It's funny to go into a science library and find half the books on climate change are about the impending "global ice age"
A lot of people think that the 1960's and 70's were a time when "global cooling" was being pushed by the scientific community. Despite a handful of popular media articles, this really wasn't the case. The classic climate dynamics papers from that era talk about how rising anthropogenic CO2 would likely overcome the recent cooling trend.
In fact, what is incredible about those papers is the prescience shown by the authors... and if you take the time to read them (and that's something I highly recommend for anyone interested in doing their own background research) you will find that the issues that these scientists were discussing in their papers are the same issues that many skeptics bring up today... as if they are fresh criticisms. They are not. And contrary to popular opinion, global warming - not global cooling - was a bigger concern among the scientific community during the 1960's/70's.
You will notice that even by the 1960's, climate scientists were aware of the contribution that volcanoes, solar activity and other natural phenomenon were playing in climate change. The public is still trying to catch up to what most scientists knew over 40 years ago.
The articles are relatively easy to read to boot...
- Sawyer, 1972 (Nature)
"Man-made carbon dioxide and the 'greenhouse' effect"
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v239/n5366/abs/239023a0.html
- Budyko, 1969 (Tellus)
"The effect of solar radiation on the climate of the earth"
- Sellers, 1969 (J. Applied Met.)
"A global climatic model based on the energy balance of the earth atmosphere system"
(I can scan in PDFs of Budyko and Sellers if you can't get electronic access to them through your school).
