If I understand what you’re saying, you’re recalling articles in Newsweek and Time in the mid 70s suggesting the climate was cooling. This was effectively based on a couple of lines in an NAS report speculating that the cooling effect of aerosols could potentially be greater than the warming effect of CO2. This was not a widely held view at the time, nor was there panic. It was just shitty journalism.

The state of climate science has advanced considerably in the last 50 years, and there’s no doubt we’re warming, and quickly. Beyond the science, and the fact that every single scientific organization on the planet acknowledges the fact of anthropogenic climate change, we can actually see it happening in real time.