Forty seven years ago, on this day, March 17, 1976, John Mason gave a lecture at the Royal Meteorological Society…
The few mentions of climate prediction at the [Met] Office in the early to mid-1970s came from Mason—and they brought out the hesitant side of a man who was otherwise an aficionado of numerical modeling. “‘For the immediate future priority should probably be given to the use of models to test the sensitivity of the atmosphere’s response to changes in individual parameters, to elucidate the underlying physical mechanisms, and to distinguish likely changes in atmospheric behaviour from the idiosyncrasies of particular models,’’ he told the Royal Meteorological Society in 1976.
2 B. J. Mason, ‘‘Towards the Understanding and Prediction of Climatic Variations: Symons Memorial Lecture, 17 March 1976,’’ Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 102 (1976), 497
‘‘Although I think that the likelihood of major and potentially catastrophic changes in climate has been grossly exaggerated,’’ he said at a Royal Meteorological Society lecture in 1976, ‘‘the subject is of sufficient potential importance and concern to merit a sustained research programme aimed at determining past and current trends more reliably and at improving our understanding of the underlying mechanisms.’
Martin-Nielson – computers article –
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 333.3ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that American scientists were beginning to really look at carbon dioxide closely. Wally Broecker had published his “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?.” in Science. (see All Our Yesterdays here on that). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.189.4201.460
The National Academy of Science had a two year study underway. Mason would have been well aware of this. And there was pressure on him as the Met Office Supremo to engage. He found the whole thing distasteful and called it another hoax, basically, possibly influenced by John Maddox, editor of Nature; I’m sure the two were mates.
Oh, by this time, Stephen Schneider had published the Genesis Strategy and so forth.
Senior civil servant Crispin Tickell was back from his sabbatical year studying at Harvard, and was banging the drum too.
What I think we can learn from this is that the personal views of powerful people matter, because powerful people, by definition, are gatekeepers about what is and is not “important.” And unless you can create some sort of anarcho-syndicalist utopia, that will continue to be the case. And even if you do, they’re always going to be experts of expertise and bottlenecks. And here we are, (See Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed where even in an ‘anarchist utopia’ there are all sorts of status games and so on).
What happened next Mason was forced to create or to participate in an interdepartmental committee in October 1978, and make the right noises to people of influence who were more concerned than him about climate (see AOY Feb 7 or so).
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..