

Nixon was told: sea level would rise by 10 feet in 31 years - jackfoxy
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/nixon-was-told-sea-level-would-rise-by.html#more

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philwelch
During the Cold War, the US Government had two sets of calculations for the
effects of nuclear arms (at least according to my dad, who worked for some
time studying tactical nuclear weapons in the Marine Corps). The calculations
for American _losses_ were a worst case scenario--in other words, they were a
generous overestimate of how much death and destruction nuclear weapons could
inflict on American targets. The calculations for _enemy_ losses were also a
worst case scenario--in this case, a generous underestimate of how much we
could kill and destroy by nuking them. The difference between these figures
was often tremendous, and yet both figures remain very legitimate planning
tools for the business of nuclear warfare.

If Moynihan's figures were intended to serve as a similar worst case scenario
for climate change, they were not off by much--the increase in CO2
concentration was off by less than a factor of 2, and the measurements for
temperature and sea level were just over an order of magnitude off (reasonable
if you take worst-case scenarios for both CO2 concentration and the effects of
higher CO2 concentration).

Incidentally, some factors, such as glacial melting, seem to be progressing
_faster_ than contemporary global warming estimates have predicted.

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noodle
i think it just goes to show that "the environment" and "weather" are
ridiculously complex and difficult to predict.

i'm sure they thought they were right at the time.

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mbreese
_i'm sure they thought they were right at the time_

I'm sure they were _scared_ that they might be right, hence the creation of
the EPA.

It's hard to judge predictions from so long ago because they were used to
influence policy. That policy then influenced what _actually_ happened, so
it's not like two independent time points. I doubt that the seas would have
risen 10 feet, but if there was no EPA, not environmental movement, not push
to curb CO2 emissions, etc... we would probably be in a lot worse shape.

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celoyd
I could be totally wrong, but my impression is that at the time of the EPA’s
creation, the model of pollution that it was designed to prevent was based on
more or less directly harmful contamination: litter, mercury, smog, that kind
of thing.

I don’t _think_ (and again, this is only an impression) that they saw the EPA
as addressing global CO2 emissions.

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MichaelSalib
Your impression is certainly consistent with the major environmental
legislation that gave the EPA its teeth: we have a Clean Air Act and we have a
Clear Water Act. We do not have a Carbon-free Act from the same time period
empowering the EPA to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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nailer
I remember being in grade three (1988) and being told about what was then
called 'the greenhouse effect' - some apparently respected scientists informed
us alarmingly of how whole parts of the world would be underwater by 2000.

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motters
I also remember similar predictions from the late 1980s. I think the bottom
line is that prognostications of doom sell much better than more conservative
predictions with caveats and margins of error added. Scaremongering is more
likely to result in increases in funding, career promotion, magazine/journal
articles, impassioned speeches by celebrities, etc.

~~~
hga
I'm a bit older (was in third grade in '69-70, right after watching Apollo 11
in real time) and the climate science consensus in the '70s and I think before
was that we were headed for very bad global cooling, a new Ice Age that would
put a mile of ice on top of much of the continental US. Read rather a lot of
topical science fiction based on this "science".

Of course it was all man's fault (ignore that we're due for another Ice Age
anytime now, see e.g. _Fallen Angels_ : <http://www.baen.com/library/> -> The
Authors -> Larry Niven) due to sulfur dioxide increasing the reflectivity of
clouds.

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jonhendry
Eh, primitive data was primitive.

Note that the key part of the prediction was the rate at which CO2 would
increase. As it turned out, atmospheric CO2 hasn't yet reached the point that
was predicted. So it should be no surprise that the sea level effects, etc,
have not occurred either.

The key principles are correct: CO2 does trap heat. Atmospheric CO2 has been
increasing over the century. Do the math. Clearly, unless you're counting on a
deus ex machina to save your bacon, or expecting to be raptured out
beforehand, the conservative stance is to reduce CO2 emissions in order to
maintain CO2 levels within the range that is best compatible with the current
distribution of humans on earth.

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jonhendry
Also, only a moron would use predictions from 40 years ago, based on 40 year
old science and data, as an argument against current client science. We have
vastly more data, better tools, better methods, better technology, and science
has progressed since the Nixon administration.

If you're going to do that, you might as well claim that the movie "Toy Story"
would be impossible to create, because the Apollo program computers were
unable to do 3D rendering.

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noarchy
It reminds me a bit of creationists, in 2010, arguing over Origin of the
Species as if it were the latest in biology.

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BrandonM
The Crichton lecture linked on that page is very good:
<http://www.s8int.com/crichton.html>

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narrator
I thought the 70s were all about global cooling?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling>

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whopa
There was a lot of press hype about it, but global cooling wasn't widely
accepted scientifically. The first paragraph of that Wikipedia article even
says this.

One thing hasn't changed: the mainstream media's handling of science and
technology was just as bad 40 years as it is now.

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hga
" _The first paragraph of that Wikipedia article even says this_ "

BZZZT. One thing you won't find on Wikipedia is honest coverage of climate
science. "I was there" (back in the '70s) and it was taken seriously by many
opinion makers and the like.

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philwelch
I hasten to point out that "opinion makers" and "scientists" are widely
disjunct sets of individuals. (There's also a big difference between "taken
seriously as a risk" and "taken seriously as the most probable outcome", and
it's very easy to trip the first threshold without tripping the second. Even a
10% chance of, for instance, terrorists using nuclear weapons has to be taken
extremely seriously even though it's highly improbable.)

