August 30, 1971 – Bob Carr (ex- NSW premier) ‘gets’ climate change
On this day 30 August 1971, Bob Carr (future Premier of New South Wales and Foreign Minister] watches television. No, seriously. That’s the post.
Oh, alright. Here are some slabs from his memoir “My Reading Life”
On Monday 30 August 1971 I watched biologist Professor Paul R. Ehrlich from Stanford University on the ABC’s Monday Conference. I was twenty-three. Ehrlich was interviewed by Robert Moore and questioned by a studio audience. It was my first encounter with environmentalism as opposed to a single environmental concern. Here was someone describing things I had long suspected were true but which had lain unformed in my consciousness…
(Carr, 2008:354)
Reading the thirty-three pages of transcript today, my attention spikes when an unnamed audience member asks:
“There was a paper in the New Scientist a few months ago by a physicist who estimated that we could only afford to increase the temperature of the earth’s surface by 3.5 degrees or we would probably flood most of the earth with the water which is now in ice, and we’ve already increased it by one degree, and if we keep producing energy and power from any source, no matter how much the resources we have, you can’t just do it, surely this is relevant?”
Ehrlich’s reply deserves to be weighed word by word, because here was the first emergence in mass media – and I did not see its significance – of the notion of global warming. Remember, this is 1971 and we were looking at this issue ‘through a glass darkly’. Let me quote Ehrlich’s reply – and emphasise the key phrases that pointed to catastrophe.
“The whole question of atmospheric dynamics and what’s happening to the climate is a very difficult one, and certainly it’s absolutely correct. If we continue on the long-range energy course we’re on, sooner or later we’ll melt the polar icecaps and we’ll all be swimming around at least in the coastal area. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple though because you see a great deal of material is being added to the atmosphere in the form of smog which tends to cool the planet, and unfortunately even beyond this we don’t understand enough about atmospheric dynamics though for instance the general warming trend in the planet may very well make Sydney colder, ad the disaster of all this is that when you change the climate you hurt agriculture. It doesn’t even matter [page break] if you change it for the better because agriculturalists like everybody else are conservative. You look around in New South Wales, you know, when you have one of these once in a million year droughts that you have every nine years […] So the whole question of atmospheric dynamics is under detailed study now by large groups of people – everybody’s scared – the recent study from MIT said we haven’t ruined the biosphere yet (it just came out about three weeks ago) but we’re right on the verge and we had better be very careful, but unfortunately we don’t have enough scientific evidence yet to know exactly what’s going to happen first.”
(Carr, 2008:354-5)
[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.
We knew. We know we knew.
What happened next?
Australia kept digging up and exporting fossil fuels. Some people did very nicely indeed out of it, thank you. Future generations? Not so much.