were leaded gas which finally got banned (with immediate measurable results and short + long term benefits), deforestation was a distant second, but at least in Southern California, water was the most talked about issue in environmentalism.

Biggest focal point was the LA Aqueduct drawing so much water from the Owens Valley that Mono Lake dropped to the point where a land bridge developed to the island where a majority of 1000+ miles of the Pacific Coast's seagull population bred over winter, allowing predators to decimate their population despite a shitty fence built. One of my memories from earliest childhood was every year watching an atmospheric river of seagulls migrating over where we lived, where they turned inland from the coast. For weeks, it was a constant stream of seagulls flying by, in groups and formations but making a constant unending stream 20 seagulls wide from horizon to horizon. Then one year they stopped, and never in the decades since have I seen this migration big enough to notice at all. That and the snail darter, whose giant habitat's salinity became unlivable to them due to the majority of the flow of a multi-river system's delta getting diverted by humans.

Grade school kids would egg on the people ahead of them at the drinking fountain with a bitchy, "Save some for the fish, maaan!" Save the forests and save water were the second and first biggest environmental issues throughout the mid-late 70s. These were talked about ALL THE TIME when "the environment" came up in discussion.

"There's GOING to be an ice age!" was on NOBODY'S lips in the mid to late 70s and beyond. That is my direct memory, growing up in a fairly affluent and environmentally conscious area where this stuff got talked about.

@lurkerhasarisen

I'm old enough to remember when global cooling was imminent. It was - as everyone "knew" at the time - SETTLED SCIENCE.

What everyone who "discovers" this over and over never investigates deeply enough (at all) to find global cooling actually was an imminent threat that became a SOLVED PROBLEM through applied technology.

The first generations of "smokestack industries" as well as distributed across millions of individual users, pumped out MASSIVE quantities of aerosol and particulates as a byproduct of their operations. It became unbearably bad during the postwar boom times, so work was under way to clean up the emissions of large scale industries. A vignette of "how bad" particulate pollution got, in the outskirts of London, the population of gypsy moths rapidly evolved from white to black, as they hung out on bright white birch tree trunks and became easy pickings for predators when these turned black from pollution. In later decades when the particulate emissions were minimized, the moth population became white again along with the birch trees way out in the countryside.

Removing the aerosols was technically relatively easy, and with them went their effect of blocking insolation and developing process of global cooling. What was NOT easy or urgent to remove was the invisible carbon dioxide. Without a heavy particulate and aerosol load in the atmosphere balancing it and blocking heat, CO2 was now alone in its effect of trapping more of the heat coming in from the sun.

In summary: "Global Cooling" wasn't an arbitrary made-up threat to control the population (somehow...) that got arbitrarily switched to a different false narrative of global warming. "Global cooling" was an actual, active process that humans SOLVED, and studies etc of the effect petered out completely by the early 70s because by then the underlying cause had been addressed, and the results in clean, clear air were obvious to literally everyone who had lived through the worst smog days in the 50s.

Literally every time I've brought this up over the decades, the people who brought the issue up go silent without a rebuttal, only to uncritically spout a different energy-industry-fellating propaganda piece the next time they post. Just once I'd like to see ANY kind of earnest critique of what I just wrote, if one exists.

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