Fifty three years ago, on this day, April 8, 1970, Australian academic Charles Birch had an article in the Australian National University publication Woroni about “Pollution.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 328.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
This was all part of the huge rise in awareness of pollution/environment issues from the late 1960s… Birch was an interesting character.
“Louis Charles Birch FAA (1918–2009) was an Australian geneticist specialising in population ecology and was also well known as a theologian, writing widely on the topic of science and religion, winning the Templeton Prize in 1990. The prize recognised his work ascribing intrinsic value to all life.“
What I think we can learn from this
Again, we knew. The people who run the countries of the world, the elites who attend the elite universities and go on to jobs in finance, industry, politics, academia, they were told about this, and that information has continued to be ‘out there’.
What happened next
Birch kept teaching his students about this problem, and writing about it. When I was writing for The Conversation about Australia, people would occasionally leave comments to the effect that he had switched them on to the issue 45 years previously…,
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.