Thirty nine years ago, on this day, November 9th, 1987,
1987 Beginning of the Bellagio workshop
The 1987 Villach workshop assembled 48 experts from academia, environmental advocacy groups and some national environmental agencies (Jager, 1988). Workshop participants considerably advanced the scientific debate by examining the regional climatic impacts on coastal zones, mid-latitude, humid tropics and high latitude regions.
The Bellagio workshop meanwhile was significant in advancing the policy discussion for several reasons. It assembled 24 participants, half of them ‘regulars’ from previous workshops. More significantly, however, Bellagio succeeded in attracting new policy actors including representatives from the European Commission, Commonwealth Secretariat, German Parliament and the Swedish cabinet. Conclusions from Villach were used as a springboard to engage participants in probably the first explicit policy debate on climate change. A significant outcome of Bellagio was the proposal to design policies aimed at limiting increases in temperature and sea level to within ‘tolerable rates’, with 0.1°C/decade suggested as a suitable global threshold for temperature. Science had slowly been supplemented by policy entrepreneurship, but for the moment the momentum was with the experts who had convened nominally under the AGGG umbrella.
(see Agrawala 1999)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 349ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that since the mid-1970s various think tanks and university departments had been paying serious attention to the problem of carbon dioxide build-up. There had been an attempt to get the World Meteorological Organisation to make bold pronouncements (it held a conference).
The specific context was the weight of evidence – and credibility – reached a tipping point in October 1985, with the Villach conference in Austria, hosted by WMO, UNEP and ICSU. After that, scientists started pulling on every lever they could, trying to get policymakers interested in/concerned about the climate issue.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’ve been running the experiment for 40 years, and we have some good provisional results – our methods aren’t working.
What happened next – the following year the problem finally became an issue, with the drought in the US, James Hansen’s testimony, and then the speech by Margaret Thatcher.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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References
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Also on this day:
November 9, 1987- Senate hearings, for what they’re Wirth
November 9, 1988 – Tolba gives “Warming Warning” speech at first IPCC meeting
November 9, 1991 – Australian TV station SBS shows demented ‘”Greenhouse Conspiracy” ‘documentary’
November 9, 1992 – Ark sails on, Downunder
November 9, 1994 – interdepartmental bunfight in Australia