Thirty three years ago, on this day, October 22nd 1991, the Cold Warrior physicist William Nierenberg, in the grip of Relevance Deprivation Syndrome and loving being part of the “George Marshall Institute” which he had co-founded, tells attendees of the World Petroleum Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina that there will be
no more than 1 degree of warming by the end of 21st century.
See Oreskes and Conway Merchants of Doubt page 189 (they say 1992, but I am fairly sure they’re wrong). See also Bolin 2007, page 72.
[from a chapter of Merchants of Doubt available here].
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the climate denialists were in full throat, trying to dampen enthusiasm for a climate treaty. The negotiations for this were going nowhere, but you never knew. So one way to seem “reasonable” was to say that if there was going to be any warming, it would be very, very mild. Nirenberg had been a lead author on the 1983 report by the National Academies of Science which had come out two days after the Environmental Protection Agency’s report, “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?” The EPA report stands up. Nirenberg et al’s? It has aged like a glass of milk.
Nirenberg was a tool and his prediction of “no more than one degree Celsius of warming by the end of the 21st century” is laughable and contemptible. And as a silly old man, he should have shown a bit of humility.
What I think we can learn from this is that there is such a thing as Relevance Deprivation Syndrome and that those of high status suffer the most from it.
What happened next I think Nirenberg kept being a denialist asshole till he died. Because God forbid that you admit that you were wrong.
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.
See also
WORLD PETROLEUM CONGRESS 1991
Source: Energy Exploration & Exploitation , 1991, Vol. 9, No. 6 (1991), pp. 344-353 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43753814
Also on this day:
October 22, 1969 – Edmund Muskie mentions CO2 build up
October 22, 1997 – US and Australian enemies of #climate action plot and gloat