"A wait and see policy may mean waiting until it is too late." — 1979 National Academy of Sciences report, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment.
Source: Foreword of the 1979 National Academy of Sciences report, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment.
Notes: Dr. Richard Alley, Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, has a chapter in his book, Earth: The Operators' Manual, called "Abraham Lincoln or your brother-in-law?"
In that chapter, Alley asked, who would you trust to answer the question if climate change is real, caused by humans, and a serious threat: Abraham Lincoln, who created the National Academy of Sciences, or your skeptical brother-in-law?
On March 3, 1863, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a bill creating the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS was established to independently advice Lincoln and policy makers ever since on scientific and technological issues. By 1979, the Academy looked at all the evidence of climate change and firmly concluded:
"If carbon dioxide continues to increase (from the burning of fossil fuels), the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that changes will be negligible."
The report consensus was "increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with a different distribution of climate regimes." The conclusion reaffirmed previous studies. Even more, this view by the NAS never changed, despite reexaminations by many independent committees.
Since 1979, the past 34 years, the National Academy of Sciences is telling us that climate change is real, caused by humans, and we must act now to solve it before it is too late.
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