Month: April 2022

Categories
Ignored Warnings Science United States of America

April 30, 1985 – New York Times reports C02 not the only greenhouse problem

On this day, the 30th of April 1985, The New York Times reported that “Rare Gases May Speed The Warming of the Earth: Rare Gases May Be Speeding Earth’s Warming”

The reporter, James Gleick, opened his story thus

“Tiny quantities of more than 30 rare gases threaten to warm the earth’s atmosphere even more rapidly over the next 50 years than carbon dioxide will, according to a study by a team of atmospheric scientists.

“Their findings reinforce a growing conviction among scientists that the trace gases, many of them industrial byproducts, are playing a leading role in the “greenhouse effect,” the warming of the earth as less and less heat is able to escape the atmosphere.”

This research was then presented at Villach in October of 1985, and helped convince people that climate change wasn’t anthropogenic global warming was not a threat for the relatively distant future, but something that would need a policy response right now. So even before Villach1985 there was a sense that shit was getting real.

Why this matters. 

We need to understand that our problem is not that senior politicians don’t understand the problem. Our problem is that we are unable to keep the problem at the front of their attention and to turn it into a set of policy proposals that are then implemented. 

What happened next?

Well Villach meeting happened WMO. UNDP ICSU. They tried to get the ball rolling that were successful. You got an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And since 1990, we have burned more carbon dioxide, released into the atmosphere, then all of human history to that date, which tells you how successful these international agreements have been.

Categories
Science United States of America

April 29, 1970 – Washington DC symposium talks about carbon dioxide

On this day, the 29th of April in 1970 a symposium was held in Washington DC on “Aids and Threats from Technology.” One of the topics of conversation was, well “Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change”

PDF here.

The newly minted Council on Environmental Quality would use this (and other research) to include a chapter about climate change in its first report, published a few months later.

Why this matters?

We knew enough to be worried, and to make a SERIOUS effort at research, throwing money and scientists at the problem.

What happened next

The scientists did the best they could. By the end of the decade, we definitely knew enough. Then Reagan and his cronies came and cost us the thick end of a decade. And then, well, the rest is history.

Categories
Denial Science

April 28, 1975- Newsweek’s “The Cooling World” story.

On this day, April 28 1975, Newsweek ran a story ”The Cooling World” (pdf here) based on the idea that an ice age was imminent because of the amount of particulates thrown up into the atmosphere.

It wasn’t alone in this – The previous year (June 24, 1974) Time had an article titled “Another Ice Age?” which said “the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades” but noted that “Some scientists… think that the cooling trend may be only temporary.”

These articles have been used ever since, as the part of the myth that, in the 1970s, “all scientists were convinced that an ice age was coming. And therefore, carbon dioxide build-up is just the latest iteration of a scare that we need to pay no attention to.” This idea has faded somewhat in mainstream culture, but it still persists in the nuttier corners of the internet.

What we learn is that journalism around climate is very difficult because the issues are very complex, and that people choose not to accept the journalists and scientists can get it wrong and change their mind because they are looking to have a gotcha moment.

Why this matters. 

Denialists have kept using it.

What happened next?

Denialists kept using it

See also:

The original author, Peter Gwynne, writing in 2014

Scientific American in 2015 – For Its 40th Birthday, Let’s Retire Newsweek’s Global Cooling Story

Wikipedia on Global Cooling.

Categories
International processes

April 27, 1987 – “Our Common Future” released.

On this day, April 27 1987, Our Common Future also known as the Brundtland Report, was released, giving the world the term “sustainable development”, (which actually had been used in the Global 2000 report released in April 1980. But that was attached to the Carter Administration, by then regarded as a bunch of hopeless losers). 

The United Nations had created the World Commission on Environmental Development in 1983. And the commission was chaired by Norwegian politician, Gro Harlem Brundtland. The point of the Brundtland Report was to imagine that environmental development and ecological protection were not mortal enemies that you could have when win-win situations.

There was some stuff in there on climate (but not as much as there would have been if it had been published two years later! – they took information that had been produced for the 1985 Villach WMO/UNEP/ICSU conference and shoved it in a chapter.  

Our Common Future - Wikipedia

Why this matters. 

If you’re an apocalypse geek like me, it matters.

What happened next?

The Earth Summit, the WCED proposed for 1992 kind of sort of got overtaken by the climate issue. But biodiversity was also still in the mix, as was “Agenda 21”, which called for all sorts of participatory bottom-up democracy processes which ran into the sand. But the idea is too useful, politically, to be abandoned, so it is constantly rebranded as the Millennium Development Goals, and then the Sustainable Development Goals etc etc

Meanwhile, the UK called its first climate white paper “Our Common Inheritance.” Droll.

And Brundtland decided to throw in her lot with the technocrats rather than the deep ecologists. There’s a good article about that here.  Despite this, she remains a hate figure for the far-right (one world government etc etc).

Categories
Denial International processes Kyoto Protocol United States of America

April 26, 1998 – New York Times front page expose on anti-climate action by industry

On April 26 1998 the New York Times ran a front page story. It began thus.

Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science.

Among their ideas is a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry‘s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat near Earth.

An informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations that oppose the treaty have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute to put the plan together.

Cushman, J. 1998. Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty. New York Times, 26 April, p.1

The context is that the US had signed the Kyoto Protocol (this in itself was a meaningless gesture – it only had force if ratified, and the Clinton administration had no intention of trying to get it through the Senate, especially given the previous year’s Byrd-Hagel resolution, which had insisted the US should not sign any treaty that didn’t put emissions constraints on developing countries (looking at you, China). This was of course exactly the opposite of what they’d signed off on in 1992 (Rio) and 1995 (Berlin Mandate) but hey, consistency and hobgoblins, amirite?

On one level, this was hardly “news” – anyone who had been paying any attention at all from 1989 onwards; the George Marshall Foundation got going on climate, and then the Global Climate Coalition and the “Information Clearinghouse on the Environment” (1991) and the attacks on IPCC second assessment report by various well-connected loons, and THEN the attacks on Kyoto in the run up to the meeting in 1997.

See for example Cushman’s report on 7th December 1997, during the Kyoto meeting – “Intense Lobbying Against Global Warming Treaty: U.S. Negotiators Brief Industry Groups and Environmentalists Separately in Kyoto”

Why this matters

A part of the reason (not the most important part necessarily, and not the part we can do that much about) “we” have done so little on climate change is because of staggeringly successful campaigns of predatory delay.

See also – Ben Franta’s work on the American Petroleum Institute.

Categories
Australia International processes UNFCCC

April 25, 1996 – Greenpeace slams Australian government on #climate obstructionism

On this day, 25th of April 1996 Greenpeace International condemned Australia’s negotiating stance at the climate talks in Geneva.

“Gilchrist, G. 1996. Greenpeace Attacks Global Warming ‘spoiling Tactics’. Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April, p.2. Australia’s spoiling tactics in negotiations on tackling global warming undermined the nation’s “clean and green” international image, Greenpeace International’s top climate campaigner, Mr Bill Hare, said yesterday. He warned that Australia’s diplomatic position on climate change threatened its long-term trade interests.”

The context is that the second Conference of the Parties, following on from Berlin the previous year, was going to be an important to way station on the way to completing the so-called Berlin mandate, which called on rich nations to agree emissions cuts.

It was feared that the Australian Government’s obstruction tactics would move from softly-softly on display at the previous COP to full-on, shameless and unashamed heel dragging (In March of 1996 the Labor government had been replaced by John Howard’s “Liberal National” coalition.) 

And – getting ahead of ourselves (COP2 did not happen till July 1996) – so it came to pass…

“The discussions at the second COP to the UNFCCC in Geneva in 1996 saw Australia establish itself as a climate change laggard. Immediately before the conference the government questioned the science of climate change and opposed the idea of the IPCC’s new conclusions on climate change impacts providing the basis for negotiations.55 Significantly, they were joined in this concern only by OPEC states and the Russian Federation.56 Most importantly, however, the government’s position at the Geneva negotiations was to oppose the idea of legally binding targets on greenhouse emissions.57”

Macdonald, Matt. 2005a. Fair Weather Friend? Ethics and Australia’s Approach to Climate Change. Australian Journal of Politics and History 51 (2): 216–234.

Why this matters. 

We need to prepare criminal briefs for crimes against humanity and other species at The Hague

What happened next?

The Australian Government played a spoiler role as it still largely has, in the climate negotiations, they got a very sweet deal at Kyoto still refused to ratify. And as I may have mentioned, the carbon dioxide keeps accumulating. 

Categories
Ignored Warnings

April 25th, 1974 – Swedish prime minister briefed on carbon dioxide build-up

On this day, the 25th of April 1974, German climatologist Hermann Flohn is flown –  see what I did there? – to Stockholm (well, maybe he took the train who knows?) to brief the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on the build-up of carbon dioxide. in the atmosphere This was at the behest of Swedish scientist Bert Bolin, and part of the Swedish government’s increased awareness of environmental issues including climate change.

www2.meteo.uni-bonn.de/bibliothek/HFlohn/fotflo...
Hermann Flohn

 

Palme apparently listened carefully and intently – he was a serious character. One of the things you’d do on Alternative Earth is have him NOT getting assassinated in 1986, so he was able to be a key player in the 1988-1992 policy window…

How do I know this – as usual with this site, thanks to the hard work of climate historians, in this case Kristoffer Ekberg and Martin Hultman…

“Amid the oil crisis and with raised critique against nuclear power, the issue of climate change was presented to Swedish politicians. On 25 April 1974, meteorologist Bert Bolin and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had in Hermann Flohn from Bonn to Stockholm to talk before the government’s advisory board on research. Flohn was a climate scientist who had already in 1941 published a paper discussing anthropogenic climate change. The reporter  present at the time, Tom Selander,46 wrote that Prime Minister Palme listened  ‘thoughtfully’ during Flohn’s exposition.”

(Ekberg and Hultman 2021)

Why this matters. 

We need to know that in the 1970s people with in positions of power, senior politicians and policymakers, were well aware of the co2 buildup 

What happened next?

Flohn keep kept alerting people. His name pops up at all sorts of important events throughout the 70s…. Olaf Palme was assassinated in February 1986. And therefore he wasn’t there to push the issue along during the 88-92 big wave, so it goes. 

Categories
Australia

April 24, 1994 – a carbon tax for Australia?

On April 24 1994, the Australian environment minister John Faulkner starts to fly a kite, as they say in the politics business.. The kite have a small carbon tax to help Australia stabilise its emissions, and have some sort of diplomatic cover when the UNFCCC started its meetings.

This is the opening of a policy stream or the continuation of a politics stream depending on which bit of John Kingdon you care to follow

Less than a year later, the effort was defeated. Australia never gets an effective long-term price on carbon dioxide and therefore (but not only for this), the emissions basically keep climbing

{Not the the carbon tax would have on its own being a solution. 

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that policy proposals that are relatively innocuous and minor will be treated as an existential threat by specific industries who will then respond accordingly and effectively.

And here we are. With the atmospheric concentrations climbing, human emissions climbing, temperatures, climbing, death rates going to climb. we had a slender chance to fix this – or at least give our wisdom a chance to catch up with our technologies.. Now it’s too late. And everything is fucked. 

What happened next?

The tax proposal got shot down in February 1995.  The idea of a tax was replaced with an emissions trading scheme, and that got shot down on multiple occasions. Finally became law in 2012, then repealed in 2014 by Tony Abbott.

Categories
Denial United States of America

April 23, 2009 – denialists caught denying their own scientists…

On this day, the 23rd of April 2009 journalist Andy Revkin broke a story in The New York Times about the Global Climate Coalition.

The Global Climate Coalition – cuddly-sounding name aside – was an industry pressure group that had between 1989 and 2002 been a major player in stopping any meaningful international action on climate change.

Revkin’s story – you can read it here – was that the head honchos at the Global Climate Coalition got given the truth about climate change by their own scientists,, and they chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit their in needs for predatory delay and doubt

Why this matters. 

We need to know in the words of Nick Tomalin, the British journalist who died in 1973, that “they lie, they lie, they lie”. If the truth is going to get in the way of their profits, they will lie. And these lies will be repeated by time policy wonks to create a “common sense” that maintains the status quo. Nothing that Gramsci would be surprised that nothing that you or I should be surprised that

What happened next?

People forgot because that’s what people do. 

If you want to know more about the GCC, check out the recently published article in the journal “Environmental Politics” by Robert Brulle.

Categories
United Kingdom

April 22, 1975 – UK Civil Service scratches its head on #climate

Blah blah Earth Day 1970.

On this day 22nd of April 1975, a meeting of the World Trends Committee of the Cabinet Office had an (inconclusive) discussion about climate change. A very small number of people within the UK state (as distinct from the government) was beginning to pay attention to the build-up of carbon dioxide doing nothing particularly was happening in public.

“Warren, who was one of its two secretaries, suggested putting a position paper on climatological research to the World Trends committee.36 The Met Office provided a paper that covered climate change for discussion in 1975.37 The ‘conclusion of the paper was that it was all very difficult and that ‘‘fundamental understanding has not reached a stage which permits a reliable computation of future climate. Moreover, natural climate time-series can give no useful indication of future trends’’’.

38 NA CAB 134/3974.  Sawyer, ‘Problems of assessing the future climate’, WT(75)7, 4 April 1975. 

The paper was discussed at WT(75)2nd meeting, 22 April 1975.”

Source – see brilliant paper by Jon Agar here).


Why this matters. 

We have to remember that there was a significant but largely ignored history before Thatcher gave her speech at the Royal Society in September of 1988. And this has been excavated by Gabriel Henderson and Jon Agar, among others.

What happened next?

The Civil Service bureaucracy did produce a report,  that was finally released in 1980. And when the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK, John Ashworth, tried to brief Margaret Thatcher in 1980 she said apparently “incredulously” “you want me to worry about the weather?”