The book is "popular science": as it says (remarkably) in the preface by Reid Bryson: "...There are very few pages that, as a scientist, I could accept without questions of accuracy, of precision, or of balance..." and any claim to utility it may have would have to come from bringing interesting ideas to the general public (of the time).
In this analysis, I'm interested in whether the book accurately reports the state of science as then known and what issues it chooses to focus on. Its also interesting to see what uses other people put it to, now. Its often cited in the "but 20 years ago people were predicting cooling" type pages.
Lets just prove that, shall I?
The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations... If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000. Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976 (from http://www.princeton.edu/~strasbrg/ruseScare.html).
What global warming proponents don't want people to remember is that just 20 years ago, they were predicting that global COOLING would destroy the world. Lowell Ponte wrote The Cooling on the subject in 1976 (which incidentally, can be found in Hodges Library). The theory then said that particulates reflected sunlight into space, thus preventing heat from reaching the earth. Predictions of a new ice age abounded. Then the earth started warming up. Whoops. (from http://beacon-www.asa.utk.edu/issues/v76/n35/tipton.36v.html).
Ponte gets some points for noting (p13) that the "greenhouse effect" is misnamed. But that is the high point of his science.
Evidence for Pontes inability to tell sense from nonsense (or at least to check speculative results) is his assertion (p70) that gravity is weakening in the universe, and that this is proved by the moon moving away from the earth at 4 cm/year.
The first chapter starts off with stuff about decreases in sunshine (from few
measurements from industrialised areas; I'd guess that was consistent with
aerosols) then notes the Rasool and Schneider 1971 science paper
(but only
in passing. See main page for more on R+S).
Ponte asserts that
R+W estimate that man's potential to pollute will
increase six- to eightfold in the next fifty years. I think this is wrong:
R+S actually say it is still difficult to predict the rate at which global background opacity of the atmosphere will increase with increasing particulate injection by human activities. However, it is projected that man's potential to pollute will increase 6 to 8-fold in the next 50 years.... I think they
are reporting other peoples estimates to use as feed for their model, not making
their own.
The dramatic importance of climate changes to the worlds
future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we
have been lulled by modern
technology into thinking we have conquered nature. But
this well-written book points out in clear language that
the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might
face, and that massive world-wide actions to hedge
against that threat deserve immeadiate consideration. At
a minimum, public awareness of the possibilities must
commence, and Lowell Ponte's provocative work is a
good place to start.
I'd say this is a regrettable quote. But its not really the
ringing endorsement that it is often presented as.
The Cooling will be controversial, because among scientists, most of
the matters it deals with are hotly debated. There is no agreement on
whether the earth is cooling. There is not unanimous agreement on
whether is has cooled, or one hemisphere has cooled and the other
warmed. One would think that there might be consensus about what data
there is - but there is not. There is no agreement on the causes of climatic
change, or even why it should not change amongst those who so maintain.
There is certainly no agreement about what the climate will do in the
next century, though there is a majority opinion that it will change, more
or less, one way or the other. Of that majority, a majority believe that the
longer trend will be downward. Nevertheless, it is an important question,
as this book points out, and it is time for some of the questions to be
settled. Lowell Ponte has summarized the data and theories very well,
and has reasonably concluded that a rapid change in Earths climate is
possible, perhaps even likely, within the next few decades, and that this
would have serious consequences for mankind.
OK, lets stop there for a moment and compare this to what Ponte has to say:
Opening words of chapter 1:
"Our planets climate has been cooling for the past three decades. Most experts agree on this, for it has been carefully
measured by scattered monitoring stations throughout the world.
Climate in the southern half of our planet has been warming rapidly,
according to the few measurements available. But in the hlaf of our world
north of the equator, where most human beings live, the annual mean
atmospheric temperature has plunged by 0.7 oC, more than enough to
offset the southern warming and to lower the average temperature of
the whole planet by 0.5 oC."
Some disparity with Bryson, I hope you can agree. Looking at Pontes
words further, note how, despite asserting that there are few
southern measurements, he is nonetheless happy to assert that the globe
as a whole is cooling. Where he gets the 0.7 oC cooling is a mystery:
he cites no source; the graph reproduced in appendix 1 of the book
shows a cooling of possibly as much as 0.4 oC. [Somewhat later, p45,
the 0.5 global warming is qualified as "according to available
measurements".]
This failure to acknowledge uncertainty is not something trivial,
to be passed over rapidly. It is crucial. Brysons central point, that
people are not really sure whats going on, was a good one to make at the
time and thoroughly justified by hindsight.
OK, on with the preface:
"There is surprisingly little argument among those who have actually
studied climates over multi-millenial time scales that we will be in an
Ice Age 10,000 years from now. There is, however, less agreement about
how soon and how rapidly the transition from the present
interglacial will take place...".
I quote that to point out that (AFAIK) it was indeed typical of the views
of the time (at least amongst those that
extrapolated the past into the future); that it is probably not
accepted widely now [TS Ledley, 1995, ???]; and to wonder
if "among those who have actually studied climates..." is a dig at some
other group.
Skipping over, we come to:
"...There are very few pages that, as a scientist, I could
accept without questions of accuracy, of precision, or of balance...
but he then goes on to say that the book is worth reading for its presentation
of the arguments. I'm somewhat surprised the publishers let
him keep that bit in, its not really very complementary.
The NAS report was shocking...".
The NAS report was not shocking. Anyone reading it would be more
likely to describe it as "soporific". See
here for some notes I made from
that report. But to quote some of it here:
I thought it would be interesting to look in Ponte's book to see which
statements are backed up by which references. Its easy, after all, to stuff
a bibliography full of references - but what matters is which statements
are backed up by respectable scientifc references, and which are backed
up by fluff from the newspapers. But (yet another flaw in Ponte's book),
you can't do this, because the bibliography is just a "selected bibliography",
*not* a directed source of references for particular statements. So its
impossible to tell what statement a given reference is intended to support,
or indeed which statements are supported by references, and which are
fluff.
Anyway: the bibliography is largely non-scientific. Page 269
(the first page):
Lazy people have complained that
one needs to index the whole bibliography to be sure of the sci/non-sci content.
Are you one of these people? Then please do the said indexing and send it to me.
In January 1975 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report
entitled Understanding Climatic Change: A Program for Action. There
is, it said "a finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling
could befall the earth within the next hundred years...
Stephen Schneiders quote
The back cover of the book has this from Stephen Schneider:
Reid Brysons Preface
Bryson's preface is rather odd, because it indirectly contradicts much of what
is in the "science" sections of the book. Lets read it, shall we:
Pontes Misuse of the 1975 NAS report
Ponte says (p4) "Are we at the dawn of a new Ice Age? In 1975
the US National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying that if the
present cooling trend continues, there is a "finite" chance an
Ice Age could begin "within 100 years". How much chance? The NAS
panel...set the odds of this happening at no better than one in 10,000.
The number was not random [Oh good, thats a relief - WMC].
As their report noted, Earths climate in the past has tended to change in fairly
regular cycles, and if the past patterns continue we should now be
entering a 10,000 year period of cooling climate.
Bibliography
It occupies pages 296-269=27, so there are 28 pages of bibliography.
Science (ie, as in the prestigous mag): iii
esquire: i
science news: iiii
los angeles times: iiiii
fortune: ii
readers digest: i
n y times: ii
playboy: i
"african genesis": i
"the ends of the earth (asimov)": i
smithsonian: i
unesco courier: ii
time: i
"readings in man, the env and ecology": i
sci am: ii
"lao tzu": i
"western amn and env ethics": i
"harvest of the sea": i
and I've no reason to believe that untypical.
Misc bits: peoples use of LP's misquotes of NAS 76
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=lowell+ponte+cooling&hl=en&safe=off&rnum=3&selm=348aef32.99949219%40news.nucleus.com:
Misc
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=lowell+ponte+cooling&hl=en&safe=off&rnum=6&selm=3ra7gi%24bnt%40spool.cs.wisc.edu - post by mt.
Here is some text I was mailed:
For nearly three years, Lowell worked as a futurist in the high tech think tank International Research & Technology; Inc., as first assistant to Dr. William Van Leave (who later served as chief weapons advisor to America's SALT I delegation and as chief strategic advisor to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980). Lowell wrote a prophetic 1976 book about global climate change, The Cooling (Prentice-Hall; forward by U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell, preface by Univ. of Wisconsin Climatologist Reaid A Bryson), which was widely reviewed and went through five printings.