‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come
‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come
James Hansen, who testified to Congress on global heating in 1988, says world is approaching a ‘new climate frontier’
Turns out Hansen should have been a household name in the '90s.
For fuck's sake, Carl Sagan warned of global warming in Cosmos in 1980! And, he never stopped ringing the alarm.
The first scientific paper written about this was published in the 1800s. End of, but still written in the 19th century.
55 Years Ago: Mariner 2 First to Venus: "In 1962, Mariner 2 completed the first successful close-up observations of another planet when it flew by Venus... Since it orbited closer to the Sun, most scientists assumed Venus was the warmer of the two, and some believed its climate was similar to Earth’s tropics. A young scientist named Carl Sagan, however, proposed that the known high concentration of carbon dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere created a runaway greenhouse effect, leading to extremely high temperatures at the surface."
Read “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich. We came close to acting in the late 70s. But we didn’t.
But how will giant multinational corporations make money otherwise?! Think of the CEOs!
For real. What, do you expect these people to be ok with only tens of billions of dollars?
It comes back to the same problem as everything else, really. Financial interests enjoy unchecked power. If you have enough money you can do basically anything, and those who have the most money aren't typically the kind of people we should be trusting with the fate of our species.
As long as we tiptoe around it and appease and capitulate, it's not going to get better.
Prior to 1980's, Global Cooling was all the rage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
In the first paragraph of your link:
Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
I love it when people post citations that refute their main point.
it really wasn't. I was around then. Nobody was talking about it like it was a thing that was going to happen. At best it might be talked about in relation to a movie or something as something that could possibly happen. Even then it was more like the sun going nova timeline wise.
copy/paste from an email i sent my dad in 2016 :
Scientists did not suddenly reverse themselves and start talking about global warming in the 1980s. Greenhouse gas theory (CO2 specifically) has a 120 year history of scientific study starting with John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s. Here is a link to the 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour about (among other things) climate change all cued up to the relevant section. Hardly what I would call new. The prediction of a coming Ice Age when I was a kid may have been a hit in the popular press but barely shows up in the scientific literature. Most cooling predictions were related to aerosol pollution in the atmosphere which was cleaned up in the 80s and 90s. The best that could be said about the science in the 70s was that more research was required to make a prediction. And that is what happened in the intervening 35 years, lots of research.
That may yet happen, if geoengineering goes wrong.