Hello and welcome to On the Agenda.
My guest today is Angela Eiss, science
historian and author. Those of you who have been living under a rock for the
past few months might not have noticed that this year is the 100th anniversary
of the Earth Summit. Dr Eiss’s new book, What have we done? charts global
climate changes over the past century. Angela, back in 2001 scientists were
hopeful that with a concerted effort we could crack this problem, what went
Well, what those researchers didn’t quite appreciate is that once warming
took hold it would spiral out of control. But they did know that things were
bad, even back then. Reports in 2001 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the forerunner of CCOOL, said unequivocally that human-induced
climate change was happening and that it was likely to get a whole lot worse.
The reports claimed that the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels
was already warming up the world, and that if nothing was done it would have all
sorts of disastrous consequences.
But there was one hopeful sign. At that stage, the climate wasn’t heating up
nearly as much as anyone thought it should. There had been a slight increase in
temperature on the ground. But satellite measurements showed that higher up in
the so-called “free troposphere”, things didn’t seem to be getting much warmer.
Incidentally, this led to a whole movement of mainstream sceptics who for quite
a while tried to insist that no climate change was happening at all.
Anyhow, the status of the free troposphere became a very big deal,…