How The Climate Scam Gained Momentum In The 1980s
In 1984 the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis was not taken seriously. By 1997 CAGW was getting endorsements from all scientific disciplines across all Western countries
This transformation was engineered by G7 leaders who realized transitioning away from coal and oil required uneven and unpopular sacrifices from workers, consumers, taxpayers, and nations.
An overarching benevolent global mission; i.e., “saving the planet,” was weaponized to dominate, deflect and distort discussion about this energy transition.
Through their control of science funding, and their influence on the media, G7 governments imposed CAGW onto scientists and the public.
London hosted the 1984 G7 Summit. Margaret Thatcher presided. Proceedings concluded with the London Economic Declaration. Clause 13 instructs the Working Group on Technology, Growth and Employment (WGTGE, est. 1983) to prepare a report for the 1985 Summit.
While emphasizing the “international dimension of environmental problems” Clause 14 directs G7 Environment Ministers to work with WGTGE to: “identify projects for cooperation.” (1)
Bonn hosted the 1985 G7 Summit. Helmut Kohl presided. Proceedings concluded with the Bonn Economic Declaration. Clause 12:
“We shall also address other concerns such as climatic change…” (2)
Clause 13 toasts their shared desire to “harness the mechanisms of governmental vigilance” while noting how: “science must contribute to reconciling environmental protection and economic growth.”
Clause 14 dispatches WGTGE to consult international science bodies regarding enviro-measurement harmonization. Clause 15 directs G7 Environment Ministers to recruit OECD-member counterparts. (3)
CAGW consensus history splices thricely into:
- CAGW’s journey through academic and popular literature;
- The globalization of a centuries-old Euro-American social movement (self-identifying as: naturalist, ecologist, conservationist, environmentalist, green etc.) fixated on stimulating and instrumentalizing phobias about industrial (anthropogenic) impacts on ‘Nature’; and,
- Evolving OECD efforts to coordinate fuel policies.
Paleoclimatology emerged as an adjunct to Vulcanology after it became obvious that volcanic dust cooled Earth’s climate. A similar observation, inappropriately dubbed “greenhouse gas warming effect,” gained currency in the 1800s.
Speculation about fuel burning causing excessive warming were dismissed. It was doubted humanity could burn enough; and, as warming lengthened growing seasons its specter conjured little dread.
Greenhouse gas fears resurfaced in the late-1930s, after decades of actual global warming. This warming period ended in the late-1940s. Cooling prevailed until the late-1970s.
Because this 1945-75 cooling accompanied unprecedented industrial CO2 emissions, CAGW hawkers became scarce and muted; but the hypothesis never died. Scientists issued back-of-the-napkin reckonings about how much warming might result from doubling atmospheric CO2. Estimates ranged from 0.25 C to 3.6 C. (4)
Rebranded as “environmentalism,” the anthropogenicist movement sprawled in the 1960s. (5) By the early-1970s it oversaw beachheads (Environment Ministries) inside every OECD state. It swept campuses with a ‘green’ “color revolution” and a proliferation of Enviro-Science, Ecology, and Conservation Biology faculties.
Anthropogenicists forced millions to ingest eco-doomsday pulp like Carson’s Silent Spring, Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. Rivers of gold flowed from Big Green philanthropists (Rockefellers, Fords, Pews etc) and farsighted big businesses (including Big Oil) to enviro-NGOs and likeminded science institutes to fund eco-projects (including anthropogenic ‘climate change’ research).
To kick-off a desertification scare in 1961, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and UNESCO sponsored a conference on ‘climate change’ in arid regions.
This scare peaked in 1972 during the Sahel famine and a drought in the Soviet Union.
While some blamed weird weather, desertification’s scapegoats were overpopulation and soil degradation – not CO2. The climate demon of the day wasn’t CO2, but aerosols (smog, contrails, dust). Even the warming worry wasn’t CO2; it was urban waste heat.
Circa 1972, there was zero consensus on whether the net anthropogenic effect was warming or cooling.
Anthropogenicists love highfalutin, well-catered, science conferences. In 1970 scores of top US scientists flocked to the month-long, Study of Critical Environmental Problems.
A year later, 30 scientists from 14 countries flew to the patently anthropogenicist Study of Man’s Impact on Climate in Stokholm. Attendees split between aerosol coolers and greenhouse warmers. Nobody pressed the case for impending climate catastrophe; au contrair, they concluded:
“While it is conceivable that man may have had a small part in the most recent climate changes we have just described, it is clear that natural causes must be sought. In fact, as has been frequently pointed out, it will be difficult to identify any man-made effect because, first, with our present state of knowledge, we do not know how to relate cause and effect in such a complex system and, second man-made effects will be obscured by the natural changes that we know must be occurring.” (6)
Anthropogenicists again rallied in Stockholm at the UN’s 1972 Human Environment mega-confab. CAGW fought for attention with: desertification, global cooling, overpopulation, urban heat, smog, biodiversity loss, acid rain, deforestation, resource exhaustion and ozone holes.
Despite immense publicity, audiences seldom broadened beyond academics.
In 1973 the CIA, BBC, Time, Newsweek, Fortune and National Geographic launched a global cooling scare; their flagship being the 1974 BBC documentary (and book), The Weather Machine. (7)
A “human volcano” of pollution blotted-out the sun! Cooling hysteria spiraled so embarrassingly the WMO stepped-in to tamp-down “controversial statements of climactic changes.”
The WMO insisted urban heat plus CO2 preordained warming, not cooling. Regarding anthropogenic warming, WMO’s mode was ‘further research needed’ not ‘the end is nigh.’ (8)
The 1979 (first) World Climate Conference’s keynote reiterated:
“The effect of CO2 increase itself, although clear in the laboratory and in theory, is not proven as applicable in the global environment context where feedback (i.e. consequential) effects operating through the oceans and water vapor in the atmosphere may greatly alter the outcome. Nor is the net effect of the global increase in turbidity (particulate matter) in the atmosphere as yet certain…” (9)
Anthropogenicists don’t win debates; they capture institutes. In 1975 long-serving intel asset, academic fraud and overpopulation shill, Margaret Mead, became President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She immediately convened: The Atmosphere: Endangered or Endangering.
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) also fell. (GISS was NASA’s Columbia-hosted atmospheric research lab.)
GISS founder, Robert Jastrow, vocally dismissed CAGW. He departed in 1981 amidst controversy regarding GISS’s funding and GISS’s sudden side-door dissemination of CAGW propaganda.
The EPA leapt-in to temporarily fund GISS. During this twilight zone James Hansen (pictured above) took over. Hansen, who was already making headlines with alarmist potshots, became one of the most decorated CAGW boosters. (A similar switching-out of the guard had occurred in Britain’s premier climate institute two years earlier.)
Some media outlets pushed CAGW in the early-1980s, often quoting releases from a few Austrian conferences; but, on-the-whole, CAGW remained no more relevant than acid rain, ozone holes or deforestation.
The global warming scare would grow ten-thousand-fold; after the G7 tractor turned the topsoil.
In 1988 the United Nations Environment Program and the WMO established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Climatology’s high court. IPCC re-defined “climate change” as “anthropogenic climate change.”
Science funding across OECD countries thereafter focused on anthropogenic climate change; specifically, on proving CAGW, and natural processes were to be ignored.
The ascendant paradigm presumed industrial emissions drove ‘climate change’, and it relegated natural climate variability to background noise – a hard sell to climate authorities.
Disconnect between science and politics reared after IPCC issued its 1990 Scientific Assessment. This document incorporated two years of work by 170 scientists and had been peer-reviewed by 200 more. (10)
Finding the Assessment’s uncertainty and complacency unhelpful, G7 energy transitioners demanded a re-do. Thus appeared: Climate Change 1992 Supplementary Report.
Preface:
“Generation of the background papers involved, either as lead authors or contributors, 118 scientists from 22 countries. A further 380 scientists from 63 countries and 18 UN or non-governmental organizations participated in the peer review… It can therefore be considered as an authoritative statement of the contemporary views of the international scientific community.”
Conclusion:
“Findings of scientific research since 1990 do not affect our fundamental understanding of the science of the greenhouse effect and either confirm or do not justify alteration of the major conclusions of the first IPCC Scientific Assessment, in particular…
· there are many uncertainties in our predictions particularly with regards to the timing, magnitude and regional patterns of climate change;
· global mean surface air temperatures have increased by 0.3 to 0.6 C over the last 100 years
· the size of the warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability;
· unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.” (11)
Fact: in 1992, the world scientific establishment inspected – then rejected – CAGW.
By 1992 the energy transition juggernaut had hoisted anchor. Bio-fuel, solar power, wind power, and above all natural gas, firms frankensteined into a climate-industrial-complex gorging upon public treasuries.
Consequently, shortly after the Supplementary Report poured cold water onto the CAGW fever dream, 154 governments signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 24 were OECD. 115 were micro-states dependent on OECD states to cover their delegations’ expenses.
Berlin hosted the first UNFCCC-mandated Conferences of the Parties (COP1) in 1995. Angela Merkel presided. COP1’s “Berlin Mandate” pronounced voluntary energy transition policies that were allegedly incapable of resolving the ‘climate crisis’.
The IPCC then folded to political pressure, as their 1996 Assessment whimpered:
“The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernable human influence on global climate.” (12)
Pre-1996 anyone believing in CAGW had to be labeled a science outlier. Post-1996 anyone doubting CAGW stood accused of suffering pathological denial.
The goalposts were being moved then, as they still are today.
See more here substack.com
Header image: Grist
Bold emphasis added
ROBERT JOSEPH BUGIADA
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My first exposure to the idea of manmade global warming was in 1979 in my Heat Transfer class when I was an undergraduate majoring in Chemical Engineering. It was in a footnote of my textbook by Bennett & Meyers, “Momentum, Heat, and Mass Transfer.”
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Seriously
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Got a bot scammer in almost every comment section…fix please
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