In the 70s We Were Headed for a Full-Blown Ice Age.

Or at least that's what the news media kept on sayin'. Gnome sayin'?

But in the 80s the media turned on a dime and proclaimed the Earth was globally warming, apparently because they found out scientific consensus was in favor of it. Or was it for no reason? And now we have in the climatic record the biggest jump in climate warming since the Mediaeval Warming Period occurred in the mid-to-late 80s..

Hat tip to Abel Adamski at Robertscribbler.

Climate study finds evidence of global shift in the 1980s

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-climate-evidence-global-shift-1980s.html#jCp

Planet Earth experienced a global climate shift in the late 1980s on an unprecedented scale, fuelled by anthropogenic warming and a volcanic eruption, according to new research published this week.

Scientists say that a major step change, or ‘regime shift’, in the Earth’s biophysical systems, from the upper atmosphere to the depths of the ocean and from the Arctic to Antarctica, was centred around 1987, and was sparked by the El Chichón volcanic eruption in Mexico five years earlier.

Their study, published in Global Change Biology, documents a range of associated events caused by the shift, from a 60% increase in winter river flow into the Baltic Sea to a 400% increase in the average duration of wildfires in the Western United States. It also suggests that climate change is not a gradual process, but one subject to sudden increases, with the 1980s shift representing the largest in an estimated 1,000 years.

“We demonstrate, based on 72 long time series, that a major change took place in the world centred on 1987 that involved a step change and move to a new regime in a wide range of Earth systems,” said Professor Reid.

“Our work contradicts the perceived view that major volcanic eruptions just lead to a cooling of the world. In the case of the regime shift it looks as if global warming has reached a tipping point where the cooling that follows such eruptions rebounds with a rapid rise in temperature in a very short time. The speed of this change has had a pronounced effect on many biological, physical and chemical systems throughout the world, but is especially evident in the Northern temperate zone and Arctic.”