Category: Science

If you and I lived in a rational world, a world that cared about the future of human life – and indeed all life – on the planet, then by now October 15 would be internationally recognised as “The Day We Woke Up.”

We don’t, it isn’t, and the carbon dioxide concentration continues its relentless climb because we are pouring 40 billion tonnes into the atmosphere every year.

October 15 has two claims to be Wake Up day. The first and perhaps weaker one is that 54 years ago, in 1971, a report with the ominous title “Inadvertent Climate Modification” was published, in the run-up to the first big United Nations conference on the human environment, in June 1972.

The bigger claim, the one this article/blogpost/jeremiad covers, is the climax of a meeting of climate scientists gathered (not for the first time) in Villach, Austria in October 1985.

The statement they made is that day is painful. Here’s the beginning of it.

The Conference reached the following conclusions and recommendations: 

1. Many important economic and social decisions are being made today on long-term projects major water resource management activities such as irrigation and hydro-power, drought relief, agricultural land use, structural designs and coastal engineering projects, and energy planning all based on the assumption that past climatic data, without modification, are a reliable guide to the future. This is no longer a good assumption since the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are expected to cause a significant warming of the global climate in the next century. It is a matter of urgency to refine estimates of future climate conditions to improve these decisions. 

2. Climate change and sea level rises due to greenhouse gases are closely linked with other major environmental issues, such as acid deposition and threats to the Earth’s ozone shield, mostly due to changes in the composition of the atmosphere by man’s activities. Reduction of coal and oil use and energy conservation undertaken to reduce acid deposition will also reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, a reduction in the release of chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs) will help protect the ozone layer and will also slow the rate of climate change. 

3. While some warming of climate now appears inevitable due to past actions, the rate and degree of future warming could be profoundly affected by governmental policies on energy conservation, use of fossil fuels, and the emission of some greenhouse gases. 

Villach gave scientists who attended the confidence (and a document) to go knocking on as many policymakers’ doors as they could. They did this, and less than three years later the climate problem finally became an “issue” that politicians could not actively ignore (1).

The climate issue

An awareness that something must be trapping some of the sun’s heat goes back to 1824, and the French scientist Fourier. By the mid-19th century, “carbonic acid” (carbon dioxide in solution) had been identified as one of those “greenhouse gases” by Eunice Foote (her work forgotten and only rediscovered in 2010) and John Tyndall. At the end of the 19th century a Swede, Svante Arrhenius, did the calculations and guesstimated (if you call a year of manual calculations, mostly to distract from a messy divorce guesstimating) that if you doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (principally by burning oil, coal and gas, with a side order of cutting down trees) then you’d heat the planet by 1.5 to 3 degrees above pre-Industrial levels. Arrhenius welcomed this – it would take hundreds or thousands of years and would allow food growing much further north.  Soon after other scientists disputed Arrhenius’s findings, (falsely) saying that carbon dioxide didn’t act quite the way Arrhenius was assuming. Arrhenius replied, but carbon dioxide theory was largely (but not entirely) neglected until a British steam engineer called Guy Callendar presented a paper in 1938 saying that a) the world was warming (this was not controversial) and b) carbon dioxide levels were detectably higher (this was more controversial) and c) the first was being caused by the second (this was basically dismissed).  Callendar received little support or interest in the UK, but American and Swedish scientists were less skeptical.  The pivotal moment came in May 1953 when Gilbert Plass, a Canadian physicist working at Johns Hopkins University presented work that confirmed Callendar. Plass said that

The large increase in industrial activity during the present century is discharging so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the average temperature is rising at the rate of 1.5 degrees per century.

From there on, other scientists took up the mantle.  Thanks to the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) super accurate measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide began to be taken around the world, most importantly and famously at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii and Antarctica (as far away from factories and forests as you can get).

Throughout the 1960s, awareness and concern grew generally about the impacts of human actions on the natural world (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring being the most famous, but by no means the only example).

In the late 1960s pressures grew and various bodies (including NATO!) began to monitor environmental issues.  The International Council of Scientific Unions set up the Scientific Committee of Problems of the Environment (SCOPE).  The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment put “environmental matters” on the agenda, and a few agreements were signed. Another outcome was the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).  SCOPE and UNEP co-hosted the Villach meeting, along with the World Meteorological Organisation.

Through the 1970s scientists became more certain that profound scientists were on the way. In 1975 the oceanographer Wally Broecker published an article in the US journal Science called “Climatic Change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?”

In 1978 an article appeared in Nature “West Antarctic ice sheet and the CO2 greenhouse effect: threat of disaster“ 

At the same time, Exxon and other oil companies were looking at the problem.  As the website, full of documents released because of various lawsuits, says “Exxon Knew.”) (see also All Our Yesterdays posts)

The first World Climate Conference, held in Geneva in February 1979 could have been the moment when the issue broke through, but rearguard actions by skeptical scientists (including John Mason, head of the influential United Kingdom Meteorological office) prevented a stronger statement.  In the US, then led by Jimmy Carter, Gus Speth and others were trying to push through greater awareness of the issue (see for example the Global 2000 report).

The politicians were not interested. New UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was briefed by her chief scientific advisor on the climate issue and was incredulous, saying “You want me to worry about the weather?”

Ronald Reagan was not even aware of Global 2000 (and famously said that trees cause pollution).  The people behind him were actively hostile to environmentalism (see Dunlap and McCright). Nonetheless, scientific work continued, and members of congress (including a young Al Gore) were listening. By 1982 was on the evening news in the United States

Why 1985?

By 1985 UNEP and WMO had co-hosted several meetings on climate, chaired by the redoubtable and enormously respected Swedish scientist Bert Bolin (from 1959 onwards Bolin had been trying to raise concern about C02 build-up.

There are competing explanations for why the Villach Conference had what influence it did. One is simply that, thanks to recent work on the basket of non-C02 gases as being, if combined, almost as important as C02 the science was now clear enough, and the warming fingerprint emerging, that the scientists felt able, and indeed compelled to act.

The other is that – thanks to the discovery of the Ozone hole, atmospheric scientists now had enough credibility and access to decision-makers to make a concerted push on carbon dioxide worth a shot.

The short term impacts in the English-speaking world were most felt in Australia, the US and Canada.

In Australia the Science Minister of the day, Barry Jones, had been able to establish (in the teeth of indifference, derision and opposition from his Labor colleagues) a “Commission for the Future.” It chose to launch “The Greenhouse Project”.  

I haven’t dug into the details, but this was in all probability influenced by Villach.  The Australian Environment Council (made up of state and federal environment ministers) had been aware of the greenhouse issue in 1981 (and individually much earlier). It had then literally disappeared from the agenda of the AEF’s meetings until June 1986, when the head of the Atmospheric Physics Division of the CSIRO gave a presentation, based on Villach (2). Various ministers (including South Australia’s Don Hopgood, began spreading the word.

By 1988, ozone and greenhouse (often conflated and confused) were being discussed very widely in Australian society.

A report on Villach appeared in Search, the magazine of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the United States, senators (Republican and Democrat – this before the Republican went totally mad) held hearings – the famous one is with Carl Sagan.

In 1986 a Senator from Delaware, one Joe Biden, even introduced a climate bill and launched the Biden Initiative on Global Warming.

The Washington Post, until recently a proper newspaper ran articles based on Villach and its aftermath such as “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (June 1986).

The Canadians, long aware of the issue, hosted a crucial meeting on The Changing Atmosphere in June 1988, in the same venue that they were also hosting the G7 meeting.

In the UK the response to Villach was much more muted. Fred Pearce quotes a senior scientist, Tom Wigley, as saying  Villach was a “waffly non-event” whose influence has been “grossly exaggerated.” This is backed up by an interview I did recently with a British scientist who was also at Villach, and the documentary record I’ve been able to uncover at The National Archives – Villach did not “light a fire” under the British, for reasons that intrigue only me.

From 1988 on there have been countless reports and warnings. The IPCC continues to produce assessment reports (six and rising) and special reports on this that and the other.  All these reports may eventually serve a purpose as flood defences. If “we” had been able to absorb the import of what those scientists said at Villach, and act accordingly, it might have been different – or, perhaps the most we could have done is delay the impacts we are seeing now for a few years.  

Villach, for me, represents the tragic dilemma of our species. We are smart enough to cause ourselves no end of problems. We are smart enough to see some of those problems before they hit.  We are not, it seems, smart enough to do much about some of them.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was just under 350ppm. Now it’s at 425 and climbing more each year. There are large amounts of gnarly trouble ahead. Relatively small bits are already here. More is to come.

Further reading

Franz, W. 1997.  The Development of an International Agenda for Climate Change: Connecting Science to Policy. IAASA

Pearce, F. 2005. The Week the Climate Change. New Scientist volume 188; issue 2521

Footnotes

1. Things have changed back.
2. That scientist, Brian Tucker, is a somewhat confounding figure. He had written a monograph on Carbon Dioxide and Climate in 1981. Upon retirement he decided the whole issue was overblown, possibly a hoax, and contributed a couple of appalling articles to a right-wing/libertarian junk-tank, and generally made a fool of himself.