On this day, December 11, 1975, German scientist Hermann Flohn addressed a number of Australian scientists at Monash University, Melbourne, as part of a conference about… climate change.
“Now if we allow man’s interference with climate to increase exponentially as it has done in recent years, we sooner or later come to a state where this 10% rises to 100%, resulting in continuous warming made by man superimposed on these natural fluctuations of cooling and warming. This would be a really dangerous situation in that in the Northern Hemisphere we have this extremely sensitive area of the Arctic sea-ice. The few people who have dealt with models of the sea-ice have the feeling that this is in fact an extremely sensitive system which will reflect very early and very substantially any sizeable warming of the Northern Hemisphere. The lifetime of individual ice floes is 5 or 10 years, certainly not more than 10 years, and once the ice is removed the present situation would not allow the reforming of permanent ice cover as we have it today. My feeling is that if man’s interference with the climatic system is uncontrolled for some decades, together with uncontrolled growth of energy use, sooner or later during the next century the warming will overwhelm natural factors which usually produce cooling. Then the Arctic sea-ice could disappear rather rapidly, some models say in a period of 10 years or less.”
Herman Flohn, speaking on 11 December 1975
A book was published, edited by the wonderful Barrie Pittock –
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 331ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – In 1974 legendary Australian civil servant Nugget Combs had convinced the Whitlam government to ask the Australian Academy of Sciences to investigate the possibility of climate change (this was partly in the context of the CIA report and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger talking about potential food shortages). The AAS researched the matter and on this day in 1975 at Monash University Herman flown eminent German climatologist said the above.
Why this matters.
We really did know enough to be worried by the mid late 70s and to start acting on the fact that the climate issue did not hit the headlines until 1988 is a travesty but the fact that since 1988 human emissions have gone up by over 60% is beyond a travesty. It is the beginning of a nightmare, or rather the continuation and amplification of a nightmare.
What happened next?
The AAS report was released in early 1976. It sank without trace because it did not say “yes there most definitely is a problem” (to have done so would have been ahead of the evidence). And in any case, Australia was in political turmoil because the elected government of Gough Whitlam had been removed by John Kerr the governor-general (If this had happened in another country we would have talked about it being a CIA coup there have been more dead bodies but I digress).