On this day, 18th February 1978. readers of The Washington Post would have learned, via an article by a journalist called Thomas O’Toole titled “Climate Experts See a Warming Trend,” that the burning of coal and oil was causing so much carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere that by the year 2000, temperatures might begin to rise.
O’Toole was reporting
“… the opinions of 24 climate experts in seven countries polled by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects which yesterday released the poll’s results in a 100-page report published by the National Defense University.”
This report, bless, is available on the interwebz.
[See also a report in the New York Times]
We need to remember that in the late 1970s the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a problem and as one that was going to get worse and cause serious difficulty had moved from the academic journals and the scientific periodicals to the quality press such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Canberra Times. If you go looking for these, you can find them. They usually come out of various National Academy of Science reports too. We knew. We really did.
Why this matters?
What it says is that we’ve had almost 50 years to sort this out and, pace Donald Trump,, this problem was not invented by Al Gore, or by the Chinese as a hoax.
What happened next?
Well in this specific case, Carter’s Science Advisor asked some top scientists to look into the problem. This is the so-called Charney report, which said in 1979, we find no reason to believe this warming won’t happen. You can read more about it in Nathaniel Rich, and to some extent in Alice Bell’s “Our Biggest Experiment”