There is an old editors saying about selling newspapers: “Dog bites man” goes on page 20, but “Man bites dog” should have been the headline on page one. This might explain why for most of the 20th-century, stories about a coming ice age were buried deep inside newspapers and garnered little attention from the general public.

Then came the counterculture of the 1960s, the Vietnam War and Watergate, which turned many away from modern society and toward beginning a search for somebody to blame for…