When I got home today my wife was looking at an Atlas of The World published by Rand McNally in 1990. It was a wedding present that we received in 1992. She was looking at maps of Germany. Then the following title in the World of Wonders section of the atlas caught my attention. Look at this popular summary of our climate. Apparently the dominant catastrophic theory of the time was on the cold side.
"The Changing Climate: Clues to the climate of the future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climate conditions that gripped the earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4F (2C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves. New York City would lie under an ice sheet thick enough to bury the Empire State Building twice over. Montreal, Detroit, and Chicago wold be entombed in snow, and the Midwestern prairies would become a peninsula of Asia, and you would be able to walk from England to France. On the other hand, some scientists believe that a rise of only a few degrees in global temperature would start a meltdown of the polar ice sheets and flood low-lying cities worldwide."
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