Tag: 1976

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United States of America

December 30, 1976 – President Jimmy Carter is lobbied about #climate change

On this day, December 30 in1976 Congressman George Brown(of the Democrats) wrote to incoming President Jimmy Carter

“In his letter to President-Elect Jimmy Carter [on 30th] December 1976, for instance, Brown hesitated to put the blame on human factors, given serious uncertainties about the influence of other causes of climatic change. ‘‘Our knowledge,’’ he noted, ‘‘is primitive concerning the importance of not only natural factors, such as solar activity or orbital behavior, but also of man-made effects due to CO2 and particulate emissions, or fluorocarbon and NOx interaction with the ozone layer.’’

Brown’s tone was certainly not an indictment of efforts to understand the influence of human activities on the global climate system, but rather a preliminary conveyance of urgency to stimulate a much larger effort to understand the nature, causes, and potential impacts of climatic change on human affairs.” 

Henderson, G. (2016) Governing the Hazards of Climate — The Development of the National Climate Program Act, 1977-1981. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 46, Number 2, pps. 207–242

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 332ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

Scientists were beginning to say they were fairly sure that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was already – and would be – a problem.  But not “sure sure”.  Politicians were trying to get more money for them to do better research…

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that these things take time – and skill – to get up the policy agenda so that ignoring comes with significant political cost..

What happened next?

Brown was “successful” and Carter, by the end of his fraught four years, had done something towards getting the US government to look at climate (if you ignore the synfuels debacle).  All that would be swept aside by Reagan, of course….

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United Kingdom

December 1, 1976 – Met Office boss still saying carbon dioxide build-up a non-issue

On this day, December 1st,  in 1976, the Director-General of the Meteorological Office, John Mason, gave a speech to the Royal Society of Arts. It was reported in Nature by John Gribbin, under the headline “Man’s influence not yet felt by climate”

“THE message conveyed by Professor B. J. Mason, Director-General of the UK Meteorological Office, in a recent lecture was- don’t panic. The theme of Mason’s lecture (given to the Royal Society of Arts on December I) was “Man’s Influence on Weather and Climate”, and his conclusion was that -the climatic system is so robust, and contains so much ·inherent stability through the presence of negative feedback mechanisms, that man has still a long way to go before his influence becomes great enough to cause serious disruption to the natural climatic system.”

John Gribbin, “Man’s Influence Not yet Felt by Climate.” Nature 264: 608

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was xxxppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was that through the mid-70s many scientists (including but not limited to those pesky young Americans with better computers than the Brits) had started saying “whoah, this build up of carbon dioxide, this might become a serious thing.” As had Europeans (including Hermann Flohn). As had the WMO, as reported in the Times earlier that year – June 22, 1976 – Times reports “World’s temperature likely to rise”

And Mason? Mason didn’t buy it, hadn’t bought it and continued not to buy it, including at the First World Climate Conference, in Geneva in February 1979…

Why this matters. 

You can imagine an alternative world, where gatekeepers like Mason were able to see the nose on their faces, and the actual response to climate change began early enough to do something substantive.  If you smoke some serious weed, that is…

What happened next?

Mason fought a rearguard action against climate research, but lost. November 14, 1977 – Met Office boss forced to think about #climate change – first interdepartmental meeting…

The whole process culminated in a 1980 report and a briefing to Margaret Thatcher, who dismissed it all with an incredulous “you want me to worry about the weather?”

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Science Scientists United States of America

October 12, 1976 – Jule Charney throws (private) shade on fellow climatologists…

On this day, October 12 in 1976, an eminent US scientist was dismissive (in a personal letter) of Stephen Schneider et al.

12 Oct 1976 None of the “speculative ideas of people like … Schneider on future climate change are worth the paper (usually newspaper) they are written on. They mislead the public and they do the field harm,” Charney concluded in a separate letter.

Jule  Charney to Warren Kornberg, 12 October 1976, Box 13 – NSF, 1955-81, Papers of Jule Charney,  MIT Institute Archives, Cambridge, MA. 

(Henderson, 2014 Dilemmas of Reticence)

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 328.72ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

In the mid 1970s there was a flurry of books about climate change and its impacts. Only a very few of them focussed on the importance of carbon dioxide build-up – others saw the problem in dust, or ‘waste heat’. The grand old men of the field – Charney, Landsberg et al, feared that popularisation/tabloid style claims would damage the credibility of the field. 

Why this matters. 

Scientists – justifiably – worry about large claims and whether they are sound, since if the claims and predictions turn out to be wrong, all scientists suffer.

What happened next?

Charney changed his tune in 1979, agreeing that unless something very odd indeed happened, then a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would lead to serious warming…

Schneider went on to do much more great work.