date: Mon Apr 18 08:40:45 2005
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: Villach, 1985
to: pearcefred <PEARCEFRED@compuserve.com>

    Fred,
       Been away. I do remember the Villach meeting. There was the US Dept of
    Energy State of the Art reports in 1982 that Bill Clark edited, so Villach
    wasn't the first.
       Also IPCC may not have happened if WMO had taken the issue
    seriously in the mid-1980s.
       I was much younger then, so hope that Bert Bolin knows more as
    to what the driving force behind IPCC was.
    Cheers
    Phil
   At 17:10 12/04/2005, you wrote:

     Apologies for writing to you as a group.  I am interested in proposing to
     the New Scientist editors the idea of a feature in our Histories slot about
      the Villach 1985 conference on climate change.  I was not writing about
     climate change for New Scientist at that time, though I was commissioning
     John Gribbin on the topic.  But my memory is that Villach for the first
     time laid out the science of climate change in a coherent way for an
     international audience.  Without it perhaps there would not have been the
     1989 Toronto meeting, the IPCC or the UNFCCC.  And certainly looking at the
     SCOPE book of the conference again, it seems that remarkably little has
     changed in the central IPCC analysis to this day.
     I wonder if each of you would agree with this interpretation.  Would it
     perhaps be interesting to write about "the week they invented climate
     change".  And would you be willing eventually to offer your memories of
     that meeting?
     The subtext here is to address the quite common public perception today
     that nobody was talking about the greenhouse effect until the recent run of
     very warm years and that in some sense, the science was invented to explain
     the phenomenon.
     Thanks for your time.
     Regards
     Fred Pearce
     New Scientist

   Prof. Phil Jones
   Climatic Research Unit        Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
   School of Environmental Sciences    Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
   University of East Anglia
   Norwich                          Email    p.jones@uea.ac.uk
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   UK
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