On this day first of April 1979, the Jasons released their study into climate. Who were the Jasons? They were the elite, high security clearance, nuclear Cold War warriors,of very confident scientists
Wikipedia has it thus-
“JASON is an independent group of elite scientists which advises the United States government on matters of science and technology, mostly of a sensitive nature. The group was created in the aftermath of the Sputnik launch as a way to reinvigorate the idea of having the nation’s preeminent scientists help the government with defense problems, similar to the way that scientists helped in WWII but with a new and younger generation. It was established in 1960 and has somewhere between 30 and 60 members.”
who had decided to take a look at the burgeoning climate question.
In the late 70s everyone was doing this including the World Meteorological Organisation, which had in February that year hosted the First World Climate Conference.
Reading the foreword to the Jasons report, which you can see here, all of the usual names, Revelle, Keeling, Smagorrinsky, etc, turn up. So too William Nirenberg who would three years later, produce a report for the National Academy of Sciences in a heightened period of climate concern (more of that report later in the year).
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So what does Jason’s report say? In essence (i.e. a loose paraphrase), there may be a problem at some point, but we can’t really be expected to do much about it. And our best bet is technology.
Why this matters.
We have been failing to do anything substantive about climate change, other than make it worse for 50 years. And it’s worth therefore having some scepticism about the politics of experts…
What happened next?
Well, Nierenberg went on to produce the NAS report in 1983 – you can read more about that here. Later that year. Jule Charney, who had been quite rude about Stephen Schneider convened a study or chaired a study that was convened at Woods Hole. And it said that there was no reason to doubt that if the atmospheric concentration of co2 doubled then the planet would warm by three or so degrees. This is the so called Charney Report. And so it continued…