stoutfellow

In the course of my ongoing library project, I recently subcatalogued The Next Eighty Years, which is the proceedings of a futurology conference held at Caltech in 1977. One of the articles, I noticed, was "The Possibility and Consequences of Climatic Change", by Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Curious, I dipped into the article. I didn't do more than skim, but found some interesting snippets, which I've put under the cut.

From the beginning of a section on recent climatic trends:

Let me summarize briefly what the northern hemisphere climate has done in the last several years. Below [in the article; I didn't copy it] is a picture of air temperature in the northern hemisphere, based upon the existing network of thermometers. If you look at the short-term picture on the left, you'll see that since the 1880s the temperature has risen by about 1/2° Celsius, and from the middle 1940s to the middle 1960s it dropped about 1/4°. What's wrong with this picture is that there should be large error bars on it, because there are still vast regions of oceans not covered by thermometers. But the famous cooling trend we've been hearing about has been based on extrapolating the latter part of this record to the present. I don't know whether we have the right to extrapolate it one way or the other without having some other kind of information to tell us what might be causing climate change, and we haven't yet had time to analyze the temperature records past 1970.

(Emphasis mine.) A bit later, after discussion of historical trends and consequences of even small shifts in the global temperature:

One more point is that any slow trend in climate, whether due to natural causes or to human intervention, is going to be considerably slower in its year-to-year change than the very large natural fluctuations that are superimposed on those trends. Therefore we have the terrible problem of signal detectability. We don't even know the direction of the climate trend until we've lived through enough years to do enough statistical time-averaging to get the sampling error low enough to see the trend as a clear signal. By that time we're living through the change and are committed to it - and to its consequences.

Finally, after going into some detail on the CO₂ question, Schneider notes:

I'm fully convinced that we face this dilemma [of the accuracy of current models] with CO₂, because the CO₂ effect on climate should jump up out of the climatic noise level in the next decade or two, according to our climate models, and time will tell us whether the models are right if it happens. Will that event move the grain belt three or four hundred miles north, possibly drying out parts of the high plains or the California mountains? I don't know - but it is quite possible... These are the kinds of questions we have to address, recognizing that the people who are threatened are those at the margins of the circulation systems, and those at the margins of the nutritional requirements - for whom any further stress is fatal. I think that really is the outline of the climate message.

And that's what they were saying in 1977. Just a historical note....