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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Both matter, though warming wasn't considered a big deal, the media was still coming away from warning about a coming ice age (i've never figured out what was going on there, as a kid I heard it more than once, but now few admit the scare existed). The ozone hole was a big deal.

Now that CFCs are banned the ozone layer is recovering. I'm guessing these emissions are not really enough to harm the ozone layer much (so long as they don't get worse!), but they add to greenhouse gases that are not in control.

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" though warming wasn't considered a big deal, the media was still coming away from warning about a coming ice age (i've never figured out what was going on there, as a kid I heard it more than once, but now few admit the scare existed)."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

> i've never figured out what was going on there

The media lying is what happened. Either because they don't know anything about any subject and misunderstood some very non-surprising papers or because somebody was paying them to lie so people wouldn't believe on global warming.

It's hard to say how much of what reason.

And nowadays people go scrutinize the scientific papers to find the bad ones... and there aren't any. Because there were never any, the entire thing waas invented elsewhere.

> And nowadays people go scrutinize the scientific papers ... and there aren't any.

That's provably not true, there are many bad scientific papers out there.

If its bad science in the first place, nothing downstream is ever going to be credible.

There was never much scientific discussion about Earth entering an ice age. So there aren't papers there, neither good nor bad.

There was something about fixed frequency cycles on our climate, that were the source of the thing. But those don't say anything not even similar to what the press run with.

That's because anthropologists are very particular about their methodology, and which papers get accepted for peer review.

We've known about precession, but since these cycles occur in the tens of thousands of years, and each cycle is usually offset by some cataclysmic event, little actual evidence remains.

>as a kid I heard it more than once, but now few admit the scare existed.

People very rarely admit to backing the wrong horse that. Nobody will tell you they sold AAPL and MSFT stock in the 90s. Nobody will tell you they believed the racist propaganda back in the 60s. Nobody will tell you they believed Iraq had WMDs in the 00s. Nobody will tell you that they believed the people who were saying Long Island would soon be under ice in the 70s.

Would love to hear what you think about the Ars Technica article linked in another reply to GP, and how it relates to what you and GP said.

I always figured it was a Y2K style "experts make narrowly scoped statements and journalists blow it out of proportion and make it look like the world is ending" type panic. The article doesn't really look into that side of things other than to say it happened.

They didn't address the popular media of the day, only what science was really saying.

Scroll down to "This journalist wrote a story, and you won’t believe what happened next"

There was like one story in a popular science magazine once that got a lot of play, and many people heard about it because it's a vivid story. That's about the extent of it.

Climate change deniers also keep it alive because enlarging it validates their distrust of scientists.

It was more than one story. PBS programs and other sources ran with it.

Notice that i'm careful to say it was the media, and not sound science.

No, the stories also made it into Newsweek and Time, which were pretty much the dominant credible news weeklies at the time, circulated to many millions of households. It's easy to look back now and say that was just sloppy work with little impact which has since been overblown, but I remember some academic authority figures in my young life taking the idea seriously a decade later as a result.

It was delivered with an imprimatur of authority from multiple sources and left an imprint for a long time.

I certainly advocated for action in Iraq in the early 2000s. I have a naive world view, informed I guess by a lot of 90s American media output, about America saving the world, Iraq was one of those opportunities.

I they hadn't totally botched it post invasion, maybe it would have worked too.

But let's see, tell 800k armed angry men they are out of a job and tell them to "go home, please don't steal any AK47s on your way out, mmmkay thanks goodbye go home and be a good boy now"

That was definitely one of the bad ones, but I think the root problem (which continues to this day) is that US foreign policy somehow manages to blend black-and-white moral histronics with an extremely shaky grasp of morality. The US can't work with moderates and pragmatists because anybody who's less than a pro-US liberal is beyond the pale, and it can't work with idealists because it spent the whole GWOT trumpeting about its torture program.

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