HH Lamb was a traitor to his country in wartime, so I'm not surprised he changed his mind when he saw tax money coming his way by setting up the Climate Change Dept at UEA.
The prediction is for thousands of years from now. Supposedly he retracted this prediction and became a global warmer, which makes no sense as the two are not contradictory, Global warming in decades or centuries, vs an ice age in thousands of years.
However, Hubert Lamb was perhaps the first skeptic. Some quotes:
…It seems therefore, that increasing the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere―the end-product of all our burning of fossil fuels and of vegetation―should raise the world’s temperature, although the effect may be smaller, perhaps very much smaller, than usually supposed.
The CO2 increase accelerated after 1950-60, just when the northern hemisphere temperatures were falling. The quiescence of the volcanoes from 1912 to about 1960 was also a feature of the marked warming period. The warming should, perhaps, be attributed more to these features of the period than to the increasing carbon dioxide.
It is not sufficient to say that this is the ‘greenhouse effect’, the warming associated with the increasing carbon dioxide etc. in the atmosphere, which we have been expecting, unless we can say why it did not show in other, recent periods of years over large parts of the northern hemisphere.
It is unfortunate that studies produced nowadays treat these and other matters related to changes of climate as if they are always, and only, attributable to the activities of Man and side-effects on the climate.
But, because mathematical models can so easily be designed to fit any theoretical concept, it is difficult to obtain fully convincing results by these methods. The coefficient in the equations which represent any empirically found relationship between causes and effects can be changed at will to simulate results that may be convincing enough, and seem to express satisfactorily valid relationships, and yet after a few years turn out not to be a lasting expression of reality
NO, of course not. The cycle of the ice ages was discovered and researched more a than century before his time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Ori...
Lamb was a scientific skeptic of global warming (his "propensity to question conventional scientific thought" being a "characteristic which permeated his lifetime's research") during a time when skepticism was the MAINSTREAM SCIENTIFIC VIEW. http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/... He continued being skeptical after the greenhouse warming theories of Arrhenius became more widely accepted in the 1970s http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-... (hence his prediction then of an ice age within the next 10,000 YEARS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Lamb !!).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people...
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timel...
He predicted a coming Ice Age in 3-10,000 years. As a "true" scientist, however, by the 1980s he spoke of the "carbon dioxide problem" and predicted warming until we eventually ran out of fossil fuels.
Gotta love C's answer. The sign of a good scientist is changing your theory when reality refuses to cooperate, science is never wrong it's just that new information has made some science obsolete.
Not sure there were a few others who predicted global cooling and after 76 Lamb switched to predicting global warminL
This man was known as the 'Ice Man' and started the East Anglica CRU.
