Constant Climate

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, climate didn't change. Our text books said it was so. Climate in historical times was ..... well, thought by academic thinkers to be constant. Things have changed!

H. H. Lamb puts the paradigm shift at 1960. For 60 years academic atmospheric scientists thought that climate was constant. The pantheon of the climate-is-constant paradigm-busters are Lamb (UK), Bryson (USA), Namias (USA), Flohn (Germany), Hare (Canada), and Budyko (USSR). Each was a "bad boy" and an outcast of sorts at some point in their careers and each became a hero later on.

The climate-is-constant paradigm dates from the late 1890s. The temperature averages for the twenty years 1875-1895 were much like those 100 years earlier. It didn't matter that some of the coldest winters of record happened in between. It was the view that the then current climate was part of a longer stable period of climate that began about 5000 years ago. Kendrew 's text "The climate of the continents" (Oxford Press 1922, 1927, 1937, 1953, and 1961) has no mention of and no section on climate change. He notes, however, that the thirty year averages for different 30 year periods may not be exactly the same. The great contrarian of this period was C.E.P. Brooks. In his book, Climate through the Ages (1927), Constable and Co., London, he focused on glacial Vs interglacial climate changes but detailed the climate "fluctuations" in historical time as indicated by proxy records of cultural artifacts.

I broke into the business in the early 1960s at the University of Wisconsin. I had read the books. d(climate)/dt = 0! I was disabused of the notion by Reid Bryson. When I came to the University of Virginia I was a convert. When I began work on ocean wave statistics, I set out to chart the history of wave climates. The US Army Corps of Engineers had a view on the subject. One year of wave statistics were enough for their coastal engineering designs. One of my students, Don Resio, ended up working for the Corps building a long history of wave climates for all US coastal location. We disabused them of the notion that coastal wave climates were constant.

In the 1970s we had a cold war and were looking at a cold climate on the way. By the end of the decade Steve Schneider had written his the ice-age-is-coming book "The Genesis Strategy" where he took the bold step of suggesting that government intervention was needed to get ready for the glaciers. These were the days when the CIA put cold hard cash on the line to study climate, climate change and the threat to global security. Two CIA reports ended up as appendixes to a little paperback titled: "The Weather Conspiracy" written by The Impact Team. Like the current rage in Washington this little crunch of pulp was written by Anonymous! The citation is below for the conspiracy buffs among CED readers.

Everyone now knows that we now live with the climate-is-not-constant paradigm and that the non-constancy is globe threatening. University libraries shelves are now thick with the climate, climate dynamics, and climate change journals needed to take the modern rush of papers.

Anonymous (1974). CIA Report: A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems. pp. 161-196 in The Weather Conspiracy: The coming of the New Ice Age Ballentine Books (1977).

Anonymous (1974). CIA Report: Potential Implications of Trends in World Population, Food Production, and Climate. pp. 197-224 in The Weather Conspiracy: The coming of the New Ice Age. Ballentine Books (1977).

Appendix I contained a deniability statement: This document is a working paper prepared by the Office of Research and Development of the Central Intelligence Agency for its internal planning purposes. Therefore, the views and conclusions contained herein are those of the author and should not be interpreted as necessarily the official position, either expressed or implied, of the Central Intelligence Agency.