Thirty-six years of failure: a brief history of climate change (7) - Record-Searchlight (blog)

"Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war."

Statement from the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security, nicknamed the Toronto Conference

Sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the government of Canada

Toronto, Canada, 27-30 June 1988

As this series of blogs proceeds, it is helpful to remember that twenty-seven years ago, the world's climate scientists met in Villach, Austria and reached a consensus on what we now call anthropogenic global warming or climate change. There weren't any deniers present. As now, there wasn't any scientific evidence then that suggested anything different from what we now believe. Greenhouse gases trap heat. That is what they do. And these gases are our number one export into our shared atmosphere. And the more we fill our atmosphere with these gases, the hotter our world must become. It isn't politics. It is physics.

As a result of the Villach Conference, several scientists including Bert Bolin and Jill Jaeger edited a 541-page tome titled, "The Greenhouse Effect, Climatic Change and Ecosystems."

On the back of this book, we read, "This is the result of the first international scientific assessment of the consequences of the continuing increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which modify the radiative balance of the atmosphere."

According to Fred Pearce in The Climate Files, the Reagan administration wasn't worried about the greenhouse effect. However, they were extremely worried about all these scientists speaking out about the greenhouse effect.

"Participants at the Villach meeting (1985 climate conference) had envisaged establishing an independent group of scientists to monitor the issue. But when officials from the US government's Department of Energy heard from their scientists what had been going on in Villach, they complained loudly about the conference's political recommendations."

Jaeger, an environmental sciences graduate from the University of East Anglia, said, "The U.S. government became alarmed that the climate agenda was being driven by a small group of non-governmental entities."

Pearce wrote, "So the Reagan administration worked the UN corridors, lobbying instead for the creation of an international body whose activities would be approved by government delegates."

"The purpose of the IPCC, so far as Reagan's people were concerned, was to put scientists back in the cages they had escaped from at Villach. But it was too late. The story of global warming -- and what scientists really felt about it -- was out. Far from knuckling under, the Villach generation of climate scientists and their heirs have used their newfound status as the experts on an inter-governmental panel to underline the urgency of tackling climate change, and sometimes strong-arm governments into signing off on their reports.

"Republican US administrations since have devoted much time to denigrating the regular assessment reports of the IPCC. But the irony is that it is a body that they did more than anyone to create. And the spirit of Villach lived on."