Blah blah Earth Day 1970.
On this day 22nd of April 1975, a meeting of the World Trends Committee of the Cabinet Office had an (inconclusive) discussion about climate change. A very small number of people within the UK state (as distinct from the government) was beginning to pay attention to the build-up of carbon dioxide doing nothing particularly was happening in public.
“Warren, who was one of its two secretaries, suggested putting a position paper on climatological research to the World Trends committee.36 The Met Office provided a paper that covered climate change for discussion in 1975.37 The ‘conclusion of the paper was that it was all very difficult and that ‘‘fundamental understanding has not reached a stage which permits a reliable computation of future climate. Moreover, natural climate time-series can give no useful indication of future trends’’’.
38 NA CAB 134/3974. Sawyer, ‘Problems of assessing the future climate’, WT(75)7, 4 April 1975.
The paper was discussed at WT(75)2nd meeting, 22 April 1975.”
Source – see brilliant paper by Jon Agar here).
Why this matters.
We have to remember that there was a significant but largely ignored history before Thatcher gave her speech at the Royal Society in September of 1988. And this has been excavated by Gabriel Henderson and Jon Agar, among others.
What happened next?
The Civil Service bureaucracy did produce a report, that was finally released in 1980. And when the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK, John Ashworth, tried to brief Margaret Thatcher in 1980 she said apparently “incredulously” “you want me to worry about the weather?”