date: Mon Apr 18 08:40:45 2005 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: Villach, 1985 to: pearcefred 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 NR4 7TJ UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------