On this day, December 30 in1976 Congressman George Brown(of the Democrats) wrote to incoming President Jimmy Carter
“In his letter to President-Elect Jimmy Carter [on 30th] December 1976, for instance, Brown hesitated to put the blame on human factors, given serious uncertainties about the influence of other causes of climatic change. ‘‘Our knowledge,’’ he noted, ‘‘is primitive concerning the importance of not only natural factors, such as solar activity or orbital behavior, but also of man-made effects due to CO2 and particulate emissions, or fluorocarbon and NOx interaction with the ozone layer.’’
Brown’s tone was certainly not an indictment of efforts to understand the influence of human activities on the global climate system, but rather a preliminary conveyance of urgency to stimulate a much larger effort to understand the nature, causes, and potential impacts of climatic change on human affairs.”
Henderson, G. (2016) Governing the Hazards of Climate — The Development of the National Climate Program Act, 1977-1981. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 46, Number 2, pps. 207–242
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 332ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
Scientists were beginning to say they were fairly sure that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was already – and would be – a problem. But not “sure sure”. Politicians were trying to get more money for them to do better research…
Why this matters.
We need to remember that these things take time – and skill – to get up the policy agenda so that ignoring comes with significant political cost..
What happened next?
Brown was “successful” and Carter, by the end of his fraught four years, had done something towards getting the US government to look at climate (if you ignore the synfuels debacle). All that would be swept aside by Reagan, of course….