Forty five years ago, on this day, February 21 1978, a workshop took place at the Cold War lek known as IIASA, in Austria.
Carbon dioxide, climate and society – Proceedings of a IIASA workshop co-sponsored by WMO, UNEP and SCOPE, (Laxenburg, Austria) 21-24 Feb 1978.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 335.2ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
In the US the 1977 NAS report had come out. UNEP were hosting meetings with the WMO Preparations were underway for the First World Climate Conference, to be held in February 1979. IIASA had been looking at Energy and Climate for a while, including with previous workshops in 1975 and this one in 1976 about Climate and Solar Energy. Some of the big names – Flohn, Nordhaus etc, were around.
What I think we can learn from this
Smart people were “on it” quite early (i.e. 20 years after Plass, Revelle, Bolin, Keeling et al had seen what the problem was). They scratched their heads and couldn’t see easy ways forward Because there weren’t any. There certainly aren’t any now.
What happened next
This meeting and others fed into the late 1970s awareness of the problem (among a tiny number of people!)
IIASA kept having consequential meetings on climate (see their stuff on CCS in the early 2000s)
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Schrickel, I. (2017) Control versus complexity: approaches to the carbon dioxide problem at IIASAWynne, B. (1984) The Institutional Context of Science, Models, and Policy: The IIASA Energy Study. Policy Sciences