Page 1927 - Week 07 - Thursday, 31 May 1990
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The reasons they gave to support this warning were: firstly, global climate was already cooling, which was certainly true at the time; secondly, the exceptional warmth of the 1880 to 1940 period was highly abnormal and could not be expected to last, and indeed it did not; thirdly, climatic changes in the past have followed clear cycles. This is the Milankovich mechanism, named after a Yugoslav mathematician who determined that the major problem was caused by the geometrical ratio of the sun to the earth. They said that there were clear cycles and we could thus anticipate the return of a colder climate soon.
In 1976, as a result of these concerns by members of the scientific community that the earth was undergoing a continuous cooling trend, the Australian Academy of Science conducted an investigation into climatic change. The committee report of its investigation stated in summary:
We conclude that there is no evidence that the world is now on the brink of a major climatic change.
On 24 June 1988 the Phoenix Gazette in America, in a front page editorial, reported a study by two Arizona State University researchers. The study, of weather data recorded between 1920 and 1985 in small towns throughout the United States, showed that temperatures had declined by 0.5 degrees Celsius over the past 65 years.
So did the popular media do anything about this? Indeed, it did. There were headlines with such words as "Ice age imminent". A number of books were written; for instance, The Cooling by Lowell Ponte; Ice by Sir Fred Hoyle, which discussed the grave concern about the coming ice age; and in 1974 The Weather Machine by Nigel Calder, a British scientist.
Did that have any effect? Yes, indeed, it did. He was one of the senior scientists in the UK in these areas, and a four-hour television documentary was filmed, based on the book. Actually, we had a four-hour TV documentary recently in Australia. Was it on the environmental concerns of the greenhouse effect? I seem to recall so.
What they discussed at that time was the grave concern about the imminent collapse of society as we know it, caused by the coming ice age. That was just over a decade and a half ago. So what action should have been taken to handle the problem of too much heat escaping from the atmosphere? Well, I do not doubt that at the time there must have been calls to keep in all the heat we could. Perhaps someone may have suggested that any gases that collected re-radiated heat after it was absorbed from the earth would be mandatory to use, not only when we normally would but perhaps as a morning ritual to make sure that there was enough up there and that the coming ice age would not flood the lot of us.
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