Forty three years ago, on this day, April 8, 1980, UK civil servant Crispin Tickell had a stonking article in the Times. The conclusion to it (spoilers!”) is below.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 340.9ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
Tickell had become aware of the climate issue in a serious way while on a sabbatical year at Harvard in the mid-1970s, and wrote a book on the subject. He had, as a civil servant, tried to get the G7 interested (there had been some mention in Tokyo in 1979, and the upcoming one in Venice had C02 on the agenda), but it wasn’t until the mid-80s that he was able to get any particular traction with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
This particular article in the Times was in response to a February 12th 1980 report in the Times (link) about the first UK government report – “Climatic Change’, which had been grudgingly released the day before.
What I think we can learn from this
There were smart people who knew about this, and who tried to get leaders to take it seriously. That they failed is on the leaders, not them. Chief Scientific Advisor John Ashworth had tried to brief Margaret Thatcher. She said, with incredulity “you want me to worry about the weather?”
What happened next
Tickell kept beavering away (he had another article, in August of 1982 in the Times). Thatcher would only admit that maybe she should worry about the weather in 1988….
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.