Boris wrote:

It’s important to remember that Newsweek is not a scientific publication, and they recently admitted that that article was a mistake.

I think that’s the point — it was a mistake. While the article itself wasn’t a peer reviewed article, it did quote the opinions of well-respected scientists.

I’d be more persuaded that the global cooling thing was purely the figment of the overactive imaginations of a few loopy fringe players if I could find some evidence that those proposing it were roundly criticized by their more sober and learned scientific brethren. It appears to me that the scientific consensus had not much to say in opposition.

Was the scientific consensus back then as critical of those championing Global Cooling as the contemporary scientific consensus is of those renegades who now question the anthropogenic importance of Global Warming?

Boris continues:

For more info consult:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
Now all scientific bodies who study the climate have issued statements saying that anthroprogenic global warming is real. None did so for global cooling.

I’m not a climatologist, but I did read the article, and the comments as well. It’s a really interesting site, and some really smart people contribute to it. But the notion that all “scientific bodies who study the climate have issued statements saying that anthroprogenic global warming is real” is demonstrably false.

1) Richard Lintzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, is one body who has raised serious questions about several aspects of it (link and link).

2) More recently, Timothy Ball, whose credentials are also impeccable (Ph.D. in Climatology, with “an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition”) is another such body (here’s a recent article entitled Global Warming: The Cold Hard Facts?.

3) And then, there are those 60 plus Canadian scientists (“accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines”) who wrote Prime Minister Harper to inform him that GW data is not so secure as lay people have been led to believe (“Observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada’s climate policies are based.”) Read the whole letter.

I could go on, but why beat a dead horse?

I would also like to add that scientific consensus is hardly infallible. Michael Crichton, dismissed out-of-hand at realclimate.com, makes that point in spades, pointing to scientific consensus choosing to ignore dispositive evidence that it (the consensus) was wrong about both puerperal fever and pellagra. (I myself am familiar with a contemporary case in which a theory that was inconvenient to the one preferred by scientific consensus was pointedly ignored, in spite of dispositive evidence of it’s validity.)

My point is that science is not subject to the democratic process, and that scientific consensus and scientific truth are two quite different animals.

Boris continues:

It’s a shame this myth keep gets repeated.

It may well be that it is a myth to say that there was no scientific consensus about Global Cooling. But so what? Scientific consensus is not infallible; there were experts who sold Global Cooling as plausible; and as far as I know, unlike those who question GW today, there predictions weren’t greeted with a firestorm of criticism.

Brian