How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists

Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the existential threat of climate change, and how the scientists who study and write about it are similar to the early atomic scientists who created, and then worried about, the threat that nuclear weapons posed to humanity: 'Just as the Manhattan Project participants could foresee the coming arms race, climate scientists today understand the consequences of deploying the technologies that defined the industrial age. They also know that action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will mitigate the worst consequences of climate change, just as the Manhattan Project scientists knew that early action to forestall a deadly arms race could prevent nuclear catastrophe.'"

Comments

Re:Honesty?

[FriendlyPrimate]

The term "Climate Change" has been around since at least the 1950's (see http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=326).

"Climate Change" is more common now thanks to conservative think tanks who made a concerted effort to use that term in the early 2000s because it was considered "less scary" than global warming. Scientists went along with it because "Climate Change" is technically more accurate anyway and they are not particularly good at playing politics.

You've got to envy the Republicans in their ability to twist language to suit their needs.

Selective Memory

[MellowBob]

The arms race happened. It wasn't deadly. There was no nuclear catastrophe.

Carbon's increasing. We're still here. The polar ice caps are still here.

Good comparison.

Alarmists don't change

[Hentes]

The biggest similarity between the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and climate alarmists is that they both have predicted the end of the world like a dozen times by now.

that's totally wrong

[stenvar]

The record shows that increased CO2 levels accompany periods of instability (e.g. rapid growth and reduction in glacier size) even if the trend tends toward warming.

We still have some of the lowest CO2 concentrations in earth's history right now, and our climate has been changing rapidly (in fact, oscillating wildly) for the past 7 million years or so. To stop these oscillations, CO2 concentrations would have to go up substantially.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology

Re: Maybe both? They warned if a coming ice age

[Black Parrot]

Not so. Read the Newsweek article, Time, etc. the contemporaneous press shows the coming ice age was quite the thing on the 70s.

The media isn't a good guide to what scientists actually think.

Meanwhile, back in reality, cooling never was the dominant opinion in scientific publications.

Also note that until we figured global warming out, global cooling was a reasonable prediction, since we appear to be in an interglacial that can be expected to go back toward cold at some point.

In fact, the last I read on the topic (several years ago) said we're experiencing forcing toward warmth due to greenhouse gasses and forcing toward coolth due to the interglacial cycle, and it happens that the forcing toward warmth is stronger, so we're warming up rather than cooling down.