Every issue of the CO2 Newsletter had an editorial. They are William Barbat’s attempt to share (and shape) situational awareness.
Here, in March 1980, he is breathing a sigh of relief because it seems the various elements of the state (the Department of Energy, the Council on Environmental Quality) is finally beginning to get its act together. Sadly, all that would be wrecked from November 1980, with the coming of the Reagan gang. (And yet, Barbat persisted. The man had brains and guts).
The new decade begins on an optimistic note as the CO2-greenhouse problem is beginning to receive deserved attention in scientific, political, and economic institutions. Also this particular environmental issue may unite former adversaries in a common effort. David Burns, head of the AAAS Climate Program, has noted a great increase in the number of major papers which are being prepared for publication on the CO2 problem. Also our growing readership indicates to us that the Newsletter is fulfilling its role of enlightenment. Soon a European distributorship for the Newsletter may be established. Most heartening though is the apparent absence of polarization toward the CO2 problem.
Still much skepticism remains concerning the seriousness and urgency of the CO2 problem. Although a rapidly growing number of scientists feel that we now have sufficient knowledge of impending CO2– induced impacts on which to base energy policies, others feel that much more concrete evidence must first be gained throughout the world to substantiate theories and models. Some non-technical people grossly misinterpret this skepticism as representing negative proof.
From the very beginning, much work on the CO2 problem has been performed under adverse conditions or severe financial restraints. Tyndall had to trouble-shoot his galvanometers and have them reconstructed in order to measure the absorption and radiation of heat by CO2. He found that the green dye used in the silk covering of the copper coils of the most delicate instruments of his day contained some iron compound which caused the needle to deviate. Arrhenius lacked laboratory determinations of the absorption coefficients for CO2 and water vapor at plus 15 degrees C, and he also lacked the laboratory equipment needed to make the determinations. “Such experiments . . . would require very expensive apparatus beyond that at my disposal.” Ingeniously, Arrhenius used the earth’s atmosphere instead as his laboratory. Ernest Rutherford described the challenges of those days clearly’ “We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.”
Modern workers on the CO2 problem seem to be little better off. The federal funding of Keeling‘s invaluable monitoring of atmospheric CO2 concentrations fell victim to the race to put a man on the moon for several months in 1963. The General Circulation Model of Manabe and Wetherald reportedly contained a programming error, which apparently could only be eliminated by a computer rerun which exceeded their resources. Glaciologists are asked to make predictions of future ice sheet behavior from very sparse data. As far as we can tell, the only available forecast of the warming threshold for West Antarctica Ice Sheet destruction relies solely on a temperature datum provided by a map made from Russian observations taken during the International Geophysical Year. Polar research has been funded meagerly by the U.S. in recent years.
Meetings which bring together atmospheric scientists, climate modelers, terrestrial and marine biologists, ocean geochemists, and other workers to analyze the CO2 problem collectively are greatly limited as to frequency and numbers of invited participants. Publications concerning such meetings are usually incomplete and much delayed. Some important results of the scientific analyses are not even available for purchase through normal channels because some agencies seem to act more as a sink than a source of information. Thus, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the relatively small number of scientists who have brought us so much understanding with so little.