Schneider,S.H. and Londer,R. (1984) The Co-evolution of Climate and Life. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. 563pp.

This essay initiates my new series of posts.  Each month, I highlight and review one ‘climate’ book, selected from one of the 44 years of my professional career in climate research starting this month with 1984, the year when I first entered academic employment.  The series will end in September 2027, the month in which I shall retire.  See here for more information about the rational for this series, and the criteria I have used in selecting my highlighted books.

This 1984 essay can be downloaded as a pdf.

By the early 1980s, climatic variability – of both natural and anthropogenic origin – was firmly established as a growing concern of public policy in western societies.  This awareness had been catalysed by the climate shocks of the 1970s – for example, the 1972/73 El Niño, extended drought in the Sahel, and the cold Northern Hemisphere winters of 1976/77 and 1977/78 – events which had revealed the vulnerability to climatic variability of global food production, energy supply and transportation.  The scientific literature on climatic change was still modest, although slowly growing, and academic workshops and conferences were abounding.  And in February 1979, the World Meteorological Organisation convened the First World Climate Conference in Geneva, which also gave new international focus to the emerging science of the enhanced greenhouse effect. 

Beyond scientific journal articles, the book-length literature on climatic change consisted mostly of edited conference proceedings or specialised texts on, for example, paleoclimates and their reconstruction, ice and climate, regional climates, historical climatology.  There were also one or two science journalists, notably John Gribbin in the UK, writing the occasional popular science books about climatic change and the future.  But in 1984, the year I took up my first academic position — a lectureship in physical geography at the University of Salford in the UK — one book stood out from the couple of dozen published that year (and there were no more than that) concerned with climate and its changes.  This was ‘The Co-Evolution of Climate and Life’ (henceforth CCL), co-written by Steve Schneider, an American climate scientist, and Randi Londer, a young science journalist based in New York. 

Schneider was 39 years old when CCL was published in the US election year of 1984 (when President Ronald Reagan was re-elected) and he was already prominent as an emerging scientific leader.  As the deputy director of advanced study at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, Schneider had made significant contributions to the science and public communication of climatic change and was widely known, certainly in the United States, as a somewhat outspoken public climatologist.  That year, 1984, he was listed as one of the “100 outstanding scientists in America”.

A few years earlier, Schneider’s first book, ‘The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival’ (1976, written with his wife Lynne Mesirow; henceforth ‘Genesis’), had catalysed academic and public debates about the importance of climatic variability for public policy.  During 1977, Schneider had appeared four times on Johnny Carson’s popular nightly TV programme The Tonight Show and he had provoked heated discussion about the proper role for scientists in public life.  For example, the senior American climatologist Helmut Landsberg had been scathing about Schneider’s popularisation of climate science and accused him of offering “misleading guidance” for policy and decision-makers[1].

Schneider and Londer wrote CCL between 1980 and 1983, coincident with the drafting of the first major report of the US National Academy of Sciences [NAS] on climate change.  Commissioned in the dying days of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, and chaired by physicist William Nierenberg, this 500 page report titled ‘Changing Climate’ was published in October 1983.  It concluded that although rising carbon dioxide was a cause for concern, a program of monitoring and analysis was needed prior to enacting a program of action.  Also in 1983, the year before CCL was published, the prospect of what was initially called “nuclear winter” emerged as a salient subject of climatological research and modelling, especially in the USA, perhaps even more salient at the time than carbon dioxide and climate[2].  Schneider was very much involved in this highly charged issue throughout 1983 and 1984 and he devotes over 15 pages of CCL (pp.348-362) to discussing the controversy.

‘The Co-evolution of Climate and Life’ was a unique book.  As Schneider and Londer outlined at the beginning of the preface:

“The Co-evolution of Climate and Life explores the earth’s climate history and some possible scenarios for its future; the mechanisms of climate change and the political and ethical implications of the discoveries of climatologists.” [CCL, p.vii] 

No-one had previously attempted such a comprehensive account of the interactions between climate and society, covering such a broad sweep of time (back to the pre-Cambrian), disciplinary breadth and policy ambition.  This breadth fully matched Schneider’s own approach to the study of climate, and the way in which the emerging field of inter-disciplinary climate studies was taking shape.  Indeed, by launching and subsequently editing a new multi-disciplinary academic journal — Climatic Change (Springer) in 1977 — Schneider had already been shaping this field.  In the preface to CCL, Schneider and Londer lay out the reach of disciplines engaged with in the book: agricultural sciences, archaeology, astrophysics, botany, chemistry, computer science, dendrochronology, ecology, economics, energy systems engineering, ethics, evolutionary biology, geology, geophysics, glaciology, history, hydrology, meteorology, oceanography, palaeontology, physics, political science, sociology, and strategic planning.  “In essence”, concluded Schneider and Londer, “to explore the co-evolution of climate and life requires that we look simultaneously at many facets of nature – including people” [CCL, p.ix].

Reading CCL 40 years on, the challenges highlighted by the authors are both familiar and unfamiliar to us.  Familiar, in the sense that we have become highly attuned, maybe over-attuned, to the risks and challenges for human and planetary well-being of a changing (i.e., warming) climate.  Yet unfamiliar, perhaps, in the sense that CCL places the CO₂ warming of global climate into a much wider context.  For Schneider and Londer, the effect of CO₂ on climate was just one example of the more general argument that human societies are not well adapted – not ‘climate-resilient’ in the language they use — to all manner of climate hazards and risks, whether these result from natural climatic variability, weather extremes, air pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion or nuclear winter.  In CCL, climate risks were always placed in the context of other big challenges such as economic development, energy security or population growth.  Thus, in relation to population the authors argue:

“If a global survival compromise can help to bring up the quality of life and bring down birth rates in LDCs [Less Developed Countries] for a relatively small increase in CO₂, acid rain and other fossil fuel effluents, then the benefits of a lower, stable population size as soon as possible are, we believe, greater than the risks from a few tens of percent more pollution during the transition.” [CCL, p.467]

Schneider had advanced this “anticipatory adaptive [climate] strategy” in ‘Genesis’, eight years earlier.  ‘Genesis’ had a narrower focus than CCL, but writing later at the end of 1980s[3], and in response to criticism about his views in the 1970s about whether the world was warming or cooling, Schneider states that he “argued forcibly” in ‘Genesis’ that societies “needed to be prepared to deal with climatic variability in both directions”.  This same message is present in CCL, as observed by one of the book’s reviewers, the science journalist Albert Huebner.  Huebner wrote that Schneider’s “anticipatory adaptive strategy” contributes to “the solution of already pressing problems, and [these measures] ‘build resilience’ into life-support systems in a way that minimizes vulnerability to future climate changes, whatever forms they take”[4] [emphasis added].

It was this larger context for understanding climate-society relationships that I wanted to convey in 1985 when I developed for the first time a final year undergraduate geography course titled ‘Contemporary Climatic Change’.  One of the aims of my course was to introduce students to “the impacts of an unstable climate on human society and the natural environment”.  And to do this required me to cover climatic issues such as acid precipitation, ozone depletion, nuclear winter, the enhanced greenhouse effect, climate and desertification, the impact of volcanic eruptions on climate, and El Niño.  My lecture schedule clearly reflected the same sentiments as developed in CCL, even though I don’t now remember reading CCL at the time.  

CCL did not get the same wide publicity that ‘Genesis’ had acquired in the middle of a very cold North American winter in 1976/77, following that book’s publication the previous summer.  And in contrast to ‘Genesis’, Schneider himself doesn’t refer to CCL in his next major book ‘Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?’ (Sierra Club, 1989), nor in his much later autobiography, ‘Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate’ (National Geographic, 2009).  Perhaps CCL doesn’t have the startling directness of Schneider’s 1976 ‘Genesis’, nor the urgency of his 1989 ‘Global Warming’.  And yet for its scope and sweep, in its skilful weaving together of climate science, policy and ethics, CCL was a book without parallel.  Perhaps the only other writer at the time who had approached the scale of Schneider’s ambition was the British climate historian, Hubert H Lamb, but Lamb’s work, for example his ‘Climate, History and the Modern World’ (Methuen, 1982/1996), was less systematic than CCL and not as clearly written.

CCL was reviewed favourably at the time, not least for its broad scope and its clarity of writing.  Reviewing for Nature in August 1984, Tom Wigley wrote of its “eminently readable prose”, a view shared by an anonymous reviewer in The Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB), “…this is a thoroughly professional, sparkling piece of scientific writing that will bring pleasure as well as enlightenment”[5].  Another reviewer was James Lovelock, who had a few years earlier introduced his own evolutionary perspective on climate and life in his book[6] about the idea of Gaia, co-developed with Lynn Margulis.  Although somewhat dismissive of Schneider and Londer’s understanding of ‘co-evolution’ – “as they use it, [it] is little more than a hand-waving attempt to persuade us that the relationship between life and the Earth is purely platonic” — Lovelock was impressed with CCL as a whole.  Writing in The New York Times Book Review in August 1984, he judged CCL to be “…one of the most readable science books I have seen … lively, inspiring and most important”.  This was a view shared by the QRB reviewer, “…one finds unequivocally the best discourse I have seen on the subject of the evolution of climate and life – a broad synthesis of an important multi-disciplinary field”.  Lovelock’s review also observed, “…there is not much comfort here.  One clear message of the book [CCL] is the suddenness of climatic change; the onset of a glaciation could come within a few years”.  Well, that never happened! 

There is one final aspect of CCL worth highlighting.  Schneider’s first book ‘The Gensis Strategy’ had been published by Plenum Press, a New York-based publisher of scientific and technical material.  But now, eight years later, for CCL Schneider had partnered with America’s oldest, largest and perhaps most influential environmental organisation, the Sierra Club.  Founded in 1892, and with a membership of over 1 million, the Club engages in lobbying politicians to promote environmental policies in the USA and internationally.  As historian Josh Howe has pointed out[7], in the 1970s and 1980s the Sierra Club had not really engaged with climate change as a campaigning issue in its own right.  The Club’s concerns were either with resource consumption and population growth on a global scale or else with local-scale environmental campaigns on the ground.  It didn’t quite know how to position climate change.

Schneider and Londer’s framing of climate change, and its contextualisation within the context of economic growth and population pressures, would therefore have been well-received by the Sierra Club in the early 1980s.  The argument of CCL was not for a precipitous policy programme of carbon dioxide emissions reductions.  In this, Schneider was in tune with the NAS’s 1983 “Nierenberg Report” on the changing climate.  What CCL was arguing for, however, were measures to slow population growth, provide short-term emergency aid to the developing world complemented by longer-term technological assistance and capital investment, and a wide-range of resilience-building measures.  For the authors of CCL, such a policy programme was “…vastly more urgent for human well-being .. than whether or not to impose automobile import tariffs, build B-1 bombers, reform government overregulation [or] expand oil depletion allowances” [p.467].

[1] Landsberg,H. (1976) Review: ‘The Genesis Strategy – Climate and Global Survival’. EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. 57(9): 634-635 (September).

[2] Howe,J.P. (2014) Behind The Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 296pp. 

[3] Schneider editorial in the Detroit News, 5 December 1989.

[4] Albert L Huebner in Worldview. 28(5): 26-27, May 1985.

[5] The Quarterly Review of Biology. 60(1): 63-64. March 1985.

[6] Lovelock,J.E. (1979) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[7] Howe (2014) op. cit., pp.105-107.

© Mike Hulme, February 2024

Other significant books published in 1984

Sagan,C., Ehrlich,P., Kennedy,D. and Roberts,W. (1984) The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War.  New York, NY: W W Norton.

The biggest public climate debate of 1984 concerned the newly proposed scenario of ‘nuclear winter’.  Paul Crutzen had initially set this hare running in 1982, but it was a paper published in the journal Science in December 1983, led by Richard Turco, that galvanised the scientific and public debate.  The book, ‘The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War’, lead-authored by the prominent American populariser of science, Carl Sagan, summarised the nuclear winter hypothesis based on the proceedings of a major conference held in Washington the previous autumn.  Also included in the book is the text of an interesting dialogue between Soviet and American scientists on the idea and significance of nuclear winter.