Tag: University of East Anglia

Categories
Science Scientists United Kingdom

 August 18, 1975 – it’s gonna get hotter, not cooler, say scientists

Forty eight years ago, on this day, August 18, 1975, a bunch of people who had been thinking about man’s impact on the climate for quite a while get together in Norwich, England, for a meeting about what’s coming. They decide that there’s no ice age on its way but there IS a decent chance of a large amount of warming…

1975  18-23 August 1975 Norwich meeting which ended speculation about possible cooling.

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2008/10/the_great_global_cooling_myth.html

Paterson 1996 is good on this…

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 331ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that everyone was interested in the weather – was it getting colder? was it getting warmer? There had been public pronouncement in both directions including, infamously, the 1971 Rasool and Schneider paper. The popular version of this was The Weather Machine by Nigel Calder which became a BBC documentary. And there were questions asked in the House of Commons. 

But the people who actually studied the climate issue were looking closely at carbon dioxide and by now beginning to think this is the issue – we’re going to get warming not a cooling. Wally Broeker’s paper in Science had just been published a month earlier and the National Academy of Science had started its 2-year study on understanding climate.

What I think we can learn from this is that although doubt continued in public because bad ideas and stories have a long half-life this workshop was the moment at which any lingering doubts about the cooling were put to one side, at least in the minds of people who knew what they were talking about.

What happened next was that by 1976 the World Meteorological Organisation was making statements about the likelihood of warming. It was also a very very hot summer in Europe and especially the United Kingdom the 1976 drought which was until 1995 rather the hottest for years. And 2022 was much hotter globally.

But we get used to anything – until we can’t…

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.

Categories
anti-reflexivity Predatory delay Scientists United Kingdom

March 1st 2010 – scientist grilled over nothing burger…

On this day in 2010, Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, gave testimony to a parliamentary committee (the Science and Technology Select Committee since you ask) on the subject of the so-called Climategate hack (or the “Climatic Research Unit email controversy”).

In late 2009, in the run up to Copenhagen, the servers of the University of East Anglia had been infiltrated, a vast archive of emails downloaded, and then selected releases to make it look as if climate scientists were colluding to keep critics out of peer review. And this was designed to make the negotiations at Copenhagen COP more problematic. Whether it mattered or not is impossible, perhaps to say, but no single bullet ever wins a war… 

The broader context is that climate scientists had been coming under fierce public attack since at least 1989. (Never mind James Hansen’s funding being pulled in 1981 because of a New York Times front page article displeasing the Republican Administration). 

But the kind of personal, bitter ad hominem attacks really took off 1995-96 around the second IPCC assessment report. Michael Mann, who became the subject of attacks himself, calls this the Serengeti Strategy.

Why this matters. 

The narrative of “there is doubt about how severe climate change will be/the climate scientists may be – if not lying – exaggerating” is an immensely powerful narrative. Because it allows middle class professional people to continue not to pay attention to the issue. And that’s why the predatory delayers have played the card for so long. 

What happened next?

The “climategate” emails were found, after multiple investigations, to be – in the words of the right wingers –  a “nothing burger.” Jones continued his career, having admitted that he had contemplated suicide at the time. Meanwhile, the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have continued to climb

Atmospheric C02 concentration at that time: 390.1ppm

Atmospheric C02 concentration at time of publication: 416.71ppm