Emergencies and climate
Global cooling in the 1970s
Claim not established
No established paired UK government ice age proclamation and retraction.
Fact-check
No established paired UK government ice age proclamation and retraction.
The evidence
Links go to the original records: Hansard, legislation, official guidance and news reports. A before-and-after pair is not always proof of a direct contradiction, so read the originals for exact wording.
Context
What the source documents claim
These are summaries from the original documents behind this archive. They have not been checked word for word. Where they differ from the fact-check above, the fact-check is the more reliable account.
Why "Global Cooling" Was Not a UK Government Reversal
Document B, case 10
- Individual UK Climatologists (Hubert Lamb)
- Former Met Office climatologist Hubert Lamb (who founded the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in 1971) documented slight Northern Hemisphere cooling between 1940 and the 1970s and warned that natural cycles could bring colder climates.
- Official Met Office & Government Position (Sir John Mason)
- Neither the Met Office nor the UK government ever endorsed predictions of an imminent ice age. In 1976 and 1978 lectures to the Royal Meteorological Society and Royal Society, Met Office Director-General Sir John Mason explicitly rejected extrapolating short-term cooling trends into glaciation, concluding that human-made greenhouse gases were the dominant climate driver.
Register entry 35. Last reviewed: 12 November 2026.