Intelligence Agency’s 1981 Assessment of Climate-Change Threat Was Remarkably Accurate

Dec 8, 2022 | William Leben
View Original

Australia’s national intelligence agency has released a report that ‘examines the implications of the increasing accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, with special reference to Australia as a producer and exporter of coal’.

Actually, the declassified study, Fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, was produced 41 years ago by the Office of National Assessments.

But the same multi-disciplinary research that the assessment authors noted was needed and had ‘hardly begun’ in 1981, today suggests a much more pessimistic picture of our global and regional future. Climate change has dire interacting and compounding impacts even at lower levels of warming.

If nothing else, we can’t say we weren’t told.