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?”