Professor Paul Edwards (author of “A Vast Machine” – full bio at end) writes about Vol.2 no. 6 of William Barbat’s CO2 Newsletter
William Barbat devoted half or more of each CO2 Newsletter to his own, greatly abridged versions of recent scientific articles, reports, and journalism. This format used to be called a “digest.” Younger folks coming up in the age of instant, effortless AI summaries will be unaware just how much digests could matter in the now-vanished world of paper publications. In that world, finding, obtaining, and understanding scientific work was harder than today. Digests like Barbat’s played a key role, especially in interdisciplinary fields such as climate science. I wish I had found it while writing my book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).
The September-October issue of CO2 Newsletter (Vol. 2 No. 6) appeared in the fall of 1981, just as I was starting graduate school. President Reagan was hitting the stride of his first term, backed by a Republican Senate majority – the party’s first in either house of Congress since 1953. Reagan’s anti-environmental positions were hardening into policies and rollbacks. His nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch (mother of present-day Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch), had been confirmed in May. She cut the agency’s budget by 22 percent and severely reduced regulation of polluters and pollutants. Reagan famously stripped the White House roof of the demonstration solar panels recently installed there by his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. His first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, loosened strip-mining rules and quintupled the amount of land leased to coal-mining companies, “at a loss of $100 million according to the General Accounting office” (Time, “The Legacy of James Watt,” 1983).
Meanwhile, however, worries about the “carbon dioxide problem” had taken firm root among environmental activists and within Congressionally mandated government scientific advisory bodies. These included the White House Council on Environmental Quality (established in 1969 as part of the law creating the EPA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, created in 1976. The Department of Energy housed a CO2 Climate Effects Research and Assessment Program (discussed by Barbat in Vol. 2 No. 5). Journalists, led by the great New York Times science reporter Walter Sullivan, seemed to have finally zeroed in on the fundamental concern. As Barbat wrote in this issue,
“Newspapers and magazines are now publishing articles on the CO2 problem with greater frequency and with deeper understanding. Not long ago, editors seemed to print at least one article predicting the rapid return of an ice age climate for every article predicting CO2 greenhouse warming, and the CO2 articles often received less prominence. The public was confused about climate trends, the news media were confused, and the scientific community also gave the impression of being confused.”
Environmental activists, too, had begun to take the issue on board. Despite some quirks, Nathaniel Rich’s article and book Losing Earth covers the 1979-89 politics of climate reasonably well.
Even this meager amount of context greatly enriches a reading of this issue of the CO2 Newsletter. Barbat devotes most of it to two events whose groundbreaking quality is evident only in retrospect. First, he digests testimony from subcommittee hearings held in the House of Representatives on July 31, 1981. Titled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Greenhouse Effect,” those hearings were co-led by a young Al Gore, then in his third term representing Tennessee. Barbat summarizes testimony by Joe Smagorinsky, head of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory: “despite the admitted existence of numerous uncertainties, the consensus on the nature and magnitude of the [CO2] problem has remained remarkably constant throughout this long worldwide process of study and deliberation.” Arguably the world’s most important organizer of climate science in the 1960s and 1970s, Smagorinsky was largely responsible for the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) and the First GARP Global Experiment (discussed at length in A Vast Machine.)
My own mentor, colleague, and friend Stephen Schneider’s testimony also comes up for review: “perhaps the most dramatic, even if far off, potential event would be the breaking of part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, possibly resulting in a five- or so meter sea level rise….” Today, 45 years later, the grounding line of the Thwaites “doomsday glacier” – part of that very West Antarctic ice sheet – is being undermined from below by warming seawater. Barbat also quotes Schneider saying “… if we wait ten or twenty years before proceeding with… actions, then we will have to adapt to a larger amount of CO2 and its consequences than if actions were taken now to either increase our options to deal with CO2 in the future, or to eliminate CO2 emissions….” Among the saddest facts of our time is that despite remarkable progress toward increased efficiency, electrification, and renewable energy, annual global CO2 emissions have risen every year since then, with only two exceptions: 2009, following the 2008 recession, and 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic.
As Barbat notes, the House subcommittees that took in Smagorinsky’s and Schneider’s testimony expressed skeptical views. Barbat: “The overall results of government-sponsored programs had to be defended vigorously, and the new administration wants assurance that sociological and political implications of the CO2 greenhouse problem were not derived ideologically. However, the net effect on future CO2 research may be very beneficial.” That assessment proved prophetic. Unable to completely suppress the climate issue, the Reagan administration found it most convenient to chant the mantra “more research is needed,” thus helping to create the seemingly endless cycle of ever more potent climate reports and assessments followed by little policy action.
Schneider would go on to found the interdisciplinary journal Climatic Change, co-found the IPCC, and win a MacArthur award. Al Gore relied on him as a key science informant, and the two became friends. By the 1990s, Gore was the most prominent American politician to take a strong stance on climate policy. Had he become president in the 2000 election, the world might have moved more swiftly toward decarbonization. Long after his stint as Vice President (1993-2000), Gore was still presenting his slide show to anyone who would hear it. He wrote two climate books, starred in a documentary about his work, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and played a key behind-the-scenes role in the 2015 landmark Paris Agreement.
The second major “event” discussed in Vol. 2 No. 6 is an article in Science, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” Its lead author: James Hansen, whose 1988 Congressional testimony would become one of the most iconic moments in climate politics. Barbat had already presented that article’s abstract in issue No. 5. By the time of No. 6, he would certainly have seen Walter Sullivan’s front-page article about it in the New York Times (August 22, 1981). At nearly 2400 words, Barbat’s digest version occupies most of two newsletter pages (out of eight); the full article in Science is just 8.5 pages, including numerous figures and charts.
By omitting its citations and nearly all of its math, Barbat brings out the article’s major findings for a more general audience. One is the equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3°C for doubled CO2 , a figure that has stood the test of time; the IPCC Sixth Assessment (Working Group I, 2021) narrowed the range of that value to 2.5-4°C. Second, and more significant for climate politics, Hansen and his co-authors projected warming of 3-4.5°C under a “fast growth” scenario, or 2.5°C under “slow growth” by 2100 – entirely in line with most present-day assessments. Finally, they predicted that “CO2 warming should rise above the noise level of natural climate variability” in the 1990s. And indeed, the CO2 “fingerprint” was detected in the early 1990s, underpinning the famous “balance of evidence” statement in the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report.
As a final, unrelated comment, I note that this period of time – not long after the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown in 1979 – was the high-water mark of the anti-nuclear movement, especially in Germany, the UK, and the United States. In the “Feedback” section of this newsletter, a very annoyed Amory Lovins responds to Barbat’s article in the previous issue regarding his “Energy Strategy for Low Climatic Risks” (Report for the German Federal Environmental Agency, June 1981, co-authored with Hunter L. Lovins, Florentin Krause, and Wilfrid Bach). By then Lovins was already famous for his early book Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (1977), which dismissed nuclear power as not only too risky but also too expensive. He and his eventual Rocky Mountain Institute focused instead on reducing energy consumption through efficiency, passive heating/cooling, and other techniques, while rejecting fossil fuels in favor of solar and wind energy.
Barbat, by contrast, was strongly pro-nuclear – a position that remains quite common among geologists (Barbat’s own discipline) and climate scientists of my acquaintance. Probably no issue related to energy and environment has ever inspired stronger commitments pro and con. In his account of Lovins’ report, Barbat could not refuse himself a dig: “Thus when Amory Lovins states, ‘It is the empirical verdict of the capital marketplace…that has rightly sealed the fate of nuclear power,’ the only debatable point is his choice of the word ‘rightly’.” Lovins’ response was livid: your comments “added things that weren’t there, lifted concepts out of context…, and used our work as a vehicle for your own pro-nuclear polemics.” Barbat’s response was conciliatory, encouraging readers to read the Lovins report and “pursue a constructive course faithfully.”
William Barbat’s CO2 Newsletters are remarkable documents, capturing a crucial moment in the history of climate science and politics. As I’ve discussed, they’re most meaningful when placed in context, which can take a bit of effort. Highly recommended reading, especially for historians!
Paul N. Edwards
Collaborateur, Laboratoire de Population, Environnement, et Développement, Aix kMarseille Université, Marseille, FranceDirector (Emeritus), Program in Science, Technology & Society, Stanford University
Professor of History and Information (Emeritus), University of MichiganEmail: pedwards@stanford.edu