This post is a follow-up to a post from a few years ago. At a second-hand store, I'd found a Reader's Digest Atlas, published 1987, that had some curious statements about climate change. The paragraph that I thought anachronistic is below. It read as though it were from the 1970s.
There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2°C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves.
I returned to the second-hand store months later and bought a copy of the atlas. At least, I thought it was the same book. I recently re-read the paragraph and had one of those "everything you know is wrong" moments. It read nothing like I remembered. I found the original photo I took and the paragraph I thought was dodgy appeared to be the only change across the two-page spread when compared to the 1992 printing.
Original photo, take 2022, from the book probably printed 1987
The 1992 printing, with amendments
We inhabit a thin, damp tissue of the atmosphere, where hospitable warmth and moisture are maintained in a critical balance. What we think of as the planet's "normal" weather patterns are typical only of the period in which we live.
Clues to the climate of the distant future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2C) could initiate a new ice age.
A much more immediate threat is of global warming, with man's ever-increasing use of fossil fuels and destruction of forests, which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. We are also producing more methane and other gases. These gases block the escape of the Sun's reflected infra-red radiation back into space. Without any of this "greenhouse effect" our world would be so cold as to be uninhabitable, but man is now tilting the balance too far in the opposite direction. An increase in global temperatures would raise sea levels and might eventually change worldwide patterns of agriculture and population.
Many other forces interact to create changes in the Earth's climate. These include tilts in the planet's axis and changes in its orbital path, sunspots that swell the stream of radiation emitted by the Sun, and spasms of volcanic activity that hurl veils of dust into the atmosphere and may slow down warming.
The amendments from the 1992 printing are superb. They predate the climate denialist movement, starting from the 1990s, that continue today. I wouldn't be surprised to read an atlas from 2025 that reads like the 1987 printing.
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