David reads books

Climate change has been understood for decades

While it seems that a general consensus about climate change has only emerged in the last few years it is not a new idea. Many people have known about and understood the problem for decades even though people continue to try and cast doubts on it today.

The latest issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly is on the topic of "Indigenous People and Climate Change". Mark Cherrington writes:

Just five years ago, governments, pundits, and the general public were talking about climate change -- to the extent they were talking about it at all -- as a vague issue that was open to question. Today it is not just accepted as a fact; it is seen as a crisis. But indigenous peoples have known for decades that climate change is happening, and they know better than most exactly what it means.

Indigenous peoples tend to live close to the land. They are subsistence farmers, herders, fishers, and hunters, with millennia of collective knowledge about the ecology of their surroundings. With that knowledge and experience, even tiny changes in water cycles, wildlife, soil, and weather are readily apparent. An indigenous farmer notices that a certain insect is slightly less abundant this year or that a particular flower is blooming three days earlier.

Unfortunately, the same closeness to the land that has given indigenous peoples early warning about global warming also means that they suffer the consequences of it to a far greater degree than others. The trends of history and hegemony have left many indigenous peoples living on land that is already marginal, so even relatively small changes in temperature or rainfall have an outsized consequence.

Some of the world's best scientists were all quite aware of it too. An article from The Times writes about "Jason", a group of leading scientists including a number of Nobel Prize winners engaged by the US Government to think about the big issues.

Recent research reveals how the roots of this argument stretch back to two hugely influential reports written almost 30 years ago.

These reports involve a secret organisation of American scientists reporting to the US Department of Defense. At the highest levels of the American government, officials pondered whether global warming was a significant new threat to civilisation. They turned for advice to the elite special forces of the scientific world – a shadowy organisation known as Jason. Even today few people have heard of Jason. It was established in 1960 at the height of the cold war when a group of physicists who had helped to develop the atomic bomb proposed a new organisation that would – to quote one of its founders – “inject new ideas into national defence”.

[snip]

In 1977 they got to work on global warming. There was one potential problem. Only a few of them knew anything about climatology. To get a better understanding they relocated for a few days to Boulder, Colorado, the base for NCAR – the National Center for Atmospheric Research – where they heard the latest information on climate change. Then, being physicists, they went back to first principles and decided to build a model of the climate system. Officially it was called Features of Energy-Budget Climate Models: An Example of Weather-Driven Climate Stability, but it was dubbed the Jason Model of the World.

In 1979 they produced their report: coded JSR-78-07 and entitled The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate. Now, with the benefit of hind-sight, it is remarkable how prescient it was.

When climate change impacts become even more severe and historians look back at humanity's failure to act they won't be able to say it was because we didn't know. Politicians and lobby groups taking care of vested interests will have a lot to answer for.

Labels: climate change

posted by David @ 2:41 AM