Denier Evidence of the Global Cooling Consensus Proves No Such Consensus

A climate denier in the comments to an article linked me to this.  It's a PDF scan of the original infamous April 1975 cover story in Newsweek magazine that talked about "global cooling."  For many years now this has been a go-to argument of climate deniers, to show that climate scientists don't have a clue, they thought it was cooling the 70s, now they say it's warming, how can we trust them?

So I read it, I'd never read the actual piece.  Here's the best part.  It includes a quote from a 1970s report by the esteemed US National Academy of Sciences on the phenomenon:

"Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climate change is at least as fragmentary as our data.  Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

This is their global cooling "scientific consensus"?  What a sad bunch of liars climate deniers are.  No wonder they're taken in by preposterous charlatans like Viscount Monckton.  These people have absolutely no ability to discern reality from fantasy.  Even the very proof they offer of this inherently stupid and irrelvant claim (it wouldn't matter if there was a global cooling consensus in the 70s, reality is what it is, and being wrong in the past doesn't make you wrong today, not to mention almost none of the climatologists active today were working in the field, or even alive back in 1975) disproves the very basis of it.  The NAS said we didn't know enough to act, and more study was needed.  That's what happened.  Now what does the NAS say?  Well here's a 2009 joint statement issued by the National Academies of 13 nations including the G8:

"Climate change and sustainable energy supply are crucial challenges for the future of humanity. It is essential that world leaders agree on the emission reductions needed to combat negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change."

That's your global scientific consensus.