Ecology and Environment: Current Perspectives

The decade of the 1970s was marked by a growing climate consciousness, both popular and scientific. The new interest was sparked by a series of extreme climate events and related disruptions, and by scientific speculation as to increased climate variability and possible climate change. Two sets of events during this period attracted both scientific and public interest. The first, in 1972, was the apparent simultaneous occurrence of unfavorable weather in many parts of the globe and its speculative relationship to a wide variety of socioeconomic events, including the quadrupling of various commodity prices around the world, food shortage in the Sahel of West Africa and in South Asia, a drastic fall in the anchovy fishery of the Pacific, and even changes in Government in Ethiopia and Niger. The second was an emerging scientific consensus that human induced alterations in the chemical constituents of the atmosphere could lead to large regional, and even global, changes of the atmosphere in the form of more acidic rain, greater ultraviolet radiation and altered temperatures.