While cleaning out my office the other day, I found a yellowed newspaper clipping with the headline, "Greenhouse effect viewed with alarm." The article was dated Oct. 18, 1983. Check it out below the fold:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth will start in the 1990s, disrupting food production and raising coastal waters as the polar icecaps melt, the federal government said in a report released today.
The study by the Environmental Protection Agency said the climatic changes from the so-called “greenhouse effect” are unavoidable and warned that the United States and other countries must begin searching now for ways to mitigate the impact.
The report, titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?” concluded that even as drastic and unlikely a step as a total ban on coal burning would delay by only 15 years a 3.6 degree increase in average worldwide temperatures.
While other government studies have warned that the greenhouse effect was a potential problem, the EPA report is the first to state with certainty that the warming will occur no matter what.
The EPA study is based on earlier projections by the National Academy of Sciences that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the air – which could occur by the middle of the next century – would raise present world temperatures within a range of 2.7 degrees to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
This result is known as the greenhouse effect because carbon dioxide acts like the glass in a greenhouse allowing the sun’s warming rays to reach earth but not allowing the heat to escape.
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This is an amazingly unbalanced article by 2012 standards. Clearly, the denialists weren't yet active in 1983, and climate scientists still felt free to draw bold conclusions. Imagine stating with certainty that "the warming will occur no matter what," and in the 1990s, no less! These days, by the third paragraph at the very latest, the article would say, "Other scientists, however, disagree. Joe Blah, of the Climate Truth Institute, says, "The evidence does not support such a conclusion. Drill, baby, drill! And furthermore, blah blah!"
The well-funded denialist movement has done a splendid job spreading lies and confusion, preventing effective action, to the point that many observers, including myself, view the situation as irredeemable. Opinions among the "reality-based community" still vary widely, but it will be only a very few more years before the climate scientists have accumulated enough data to start projecting the consequences of the ever-increasing Arctic methane release. Then, perhaps, we can start to achieve some kind of consensus about what we are really up against.
This is my first diary under this moniker, though I have been reading DKos regularly since the spring of 1993, just before the war. (The status I would have if I had registered a username back then!) I was once a fledgling planetary astronomer in the 1960s, doing research on weather patterns on the planet Jupiter, so I have always had a planetary mindset and have always viewed Earth in planetary terms. I totally bought the Whole Earth Catalog "whole systems" approach. In my estimation, we actually passed the point of no return 20 years ago. This conclusion has seemed inescapable to me ever since the early 1990s. Since then I have been asking myself, "OK, if this is true, then now what?" Some day I'll probably write something about this subject. It's important to remember that we're no more doomed now that we ever were. Only the time scale has changed.