On Oct 19, 5:31*pm, Stephen Davenport wrote:


Nor is the general point true that there was any sort of consensus on
'global cooling' during the 1970s. There is an excellent paper in
September's 'Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society' that
lays this argument to rest: 'The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling
Scientific Consensus' [Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and
John Fleck]. In a nutshell, the authors found that of relevant papers
published from 1965 to 1979, 44 indicated 'warming' and just seven
'cooling', while 20 were 'neutral'.


The idea that winters in the UK could get colder persisted for some
time after 1979. In the May 1987 edition of "Weather" is a letter
suggesting that cold winters in SE England were now the norm after the
cold of 1985,6 and 7. There are thoughts along these lines elsewhere
in that issue too. It seems to illustrate the point that long-term
predictions are often excessively influenced by recent events, an all-
too-human reaction. There have been few seriously cold spells of any
length in SE England since 1987. February 1991 had a very cold spell
but it didn't last long.

Tudor Hughes, Warlingham, Surrey.