A timeline of climate change warnings
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e, 9 & 10
Update 1: Follow-on here in this series, or continue on here in the previous series.
Update 2: added 1975 personal memory& a new book under Katharine Hayhoe
Update 3: remembering the 50th anniversary of a landmark paper (go to 1972)
Update 4: added Earth Song 1989
As IPCC 2021 issue Code Red for Humanity, it may be time to reflect how long this topic has been on people’s minds. And after intelligence failures recently in Afghanistan and 20 yrs ago around 9/11, it seems we’ve been here before...
1856 Eunice Foote
[Around the end of the Industrial Revolution]
She’s retroactively credited with the first chemical observations leading to greenhouse gas effects, tho it’s unclear if lab experiments were scaled toward their climatic implications.
1859 John Tyndall
That extrapolation goes to this Irish scientist with appropriate instrumentation, who “argued the importance of atmospheric water vapour in moderating the Earth’s climate — that is, in the natural greenhouse effect.”
1912 GHG warning
[The year the Titanic sank]
This Popular Mechanics article “Remarkable weather of 1911” stated it as plainly as possible… no need to rephrase this caption!
“…This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth to raise temperature…”
Note: Snopes fact-checked it as authentic, should you ask.
1972 “Man-made carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect”
Carbon Brief here reminded us of “… the 50th anniversary of a remarkable research paper on global warming [… w]ritten by meteorologist John Sawyer [… t]he paper discussed some of the key concepts involved in human-caused global warming and makes one of the first predictions of future global warming — that temperatures would rise 0.6C by the end of the 20th century…”
1975 INA Epidemiology Centre, Bordeaux FR
News flash THE TIGER MOSQUITO RETURNS TO FRANCE: 51 DÉPARTEMENTS ON RED ALERT (Institut Pasteur news), from an Extinction Rebellion WhatsApp group:
“Checking w a Fench friend whose Dad uses to work @ epidemiology centre in Bordeaux (used to be main port of entry for FR colonies, ergo portal for diseases) why they say ‘return’ not ‘arrival’. I went to school there and visited that centre 45 yrs ago, when their head virologist direly predicted “viruses will inherit the earth”… I remember now they referred to climate change as the vector… not that anyone was paying attention… not sure if its a good thing to have known Cassadras as a teen, it kinda makes me feel depressed that the signs were there 50 yrs ago… I think ill update my post on same [this here]”
1977 Exxon report
[ExxonMobil only became so in 1999]
Debates have raged over whether Exxon misled the public or not from their seminal research, and Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014) is the best dry-eyed review I found. “We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science — by way of its scientists’ academic publications — but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.”
1981 Hansen paper
Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide stated in 1981 “The global temperature rose 0.2°C between the middle 1960s and 1980, yielding a warming of 0.4°C in the past century. This temperature increase is consistent with the calculated effect due to measured increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
1982 Exxon Primer on CO2 Greenhouse Effect
From Howard Falcon-Lang on LinkedIn, “… an outstanding report based on an authoritative literature review and inferences based on industry data compilations”, read it here.
1985 Carl Sagan testimony to US Congress
“Witnesses testified on how the greenhouse effect will change the global climate system and possible solutions”, C-Span on YouTube.
1988 Hansen testimony to US Congress
[Year before the Exxon Valdez sank and spurred widespread concern for the environment though not climate, despite awareness of the ozone hole: 1]
Hansen testified same to Congress, meaning it’s no longer just a research article. You can see NYT post here (viewing archive needs subscription).
Michael Jackson’s Earth Song
https://youtu.be/XAi3VTSdTxU?si=zQJRW5CZyNHBmtyN
1992 Severn Suzuki
“From the UN Audiovisual Library: Severn Cullis-Suzuki, delivers her famous speech at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).”
2002 Jacques Chirac
Plenary Session of the World Summit on Sustainable Development:
“Our house is burning down and we’re blind to it. Nature, mutilated and overexploited, can no longer regenerate and we refuse to admit it. Humanity is suffering. It is suffering from poor development, in both the North and the South, and we stand indifferent. The earth and humankind are in danger and we are all responsible.”
2009 Climategate
The hacking of thousands of academic emails pertaining to climate studies became BBC4 news story recently reprised in NewsNight to be made into a film attesting to its currency. Science has become political and tools like hacking are old as the hills — the Trianon Treaty talks were skewed by Brits recovering Germans’ scrap notes from the bin according to Margaret McMillan — but it also brought denialism out of the shadows as a real tool by powers-that-be, which has only increased in the run-up to COP26 in Glasgow.
2014 Pumphandle
This has got to be NOAA’s most graphic history of atmospheric carbon dioxide:
Hansen revisited
Last December, risk assessor Mark Cranfield on twitter quoted James Hansen (2016):
“Our situation is almost comically easy to understand.
The extremely long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere makes it the ultimate determinant of global temperature....
....which is why there is a virtual 1 to 1 relationship between CO2 and temperature revealed in the earth’s paleoclimate proxy records such as ice cores.
Once we understand this most basic fact, that CO2 is the "control knob" of global temperature, we then look to see what temperature is produced by the level of CO2 presently in the atmosphere.”
Today he stated:
“Nothing can bend that line any timescale that matters to humans.”
Michael Mann
Famous for Climategate three paragraphs above and “hockey stick diagram" similar to that right above, Mann wrapped all his arguments including misdirection I mentioned here in his book published earlier this year, The New Climate War: the fight to take back our planet (see more on him in Misdirection).
The same way he argues the personal efforts to combat Climate Emergency while necessary pale in comparison w industries' contribution, I argue in a story map submitted to a climate change competition — Fenlands Challenge — that restoring peatlands in my current home region East Anglia to carbon sinks from current emitter state, would dwarf any effort we take as individuals however necessary also.
In 1662, Dugdale contrasted the Great Levels before & after drainage of the Fens - above, see them georeferenced also Dugdale’s text - one unintended consequence was rivers draining on a slight uphill into the North Sea at the Wash: the drying and shrinkage of the extensive peatlands resulted in a telltale network of drainage, windmills and water pumps to keep near-subsea areas dry, below. Another unintended consequence recently came to the fore, as dry peatlands are 'carbon emitters', whereas wet they are 'carbon sequesters' (Scientific American)… Not only are there programs to re-water nature & farmland (Natural England & Lottery Fund), but grassroots organisations such as Fens Biosphere, Fens for the Future & Great Fen aim to re-water peatlands, mitigate CO2 emissions & fight climate change!
Katharine Hayhoe
Canadian climatologist “Texpat” — Texas expatriate like I was 25 yrs ago — and co-author of the 2018 US Natonal Climate Assessment, is a fellow Christian who unapologetically bridges faith and science, like I try to in an other Medium Series. She also brings science to everyday terms and fights the ‘ivory tower’, where academics did climate science a disservice such as Climategate did.
Update: her newest book is echoed by fellow geologist Bill McGuire’s newest, Hothouse Earth:
… climate scientists — as a tribe — tend to gravitate towards consensus viewpoint rather than go out on a limb, and they are inclined to make forecasts that underplay reality. This does not help us minimise the impacts of the dangerous climate bearkdown the we know is on our doorstep. Far from it. In order to be as prepared as we can be, we need to plan for the worst even as we hope for the best.
“Can I have some more, please?”
Although I tweeted that “time for reflection is over, time for action is now”, recent examples of collective amnesia made me post this one last recap. Follow more posts on this topic in this Current Affairs Medium channel. See also Story Maps: Fire & Ice & Northwest Passage for effects on the most vulnerable area that is the Arctic, & Focus on Oceans for historic climate data.
1: last paragraph on 1986 Arctic report for awareness of such issues:
“Arctic high altitude pilots (jet liners, not propeller-driven planes and choppers) report already in the mid-eighties, the pitting of windshields thru airborne solid pollutants such as dust and sand… they say wind patterns corkscrew northward, and concentrate pollutants over the Pole… this well before knowledge around holes in the ozone layer!”
