On this day, October 14 in 1974, a UK Cabinet Office civil servant tells his boss about this climate change issue, after having been told about it by German Professor Hermann Flohn.
“The first example I have found of this route is in 1974. Dr P.T. Warren, a Cabinet Office civil servant, reported a conversation to Dr Robert Press [Robert Press], who was the acting chief scientific adviser between April 1974 and 1976. Warren had been at a meeting examining the forces shaping Europe over the next 30 years (Lord Kennet’s Europe plus Thirty project[Europe Plus 30]). There, he had spoken with Professor Hermann Flohn, a respectable climatologist from Bonn and one of the leading researchers into anthropogenic climate change. Flohn clearly impressed on Warren the necessity of taking the subject seriously.
Warren told Press:
“His organization has now achieved a ‘reasonable’ model for world climate and this leads to some very worrying predictions when data are fed in on the present output of CO2 into the atmosphere. As I understood him, and I should add that he is no over-zealous enthusiast of the doom-watch school but fully aware of all the limits to modelling, the dangers of premature judgements etc, there is a real likelihood that by the year 2100 the polar ice-caps will disappear if the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere continued at its present rate.”
TNA CAB 164/1379. Warren to Press, 14 October 1974
Agar 2015
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 327.28ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – in the aftermath of the 1972 Stockholm conference, more work was afoot about climate modelling (the July-August workshop in Wijk had just happened).
The very hot European summer had led to a certain amount of media speculation as well…
Btw – Flohn, who pops up a lot, was a total mensch on all this – a really important briefer of people, including Olaf Palme. He died in 1997, and deserves more recognition than he has had.
Why this matters.
UK Government awareness of climate change did not begin in 1988
What happened next?
Press’s successor as Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Ashworth, kept going on the climate issue. Eventually, in 1980, he briefed Margaret Thatcher who was apparently incredulous and said “you want me to worry about the weather?”