On this day , August 28, 1971, a snarky opinion piece appeared in the New York Times, written by an oil lobbyist called Eugene Guccione (not the Penthouse guy!). It ran with the now-all-too-familiar sneers and (deliberate?) misunderstandings of what was being said.
A few days later, scientist Stephen Schneider wrote a good rebuttal, his first ever letter to a newspaper.
There’s a very good piece on this in Real Climate by Gavin Schmidt.
[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 325.43 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]
Why this matters.
The ignorance, complacency and motivated reasoning? Goes way back,
What happened next?
Schneider spent the rest of his life being very very sound on climate change. A mensch.