Seventies nostalgia is going strong, and even Global Cooling has made a comeback. The lead article in the January 1998 issue of the Atlantic Monthly warns that "Global Warming could, paradoxically, cause a sudden and catastrophic cooling," of which there have undoubtedly been many such sudden shifts in the history of the Earth's climate. The author, William H. Calvin, a theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, believes the successful adaptation of man's evolutionary ancestors to sudden climate changes depended on the ability of their agile minds to form survival strategies. Calvin's own agile mind has produced a history of the Earth's climate with a respectful appreciation for the various component issues, a speculative scenario of future climate change that relies heavily on the ignorance implicit in chaos theory, a peevish call for far greater resources to study the issue, but no actual evidence that there is a warming trend that would trigger a subsequent catastrophic cooling.

[Ed.: In his influential 1976 book, The Cooling, Lowell Ponte asserted that "since the 1940s the northern half of our planet has been cooling rapidly.... Mass global famine in our lifetime, perhaps even within a decade, if current cooling trends continue."]

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