Ronald Know warned in his best-seller Enthusiasm (1950):

“where wealth abounds, it is easy to mistake shadow for substance; the fires of spirituality may burn low, and we go on unconscious, dazzled by the glare of tinsel”.

Climate change warrior, the distinguished astrophysicist James Hansen, went from being a NASA expert on planetary atmospherics to climate activist, even being arrested for demonstrating outside the White House in 2010.

For his fascinating life see my essay on him in my blog “Global Warming” in dpcrook.wordpress.com.

Engineers are constantly devising ingenious mechanical solutions to global warming. One is to seed the atmosphere with millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide which, they predict, will reflect the sun’s radiation back into space. This would cause global cooling. One unpleasant side-effect would be that it would alter the spectrum of light. So we would be living under a white sky instead of our normal blue sky.

[Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky]

Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book Under a White Sky paints a scary picture of our world if we don’t solve global warming. As a Guardian review puts it:

“Thanks to humans, the planet is heating dangerously fast, there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in millions of years, the extinction rate of other species is hundreds, maybe thousands, of times above natural levels, and just about every planetary warning gauge is heading further into the red”:

Guardian Weekly 12 March 2021, p. 40.

The Stanford Research Institute for the American Petroleum Institute concluded:

If the earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur, including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis…. Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climate change.

This was in 1968!

[“Smoke and Fumes” report 1968]

“We cannot feel any respect for a religion which does not demand more of us than we feel we want to give”

Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street (1930)

That great saint St John of the Cross said that “many persons say God has spoken to them, when they have only been talking to themselves”

The distinguished climate scientists Thomas Anderson, Ed Hawkins and Phil Jones addressed this issue raised by some climate sceptics who thought that the climate system was too complex for meaningful analysis by ESMs. In a deeply researched paper Anderson, Hawkins and Jones totally repudiated such a view.

They concluded that ESMs were essentially trustworthy and had made a compelling case that global climate would continue to undergo significant warming in response to ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This was even in the best scenario of reducing emissions.

Endeavour, July 2016 (online)

There us a widespread impression that the fact of global warming was only discovered recently. This is wrong.

The idea has been around for more than a century but it was only really put on the scientific map through the tremendous research of the British meteorologist and steam engineer Guy Callendar. He published a ground-breaking paper in 1938. A year later he reported a 7% increase in anthropogenic CO2 since 1900, the result of industrial emissions, the burning of fossil fuel:

“As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change. From the best laboratory observations it appears that the principal result of increasing CO2… would be a gradual increase in the mean temperature of the colder regions of the earth” (too little data was available for the southern hemisphere at that time).

Quarterly Journal Royal Meteorological Society (1939).

Scholars from ancient Greece to Fourier in the 18C, John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius in the C19,, and since 1900, had debated the nature and causes of climate change they had observed (unsystematically). But it took a “weather nut”, Guy Callendar(1899-1964), first to identify that global warming had taken place by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius in the first three decades of the C20; and scientifically to identify expanding CO2 in the atmosphere from industrialisation as the likeliest culprit.

He estimated there had been a 10% increase in the concentration of CO2 between 1900 and 1938, the year he wrote a truly pioneering paper on the subject.

Callendar, who was a distinguished English steam and combustion engineer, a specialist in high steam temperatures and pressures, applied this knowledge to atmospheric heating. Always obsessive about collecting data (on railway engines for example), he painstakingly compiled weather statistics from around Britain and then the rest of the world, over many years. He not only showed global warming but effects such as the melting of glaciers. His theory was met with consternation and scepticism, but would be revived and expanded in a few decades time. Climate change is now recognised for the global crisis it it

For more details see James Rodgers Fleming, The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar …The Scientist Who Established the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change (2007).