Myth:
Back in the 1970s, scientists predicted that the Earth was going to cool, not warm. That did not happen, so we can’t take scientific predictions about global warming seriously.
Fact:
Scientists did not predict that the Earth would cool. What happened was that researchers at NASA calculated what would happen if there were a quadrupling of particulate matter in the atmosphere. They predicted that this would block enough sunlight to reduce global temperatures by 3.5°C and trigger another ice age. Of course, this scenario did not occur, as governments introduced legislation in the 1970s to clean up polluting industries. The reason the public became aware of the story was that Time and Newsweek magazines published articles at the time about the possibility of an imminent ice age. Scientists were not wrong in their predictions, as they never made such predictions. This was just a media ‘beat-up’.
Sources:
Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1/9/08.
“What did 1970’s climate science actually say?” Skeptical Science. https://skepticalscience.com/What-did-1970s-climate-science-actually-say.html