1978: Is mankind warming the Earth?
By William W. Kellogg, December 7, 2020
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the February 1978 issue of the Bulletin. It is republished here as part of our special issue commemorating the 75th year of the Bulletin.
It is a human tendency to cling to the belief that the natural environment or climate to which we have become accustomed will remain more or less the same from year to year and from decade to decade. We are surprised and alarmed when an unusually severe winter or an unusually prolonged drought occurs, because our “tribal†memories tend to be too short to recall past years when things were equally unusual. Furthermore, the dim history of periods at the dawn of civilization, when it was considerably warmer or colder for thousands of years on end, have not survived at all as a tribal memory. That longer record is still being laboriously reconstructed.
The facts are, of course, that climate everywhere does fluctuate quite noticeably from year to year and that there are gradual changes in climate that make one decade or one century different from the one before. These yearly fluctuations and longer-term changes have been the result of natural processes or external influences at work on the complex system that determines the Earth’s climate. It is a system that seems to strive for an uneasy balance among atmosphere, oceans, land and polar ice masses—all prodded by possible solar and cosmic variations of which climatologists are only dimly aware. It now appears though that we ourselves are becoming another significant factor in the climatic balance.
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