The Beaches are Moving

                                                                       The beaches are moving

In 1979 a famous popular science book entitled "The Beaches are Moving" was published.   This book was the first attempt to explain to the general public the science behind coastal erosion, and to educate the public about the dangers of building in coastal sites.  Curiously, there is not a word in this well-known science book about climate change or about global sea level rise.  Today it is generally accepted that sea level is rising,  but as the 1979 edition of this book shows, the scientific concepts of global warming and global sea level rise were mostly unknown just 36 years ago, even within the scientific community.

Just six years after "The Beaches are Moving" was published, an international scientific Conference on the "Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts" reviewed the available science and predicted  that greenhouse gases would cause significant warming in the future.  A few years later in 1988, Prof. James E. Hansen reported that global climate change had already started.  Later in 1988, scientists met at the "World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security" and released a report that said  the buildup of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases "represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe."  The year 1988 also saw the establishment of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with a mission to document global climate change and to predict the effects of future global warming.  

In the years from 1979 to 1988 a revolution began in the scientific community.  The concept of global climate change began to be accepted, first among scientists and then within the general public.  The idea that human-caused global climate change is underway is still not universally accepted, but then its only been 27 years since scientists themselves starting to publicize the concept.    By comparison, it took until 1765--- 150 years after Galileo started advocating the idea that the earth rotates around the sun in 1615 --for the ban on his writings instituted by the Holy Inquisition to be lifted.



POSTSCRIPT:  

My copy of "The Beaches are Moving" is 35 years old.  It looks good on my library shelf, but I rarely refer to it.  Almost nobody actually reads old science books.  Literature is timeless, and people will read and reread the novels of Dickens, Proust, Homer, Dumas, Chaucer, Ovid and other long dead authors forever.  The stories are still powerful, the writing is still great, and the books contain eternal truths.  Old science books are different because eventually they are superseded by newer, more modern, and more accurate books, and what were though to be eternal truths in the old science books are replaced with somewhat different eternal truths in newer science books.