The long
read
Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs
that were missed (and ignored)
The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt
in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were
dismissed as prophets of doom
by Alice
Bell
Mon 5 Jul
2021 06.00 BST
In August
1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to
intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence
of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration
(which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined
wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from
scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in
which the thermometer was travelling wasn’t their immediate concern; it was the
political impact. They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of
cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and
famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.
“The
climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one,
including the climatologists, recognised it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union
and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather.
The US shipped grain to India and the Soviets killed off livestock to eat, “and
premier Nikita Khrushchev was quietly deposed”.
But, the
report argued, the world ignored this warning, as the global population
continued to grow and states made massive investments in energy, technology and
medicine.
Meanwhile,
the weird weather rolled on, shifting to a collection of west African countries
just below the Sahara. People in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger
and Chad “became the first victims of the climate change”, the report argued,
but their suffering was masked by other struggles – or the richer parts of the
world simply weren’t paying attention. As the effects of climate change started
to spread to other parts of the world, the early 1970s saw reports of droughts,
crop failures and floods from Burma, Pakistan, North Korea, Costa Rica,
Honduras, Japan, Manila, Ecuador, USSR, China, India and the US. But few people
seemed willing to see a pattern: “The headlines from around the world told a
story still not fully understood or one we don’t want to face,” the report said.
This claim
that no one was paying attention was not entirely fair. Some scientists had
been talking about the issue for a while. It had been in newspapers and on
television, and was even mentioned in a speech by US president Lyndon Johnson
in 1965. A few months before the CIA report was issued, the US secretary of
state, Henry Kissinger, had addressed the UN under a banner of applying science
to “the problems that science has helped to create”, including his worry that
the poorest nations were now threatened with “the possibility of climatic
changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world”.
Still, the
report’s authors had a point: climate change wasn’t getting the attention it
could have, and there was a lack of urgency in discussions. There was no large
public outcry, nor did anyone seem to be trying to generate one.
Although
initially prepared as a classified working paper, the report ended up in the
New York Times a few years later. By this point, February 1977, the problem of
burning fossil fuels was seen more through the lens of the domestic oil crisis
rather than overseas famine. The climate crisis might still feel remote, the
New York Times mused, but as Americans feel the difficulties of unusual weather
combined with shortages of oil, perhaps this might unlock some change? The
paper reported that both energy and climate experts shared the hope “that the
current crisis is severe enough and close enough to home to encourage the
interest and planning required to deal with these long-range issues before the
problems get too much worse”.
And yet, if
anything, debate about climate change in the last third of the 20th century
would be characterised as much by delay as concern, not least because of
something the political analysts at the CIA seem to have missed: fightback from
the fossil fuel industries.
When it
came to constructing that delay, the spin doctors could find building materials
readily available within the scientific community itself. In 1976, a young
climate modeller named Stephen Schneider decided it was time for someone in the
climate science community to make a splash. As a graduate student at Columbia
University, Schneider wanted to find a research project that could make a
difference. While hanging out at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
he stumbled across a talk on climate models. He was inspired: “How exciting it
was that you could actually simulate something as crazy as the Earth, and then
pollute the model, and figure out what might happen – and have some influence
on policy in a positive way,” he later recalled.
After years
of headlines about droughts and famine, Schneider figured the time was right
for a popular science book on the danger climate change could cause. The result
was his 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy. Although he wanted to avoid
positioning himself alongside either what he called the “prophets of doom” on
one side or the “Pollyannas” on the other, he felt it was important to impart
the gravity of climate change and catch people’s attention.
And
attention it got, with a jacket endorsement from physicist Carl Sagan, reviews
in the Washington Post and New York Times, and an invitation to appear on
Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. This rankled some of the old guard, who felt this
just wasn’t the way to do science. Schneider’s book drew an especially scathing
attack from Helmut Landsberg, who had been director of the Weather Bureau’s
office of climatology, and was now a well-respected professor at the University
of Maryland.
Landsberg
reviewed the book for the American Geophysical Union, calling it a
“wide-ranging potpourri of science, nature and politics”, and
“multidisciplinary, as promised, but also very undisciplined”. Landsberg
disliked what he saw as an activist spirit in Schneider, believing that climate
scientists should stay out of the public spotlight, especially when it came to
the uncertainties of climate modelling. He would only endanger the credibility
of climatologists, Landsberg worried; much better to stay collecting data to
iron out as many uncertainties as possible, only guardedly briefing politicians
behind closed doors when absolutely needed. In an example of first-class
scientific bitching, Landsberg concluded his review by noting that Schneider
advocated scientists running for public office, and that perhaps he had better
try that himself – but that if he did want to be a serious scientist, “one
might suggest that he spend less time going to the large number of meetings and
workshops that he seems to frequent” and join a scientific library.
In part, it
was a generational clash. Schneider belonged to a younger, more rebellious
cohort, happy to take science to the streets. In contrast, Landsberg had spent
a career working carefully with government and the military, generally behind
closed doors, and was scared that public involvement might disrupt the delicate
balance of this relationship. What’s more, the cultural norms of scientific
behaviour that expect a “good” scientist to be guarded and avoid anything that
smells remotely of drama were deeply embedded – even when, like any deeply
embedded cultural norm, they can skew the science. Landsberg was far from the
only established meteorologist bristling at all this new attention given to
climate change. Some felt uneasy about the drama, while others didn’t trust the
new technologies, disciplines and approaches being used.
In the UK,
the head of the Met Office, John Mason, called concern about climate change a
“bandwagon” and set about trying to “debunk alarmist US views”. In 1977 he gave
a public talk at the Royal Society of Arts, stressing that there were always
fluctuations in climate, and that the recent droughts were not unprecedented.
He agreed
that if we were to continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we were, we might
have 1C warming, which he thought was “significant”, in the next 50-100 years;
but on the whole, he thought, the atmosphere was a system that would take whatever
we threw at it. Plus, like many of his contemporaries, he figured we would all
move over to nuclear power, anyway. Writing up the talk for Nature, John
Gribbin described the overall message as “don’t panic”. He reassured readers
there was no need to listen to “the prophets of doom”.
Change was
coming, though, and it would be a combination of an establishment scientist and
an activist that would kick it off . An obscure 1978 US Environmental
Protection Agency report on coal ended up on the desk of Rafe Pomerance, a
lobbyist at the DC offices of Friends of the Earth. It mentioned the
“greenhouse effect”, noting that fossil fuels could have significant and
damaging impacts on the atmosphere in the next few decades.
He asked
around the office and someone handed him a recent newspaper article by a
geophysicist called Gordon MacDonald. MacDonald was a high-ranking American
scientist who had worked on weather modification in the 1960s as an advisor to
Johnson. In 1968 he had written an essay called How to Wreck the Environment,
imagining a future in which we had resolved threats of nuclear war but instead
weaponised the weather. Since then he had watched people do this – not
deliberately, as a means of war, but more carelessly, simply by continuing to
burn fossil fuels.
More
importantly, MacDonald was also a “Jason” – a member of a secret group of elite
scientists who met regularly to give the government advice, outside of the
public eye. The Jason group had met to discuss carbon dioxide and climate
change in the summers of 1977 and 1978, and MacDonald had appeared on US TV to
argue that the earth was warming.
You might
imagine there was some culture clash between Pomerance, a Friends of the Earth
lobbyist, and MacDonald, a secret military scientist, but they made a powerful
team. They got a meeting with Frank Press, the president’s science advisor, who
brought along the entire senior staff of the US Office of Science and
Technology. After MacDonald outlined his case, Press said he would ask the
former head of the meteorology department at MIT, Jule Charney, to look into
it. If Charney said a climate apocalypse was coming, the president would act.
Charney
summoned a team of scientists and officials, along with their families, to a
large mansion at Woods Hole, on the south-western spur of Cape Cod. Charney’s
brief was to assemble atmospheric scientists to check the Jasons’ report, and
he invited two leading climate modellers to present the results of their more
detailed, richer models: James Hansen at the Goddard Institute for Space
Studies at Columbia University in New York, and Syukuro Manabe of the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton.
The
scientific proceedings were held in the old carriage house of the mansion, with
the scientists on a rectangle of desks in the middle and political observers
around the side. They dryly reviewed principles of atmospheric science and
dialled in Hansen and Manabe. The two models offered slightly different
warnings about the future, and in the end, Charney’s group decided to split the
difference. They felt able to say with confidence that the Earth would warm by
about 3C in the next century, plus or minus 50% (that is, we would see warming
between 1.5C or 4C). In their report of November 1979, Science magazine
declared: “Gloomsday predictions have no fault.”
By the
mid-1970s, the biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, was starting to wonder
if climate change might finally be about to arrive on the political agenda and
start messing with its business model. Maybe it was the reference in the
Kissinger speech, or Schneider’s appearance on the Tonight Show. Or maybe it
was just that the year 2000 – the point after which scientists warned things
were going to start to hurt – didn’t seem quite so far off.
In the
summer of 1977, James Black, one of the top science advisors at Exxon, made a
presentation on the greenhouse effect to the company’s most senior staff. This
was a big deal: executives at that level would only want to know about science
that would affect the bottom line. The same year, the company hired Edward
David Jr to head up their research labs. He had learned about climate change
while working as an advisor to Nixon. Under David, Exxon started to build a
small research project on carbon dioxide. Small, at least, by Exxon standards –
at $1m a year, it was a good chunk of cash, just not much compared with the
$300m a year the company spent on research at large.
In December
1978, Henry Shaw, the scientist leading Exxon’s carbon dioxide research, wrote
in a letter to David that Exxon “must develop a credible scientific team” one
that can critically evaluate science that comes in on the topic, and “be able
to carry bad news, if any, to the corporation”.
Exxon
fitted out one of its largest supertankers with custom-made instruments to do
ocean research. Exxon wanted to be taken seriously as a credible player, so
wanted leading scientists on board, and was willing to ensure they had
scientific freedom. Indeed, some of the work they undertook with oceanographer
Taro Takahashi would be later used in a 2009 paper concluding that the oceans
absorb only 20% of carbon dioxide emitted from human activities. This work
earned Takahashi a Champion of the Earth prize from the UN.
In October
1982, David told a global warming conference financed by Exxon: “Few people
doubt that the world has entered an energy transition, away from dependence
upon fossil fuels and toward some mix of renewable resources that will not pose
problems of CO2 accumulation.”
The only
question, he said, was how fast this would happen. Maybe he really saw Exxon as
about to lead the way on innovation to zero-carbon fuels, with his R&D lab
at the centre of it. Or maybe the enormity of the challenge hadn’t really sunk
in. Either way, by the mid-1980s the carbon dioxide research had largely dried
up.
When Ronald
Reagan was elected in November 1980, he appointed lawyer James G Watt to run
the Department of the Interior. Watt had headed a legal firm that fought to
open public lands for drilling and mining, and already had a reputation for
hating conservation projects, as a matter of policy and of faith. He once
famously described environmentalism as “a leftwing cult dedicated to bringing
down the type of government I believe in”. The head of the National Coal
Association pronounced himself “deliriously happy” at the appointment, and
corporate lobbyists started joking: “How much power does it take to stop a
million environmentalists? One Watt.”
Watt didn’t
close the EPA, as people initially feared he would, but he did appoint Anne
Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who cut it by a quarter. Pomerance and his
colleagues in the environmental movement were going to be busy. They didn’t
exactly have much time for picking up that lingering and still quite abstract
problem of climate change. It would still be a while before Pomerance would see
a public movement for climate action.
Just before
the November 1980 election, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) had set up a
new Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee to do a follow-up to the Charney
report. The chair was Bill Nierenberg, one of the generation of scientists who,
like Helmut Landsberg, had been through both the war and the subsequent boom in
science funding. He was quite at home working with the government and military.
He was even a Jason. He had been a fierce defender of the Vietnam war, which
had set him apart from some of his colleagues, and he was still bitter about
some of the leftwing protests on campus at the end of the 1960s, and the
pushback against military-sponsored science that they had inspired. He also
hated the environmentalist movement, which he saw as a band of Luddites,
especially on the issue of nuclear power. In many ways, he must have seemed
like the perfect person to lead a review that would report back to the new
President Reagan.
Nierenberg
decided to build his report around a mix of economics and science. In theory,
this should have been brilliant. But when it came to publication, the two sides
did not cohere. The writers had not worked together, but rather been sent off
to be scientists in one corner and economists in another. It has been described
as a report of two quite different views – five chapters by scientists that
agreed global warming was a major problem, and then two more by economists that
focused on the uncertainty that still existed about the physical impacts,
especially beyond the year 2000, and even greater uncertainty about how this
would play out economically. What’s more, it was the economists’ take on things
that got to frame the report, as the first and last chapters, and whose
analysis dominated the overall message. Nierenberg seemed to be advocating a
wait-and-see approach. There is no particular solution to the problem, he
argued at the start of the report, but we can’t avoid it: “We simply must learn
to deal more effectively with their twists and turns as they unfold.”
For their
2010 book about climate scepticism, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik
Conway dug out the peer-review notes on Nierenberg’s report from the NAS
archives. One of the reviews was from Alvin Weinberg, a physicist who had been
raising concerns about climate change since the 1970s, and he was less than
impressed. In fact, it might be better to say he was appalled by the stance
Nierenberg had taken. At one point the report had suggested people would
probably adapt, largely by moving. People had migrated because of climate
change in the past, it argued, and they would manage again: “It is
extraordinary how adaptable people can be,” the report muses.
Weinberg
was scathing: “Does the committee really believe the United States or Western
Europe or Canada would accept the huge influx of refugees from poor countries
that have suffered a drastic shift in rainfall pattern?” Oreskes and Conway did
some digging into the reviews and noted that Weinberg’s was not the only
negative one (although the others were slightly more polite). Puzzled as to why
these criticisms were not responded to, a senior scientist later explained to
them: “Academy review was much more lax in those days.”
In the end,
the report was launched in October 1983, at a formal gala with cocktails and
dinner at the NAS’s cathedral-like Great Hall. Peabody Coal, General Motors and
Exxon were all on the invite list – and Pomerance managed to sneak in via the
press conference. The White House had briefed the Academy from the get-go,
making it clear it did not approve of speculative, alarmist or “wolf-crying”
scenarios; that it thought technology would find the answer and it did not
expect to do anything other than fund research and see what happened. The NAS
knew these people would be in charge for the next few years, and possibly
figured that the best idea was to give them the most scientific version they
could find of what the White House wanted. Or possibly it simply was what Nierenberg
believed. Either way, from the perspective of today, it’s hard not to see it as
a big misstep.
The
report’s introduction stated up front: “Our stance is conservative: we believe
there is reason for caution, not panic.” At the press conference, Roger
Revelle, the first scientist to brief Congress on the climate crisis, back in
1957, told reporters they were flashing an amber light, not a red one. And so,
the Wall Street Journal reported: “A panel of top scientists has some advice
for people worried about the much-publicised warming of the Earth’s climate:
you can cope.”
Where were
the activists in all of this? Where was that big public movement for action on
climate change that campaigners such as Pomerance were longing for? Environmental
groups were booming, both in mainstream NGOs and more radical groups, but they
tended to focus on other environmental issues, such as saving the whale or the
rainforests, or fighting road-building. It wasn’t really until the 2000s that
we saw the emergence of climate-specific groups and climate dominating the
larger NGOs’ portfolios.
If
anything, the first really active, explicit climate campaigners were the
sceptics. Climate scepticism is as old as climate science itself, and in the
early days it was an entirely sensible position. It is normal for scientists to
raise a quizzical eyebrow when something new is presented to them. The oil
industry took this natural scientific scepticism and tapped it.
But just as
the consensus about the greenhouse effect was starting to harden, and the
sceptics starting to fall away, in the 1980s, there was a deliberate, organised
effort to amplify that natural doubt, extend it, and use it to dismiss and
distract from warnings to take action on climate change. And that wasn’t
science, even if on occasion it used scientists – that was PR. It did not
necessarily mean creating phoney science. (That could work, too, but would only
get you so far.) You would fund real scientists, but in a way that would
confuse and muddy the message. They had done this before, with air pollution in
the 1940s, and their PR companies had picked up a trick or two from fights
about the links between tobacco and cancer.
The chief
executives of the major oil companies met and agreed to set aside funds – only
$100,000 for now, but it would grow – to work on climate policy, establishing
the very legitimate-sounding Global Climate Coalition. Before long, groups such
as this started to proliferate – the Information Council on the Environment,
the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Global Climate Information Project – and any
science-smelling voice expressing sceptical views was amplified. Bill
Nierenberg was a particular favourite. The delayers knew their best strategy
was to get involved in the scientific and policy debate – it was there that
they would be best placed to push the uncertainties and question regulations.
Sometimes fossil fuel companies and their defenders get painted as
“anti-science”. In truth they run on science, and always have done – they are
just strategic about which bits of it they use.
One of the
hardest parts of writing about the history of the climate crisis was stumbling
across warnings from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, musing about how things might get
bad sometime after the year 2000 if no one did anything about fossil fuels.
They still had hope back then. Reading that hope today hurts.
We are now
living our ancestors’ nightmares, and it didn’t have to be this way. If we are
looking to apportion blame, it is those who deliberately peddled doubt that
should be first in line. But it is also worth looking at the cultures of
scientific work that have developed over centuries, some of which could do with
an update. The doubt-mongers manipulated positive forces in science – such as
scepticism – for their own ends, but they also made use of other resources,
exacerbating generational divides, exploiting the scientific community’s
tendency to avoid drama, and steering notions about who were legitimate
political partners (eg governments) and who were not (activists).
Scientists
working on climate change have been put in an incredibly difficult position.
They should have been given time, expert support and a decent budget to think
about the multiple challenges and transformations that happen when you take a
contentious bit of science out of the scientific community and put it in the
public sphere. They should have been given that support from government, but
they also needed the gatekeepers within the scientific community to help them,
too. And yet, if anything, many of these scientists have been ridiculed by
their colleagues for speaking to media or – perish the thought – showing
emotion.
As citizens
of the 21st century, we have inherited an almighty mess, but we have also
inherited a lot of tools that could help us and others survive. A star among
these tools – sparkling alongside solar panels, heat pumps, policy systems and
activist groups – is modern climate science. It really wasn’t all that long ago
that our ancestors simply looked at air and thought it was just that – thin air
– rather than an array of different chemicals; chemicals that you breathe in or
out, that you might set fire to or could get high on, or that might, over
several centuries of burning fossil fuels, have a warming effect on the Earth.
When
climate fear starts to grip, it is worth remembering that we have knowledge
that offers us a chance to act. We could, all too easily, be sitting around
thinking: “The weather’s a bit weird today. Again.”
This is an
edited extract from Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate
Crisis by Alice Bell, published on 8 July by Bloomsbury and available at
guardianbookshop.co.uk
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