Contrarian Cli-Fi 0.03: Forecasts, Famine and Freezes

John Gribbin is a science writer and astrophysicist and despite his inclusion in this series, he is not to my knowledge a climate science denialist or a global warming contrarian. Indeed, he has written several books about the reality of global warming. However, science writing is just as much a victim of choosing the more interesting story as regular journalism.

Gribbin had form for alarmist elements in his 1970s science writing. His 1974 book The Jupiter Effect claimed that a planetary alignment set to occur in 1982 would lead to catastrophic effects on Earth including earthquakes. The book sold well, although years later Gribbin repudiated his involvement in it. And for those wanting to connect the dots on the virtual map of maverick scientists, Gribbin had been one of astronomer Fred Hoyle’s research students in the late 1960s.

These days climate contrarians make much of the supposed scientific consensus in the 1970s of a coming ice age. There was no such consensus but while contrarians exaggerate the scientific interest in the possibility, there was some genuine concern among a subset of climate scientists ( see for example  Rasool & Schneider (1971) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.173.3992.138 and for a more detailed discussion see https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm )

Gribbin’s 1976 Forecasts, Famines, and Freezes was an attempt to give a popular account of current developments in climate science. It covers a lot of the complexities of climate science as well as newer developments such as computer-based climate models. However, it makes two significant missteps. One is in chapter 9

“At one time, the carbon dioxide problem caused a lot of concern. If there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. more of the heat being radiated by the solid Earth and the oceans is absorbed in the atmosphere and then re-radiated. Since the re-radiated heat goes out in all directions from the middle of the atmosphere, some of it gets back to the Earth’s surface and warms it up, in a process known as the ‘greenhouse effect”. This effect is undoubtedly a real one — but how much warming is it likely to cause? According to the latest calculations, we have nothing to worry about from the greenhouse effect.”

https://archive.org/details/forecastsfamines0000grib/page/86/mode/2up?view=theater

Gribbin was echoing the opinion of some climate scientists that the impact of additional CO2 would be self-limiting but Gribbin also believed that fossil fuel reserves were rapidly running out. There was a natural limit on how much CO2 humanity could add before we ran out of oil. However, Gribbin does attempt to map out the multiple factors that led to uncertainty around the impact of CO2 emissions.

Gribbin is on surer footing when it comes to CFC’s in the same chapter:

“With that caution in mind, the effect of propellant gases on the ozone layer which protects us from the Sun does look to be a very worrying one at present, even if it is not strictly a climatological problem. These gases are used in just about all spray cans — they are the gases under pressure which push out the hairspray. deodorant, fly-killer, whipped cream or whatever the ‘useful’ contents of the can may be. These gases are being released into the atmosphere in ever-increasing numbers.”

Gribbin’s second misstep was broader. While the book covers a lot of climate science, the framing is very much in terms of the potential of a near-future ice age. Much is made on the right about supposed environmental “alarmism” but there are some genuine examples and 1970s media coverage of a potential ice age is one such example.

The relatively slow increase in air temperature over my lifetime has been barely perceptible in terms of personal experience. Abstracted as data sets, the rise becomes clearer, alarmingly so but the lived experience for many people around the globe has not been a directly perceived warming but in terms of unusual or unseasonal weather events from droughts to floods to unusually intense bush fire seasons. Aesthetically, there is something just a bit more alarming and exciting about the possibility of a sudden ice age. Deep snow, blistering cold and slowly advancing glaciers.

I suspect that is a particularly Northern European cultural perspective. Cruel winters or sudden snowstorms are a cultural touchstone in a way that heatwaves and prolonged droughts are not. Ironically, while this pop science interest in a new ice age was at its height in 1976, Britain faced an unusually hot summer.

“A period of unusually hot summer weather occurred in the British Isles during the summer of 1976. At the same time, there was a severe drought on the islands of Great Britain and Ireland.^[2][3] It was one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers (June/July/August) in the 20th century, although the summer of 1995 is now regarded as the driest. Only a few places registered more than half their average summer rainfall. In the CET record, it was the warmest summer in the series until being surpassed in the 21st century.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_British_Isles_heat_wave

Water shortages and uncomfortable weather were seen more as an annoyance than a warning even though the additional heat led to increased hospital admissions and deaths. Warm weather meant more trips to the beach and long days in the parks and countryside. If Britain had had a historically cold winter or excess snowfall (in England any snowfall is ‘excess’ and likely to cause substantial disruption) the framing of the weather event would have been more in terms of the Blitz-spirit than the “Whew, What a Scorcher!” tabloid headlines^[1].

Struggling through the snow or surviving in an Arctic-like environment is one of those ideas attractive to fiction. Prior to the 70s, it is a topic that had appealed to science fiction writers in examples such as Robert Silverberg’s The Time of the Great Freeze. Gribbin’s non-fiction account of how modern climate science might be suggesting that a new (and sudden) ice age was imminent appealed to the imagination in a way that the idea of global warming simply doesn’t.

We’ll get to Gribbin’s own attempt to examine the idea in fiction in the next chapter but by the time The Sixth Winter was published in 1979 climate scientists were very clearly warning governments that warming was an imminent danger, not spurious ice ages. The National Academy of Sciences, Climate Research Board published Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment to help inform US policy. It stated:

“The conclusions of this brief but intense investigation may be comforting to scientists but disturbing to policymakers. If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”

National Academy of Sciences, Climate Research Board. (1979) Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A
Scientific Assessment. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12181/chapter/3#5

Next time: The Sixth Winter

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Footnotes

• [1] “WHEW! What a scorcher!” I don’t know if that headline was actual used in 1976 and I can only find images of The Sun just using “WHEW” by itself as a headline (and not “PHEW”)