Professor Cyrus Mody (bio below) ponders the CO2 Newsletter, its place in history and how we think about the past, the present the future in a commentary on CO2 Newsletter, v. 3, n. 4 (May-June, 1982)
Other commentaries in this series have – rightly – marveled at William Barbat’s prescience in raising the alarm about climate change in the years around 1980. And the May-June, 1982 edition doesn’t disappoint in that respect. For example, an abstract by Karl W. Butzer on “Socio-economic implications … for CO2-induced climate change” concludes that “the pending crisis of the 21st century” [i.e., our present!] would take three forms:
- A substantial reduction of the world food supply, at a time of maximum demographic pressures upon global resources and shrinking energy reserves;
- Selective decline of productivity among the major economic and food-producing nations, implying a fundamental readjustment between developed and developing world regions; and
- Differential impacts within undersupplied nations of special complexity, as resources become inadequate to maintain controlled ecosystems, raising the probability of severe internal disruptions and confrontations within existing socioeconomic subsystems.
Some of those scenarios are still “pending” but the outlines of that forecast still ring eerily true.
Similarly, elsewhere Barbat quotes William C. Clark’s Carbon Dioxide Review: 1982. If the Lovinses soft path or the French nuclear path become universal, things will be okay; but, Clark says, “if, on the other hand, the world returns to high energy growth rates that characterized the third quarter of the present century, and fuels this growth with coal, then many of us now working on the CO2 question could see a 600 ppm world within our lifetime.” For the most part, the world did reject the Lovinses and nuclear power, and fossil fuel use did rebound, with coal remaining a dominant primary fuel across much of the world. The prediction of 600 ppm by, say, 2050 is a bit beyond the outer edge of IPCC predictions, but not by much (and the IPCC’s outer edge might well be an underestimate). So, once again, Barbat’s reporting was sound and if people had followed his lead the climatic drivers of today’s polycrisis would be much less pressing.
Yet we have to remember that the CO2 Newsletter is an historical source, and thus our admiration for Barbat should be spiced with source criticism. He wasn’t infallible, and the common ground with his admirers today was perhaps less than they might think. Other commentators have noted, for example, that his preferred form of climate action was “the French nuclear strategy” rather than “the Lovinses view of the global future;” as he put it in this issue, “the only non-fossil energy alternative presently feasible on a grand scale [is] nuclear fission.” Barbat’s contempt for what he called “the self-proclaimed environmental protection movement” also shines through here and in other editions of the newsletter.
Most notably – at least to an historian of science such as myself – in this edition Barbat reveals himself to be a continental drift skeptic. Now, continental drift and climate change do have a complicated relationship. For one thing, the influential historian of climate denialism, Naomi Oreskes, is also the world’s leading historian of continental drift; for her, both are examples of sciences where early investigators had good arguments and evidence but were ignored or overridden by conservative peers. Conversely, for climate denialists, obstructionists, and fellow travelers1 the lesson of continental drift is that supposed free-thinkers should be listened to, because they could turn out to be the next Alfred Wegener (or Darwin, Galileo, etc.).
Yet Barbat offers an unusual third option: that climate scientists should be listened to precisely because they have the hard facts – and the intuitive plausibility – that continental drift is missing!
The notion of actively drifting continents offers a contrasting study with the CO2-greenhouse theory in regard to disciplined scientific rigorousness and popularity. The greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2 is solidly founded on thermodynamic investigations which have been checked and rechecked over and over again to produce a rather consistent range of appraisals (consensus)… In contrast, scientific disciplinarians are able to show that active continental drift is fatally flawed on both a physical and chemical basis. No proposed driving mechanisms can begin to match the forces that would be needed to move ponderous continental masses apart on highly viscous magma.
And yet, Barbat bemoans, “the notion of active drift was accorded credibility in virtually all school texts to produce popularity before a truly disciplined case was made, and large research enterprises have a vested interest in perpetuating the funding and publishing of one-sided studies” – i.e., much the same criticism that denialists make about climate science!
Thus, Barbat was something of a contrarian. It therefore wouldn’t have been surprising if he had later followed other contrarians – such as Freeman Dyson – in moving from climate awareness toward climate denial, especially given Barbat’s proximity to the oil industry, fondness for nuclear power, and antipathy toward environmentalists (all common traits of later eco-modernists and other hulpmollen). We have to evaluate his prescience circa 1980 as a product of its time from which we can’t infer his later evolution. The future is a flitting songbird; just because you see it clearly once doesn’t mean it’ll be in your line of sight forever.
What the CO2 Newsletter does tell us, though, is that climate awareness was the contrarian position circa 1980, at least for people in Barbat’s milieu. As he complained,
The CO2 problem suffers from a lack of popularity. No rock concerts have decried the CO2 buildup, and no bumper stickers advocating a halt to the CO2 buildup have appeared on fossil-fueled autos. Popular scientific magazines that advertise expensive non-utilitarian autos2 seem unusually silent on the CO2-greenhouse problem.
His aim for the newsletter, therefore, was “to fill the vacuum left by a noticeable de-emphasis of the entire CO2 problem in more widely read publications.” Notably, this edition of the newsletter opens with an open correspondence between Barbat and John Haun, president of the American Geological Institute and thus a staunch representative of the establishment. For Haun, Barbat’s “mental attitude [presents] a real danger in emphasizing all the bits and pieces of evidence that tend to support your hypothesis and denigrating or giving short shrift to the opposing evidence.” Barbat’s response is revealing: “To offset what may be overblown fears of ours, we have been directly urging editors of widely-read periodicals to give the CO2 problem more extensive coverage [and] more comprehensive studies on all aspects of the CO2 problem.”
And it’s on that score that I think we should give Barbat credit, rather than for his prescience alone. Much has been made in recent years of what various people and oil companies knew (or #Knew) about climate change circa 1980. But “knowing” is a fleeting act, not a permanent condition, especially for an organization like an oil firm. What’s important is what people and entities do at the moment that they know. Barbat knew – and he acted on that knowledge by spreading knowledge of climate change as widely as he could. And it’s thanks to lonely and courageous voices like his that denial became the rightly stigmatized position that it is today.
Footnotes
1 I propose the Dutch neologism hulpmol for someone who aids denialists but can’t be labeled one themselves. The word comes from the fanbase of the reality show Wie is de mol?, in which a “mole” sabotages their peers. A hulpmol is someone who wittingly or unwittingly assists the mole’s efforts and prevents their unmasking.
2 Elsewhere, it’s clear that he means fuel-efficient vehicles, which he says only encourage environmentalists to drive in ways that actually increase carbon emissions.
Bio
Cyrus Mody is Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation at Maastricht University and author of three monographs with MIT Press, most recently The Squares: US Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s. He was PI of the Dutch Research Council-funded Managing Scarcity project (VI.C.191.067), 2020-2026.