On this day american economist Joseph J. Spengler’s Science article –
“Illustrative also would be the covering of much land by water should continuing population growth so step up man’s production of carbon dioxide that the oceans failed to absorb all of it, with the result that the carbon dioxide content, and hence the temperature, of the atmosphere rose sufficiently to melt the polar ice caps.”
See here
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1705886
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319 check ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that by the late 1950s carbon dioxide build-ups existence and possible long term consequences was not confined to a tiny tiny minority. Anyone who read a newspaper, could understand exponential growth and 19th century could see that there might be some writing on the wall…
What I think we can learn from this
We knew enough to think about worrying.
What happened next?
No economist bothered to think about the problem until Nordhaus in the 1970s.
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.