On this day, July 30 1989 Conservative Politician Sir Ian Lloyd was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying ‘we have, at the most, a quarter of a century to make the assessments and take action. The life of the planet may be at stake.’
Wikipedia has him saying “civilisation is clinging by our fingernails to the cliff”.
The man led an interesting life.
Also from wikipedia.
“He was a member of the Select committee on Technology for 10 years, and then chairman of the Select Committee on Energy for 10 years. He drove the establishment of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (Pitcom), and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST)”
for which academic (and other) researches owe him a debt of gratitude.
Lloyd was a prescient guy who, well, later started wittering on about pyramids of uncertainty, and Bjorn Lomborg. It happens. It’s sad when it does, but it happens. See obituary here.
Why this matters.
Did the rhetoric help us resist our own death grip? No, it didn’t. It never does.
What happened next?
We tightened the death grip on ourselves.