Way back in 1974,
William Kellog and
Stephen Schneider wrote these closing words to an article they had
published in Science:
While it is essential to work out international mechanisms to guarantee that any new knowledge of our climate system will have only constructive uses, the price in human suffering of continued ignorance of the causes of climate change may already have become unacceptably high.
In that
paper there was a photo of a glacier in France, which the authors compared with an engraving of the same glacier from about 100 years earlier, which was on the front cover of that December 1974 issue of Science. Below are the two images. You can guess which one is the earlier one. I added an arrow to the 1970s photo showing how far the glacier retreated:
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| Top: Engraving of the Argentierre Glacier (French Alps) made about 1850-1860 showing its front still close to the plain and the village. See page 1163. [From Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, Copyright © and published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971. Translated by Barbara Bary] Bottom: Photograph of the town of Argentierre in the French Alps, taken in the mid-1960's. Source: Science 27 December 1974 |
