Thirty one years ago, on this day, October 13th, 1993,
Nebojša Nakićenović, William Nordhaus, Richard Richels and Ferenc Toth, Integrative Assessment of Mitigation, Impacts, and Adaptation to Climate Change, Proceedings of a Workshop Held on 13–15 Oct. 1993 (Laxenburg: IIASA, 1993)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was tha the cold war -scientist shall talk unto scientist’ outfit the International Institute for Advanced Science Analysis (IIASA) was about 20 years old. It had a surprisingly long history of banging on about climate change and energy, back to 1975, with William Nordhaus and then Hafele’s energy studies. And they put together some workshops. And they were big fans of all their fancy computer models: really in love with them.
What we learn. And here we are 30 years later. And they just keep redrawing lines and magic shit into existence. Making heroic assumptions about the speed of development and deployment of offshore wind and hydrogen and so forth, bearing no resemblance to the real world. But how are you gonna make the numbers add up?
So we’re trapped in these ridiculous mental models and computer models, because we don’t tell the truth to ourselves about ourselves. That we screwed the pooch and is it no one’s short-term career interest to be the one who says “hey guys, I think we screwed the pooch.” You are not going to get promoted – in fact, you’re not going to keep your bloody job full stop if you do that…
What happened next so I’m sure that in 1993 there were people with misgivings. They didn’t speak up. I’m sure that there were other people who had misgivings in 2003, didn’t speak up. 2013 didn’t speak up. 2023 didn’t speak up. Why would you?
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.
Also on this day:
October 13, 1990/97 – Ros Kelly defends the Interim Planning Target vs Australia does nothing
October 13, 2005 – “Climate Change: Turning up the Heat” published