In fact, the opposite occurred. World food output and per-capita production both increased steadily in the decades before and after Gwynne's prophecy of drastic scarcities.
He cited top climate experts to support his premise of global cooling: "A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972."
That era of alleged global cooling in the northern hemisphere, 1945 to 1968, is the exact period that saw unprecedented increases in overall manufacturing in the northern hemisphere and, in particular, huge increases in the number of motor vehicles on the roads - as well as huge increases in the size of the fins on an ever-growing number of ever-lengthening Coupe de Villes. (It's odd that no one at Harvard got a federal grant to study the obvious correlation between the Cadillac sales and the well-being of polar bears, the clear link between bigger fins, falling temperatures and more ice between 1945 and 1968.)
Newsweek's Gwynne saw an avalanche of evidence for global cooling and a growing scientific consensus: "The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
