Peter,
on top of what Jonathan said, I'd check out David Wasdell and his work at
the Apollo-Meridian project. He's been doing work about positive feedbacks
leading to a form of multiple thresholds crossed =s meltdown for some
considerable time now. I'm sure his work far predates the Hansen 2005
speech.
Of course, as as historical corollary there is the Carl Sagan et al.
articles about nuclear war producing nuclear winter. This as reminder that
'activist' alert through scientific work precedes the immediate moment.
Indeed that would take us back through to Pugwash....
But I'm just a layman....they'll be others on this site who surely can offer
chapter and verse,
cheers,
mark
on 2/8/10 2:56 pm, North, Peter at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> hello
>
> I'm just finishing off a paper about climate change activism and am trying to
> locate early activist writing about the possibility of runaway climate change
> happening quickly through crossing tipping points, rather than a slow decadal
> or even historical process?
>
> I remember it hitting me hard - '0h my god, so you are saying the climate can
> flip over a decade or less to a catastrophic state?' rather than gradual
> warming over a century.
>
> But when did climate activists begin to point this out explicitly being a
> prompt to doing something about it?
>
> Can anyone help?
>
> Peter North
>
> Department of Geography
> School for Environmental Sciences
> University of Liverpool
> 0151 794 2849
>
> Building the Low Carbon Economy on Merseyside
>
> www.lowcarbonliverpool.com
>
> www.liv.ac.uk/geography/research/lowcarboneconomy/index.htm
>
> Local Money
>
> http://greenbooks.co.uk/store/local-money-p-320.html?osCsid=53cafffb104745d086
> 78d499c824626e
>
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