evidence: One of the undying, zombie-like arguments against climate change is that you can’t trust climate scientists because they started out making doom and gloom claims about global cooling in the 1970s. But this, along with many other things comedian Dennis Miller has said on late night talk shows, needn’t be taken seriously. By the time fears of an ice age reached the public's attention, there was a long history of concerns about warming. The idea that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet can be traced back to an 1896 paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. In the 1930s, Britain’s Guy Callendar concluded that global warming was already underway. So it seems a bit odd that anyone worried about cooling. What was really going on back in the '70s—both in science and in the media? [...] This was partly the result of some new fields that were opening to concerted exploration for the first time. Up-to-date estimates of global temperature were finally being maintained, and they were accompanied by ongoing atmospheric CO2 measurements, which had only started in 1958. The first punch-card-driven computer models of Earth’s climate system were being developed, giving researchers new tools to analytically attack questions about the physics of Earth's atmosphere. And we were just getting a handle on how sunlight-reflecting aerosol particles behaved in the atmosphere.