Nope.
Despite the majority of studies projecting warming, one common myth today misrepresents climate science in the 1970s by saying that the general understanding was of an imminent ice age. The small fraction of studies predicting cooling received a lot of media attention in the 1970s. The idea of a forthcoming ice age made for great headlines. The effect of this disproportionate media coverage persists today, as some people and organizations continue to perpetuate the idea that an ice age was predicted in the 1970s.
Those who continue to spread this idea create a straw man argument. A straw man is when an opponent’s position is misrepresented in order to make that position easier to attack. In this case, the position is the cooling prediction that was only held by a small minority of scientists, and has since been abandoned. This straw man results in the distortion of public understanding of climate science, and made it easier to cast doubt on the fact that our planet is currently warming due to human activity.
The majority of climate scientists predicted warming from CO2 emissions, and data supporting this prediction increased throughout the 1970s.
Many lines of evidence continued to build up, all indicating rising temperatures. By about 1980, evidence for warming was so overwhelming that ice age predictions had stopped altogether. This increase in understanding based on new evidence is a key part of the scientific process. Scientific thinking evolves as studies reveal new information. In the case of global warming vs. impending ice age, climatologist Stephen Schneider is an example of this key component of science. He was the second author on the aforementioned Rasool (1971) paper, which asserted that a quadrupling of aerosols would decrease global temperatures and, if this decrease was sustained, might lead into an ice age. However, upon revisiting this conclusion in 1974, when data and climate models had advanced, Schneider retracted the findings:
“I personally published what was wrong (with) my own original 1971 cooling hypothesis a few years later when more data and better models came along and further analysis showed [anthropogenic global warming] as the much more likely…” (Schneider quoted in Santer & Erlich (2014))
The prediction of cooling was based on the notion that aerosols from human emissions would quadruple. This increase simply did not happen, thanks in large part to actions like the Clean Air Act. Aerosol emissions actually decreased in the late 1970s, as previously mentioned. Thus, the key aspect of the cooling prediction did not come to pass, and the prediction was abandoned.
