Sixty Years of Warnings Ignored and We're Still Looking the Other Way.

It was sixty years ago that our political caste was warned that an era of weird weather was upon us. Excerpts from a Guardian 'Long Read.' 

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”.

...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.

Six Decades of Whistling Past the Graveyard.

...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.

...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.

...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.”

...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.

Living Our Ancestors' Nightmare

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).

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.

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.”

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Today's Big Announcement - The prime minister unveiled a plan to convert Algoma Steel's plant in the Sault Ste. Marie from coal to electric blast furnaces. There seems to be several hundred million dollars involved. It will be the carbon equivalent of taking half the planet's cars off the road - or something like that. 

Hmm, I wonder where they'll generate the electricity to run the new plant? Oh, I'm sure they'll think of something.