June 7, 1959 – another letter about carbon dioxide build up in the Times of India
Sixty four years ago, on this day, June 7, 1959, two Indian writers sought to alert people to the dangers of carbon dioxide build-up
7 June 1959 Second letter by Kulkarni and Mani in Times of India
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 317.2ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Edward Teller had been giving various talks about the buildup of co2. And this had been picked up by press services, such as Associated Press, and people in other parts of the world were paying attention. This was the second letter by these authors to The Times of India.
What I think we can learn from this is that there was no deep dark secret. People knew from the mid 1950s that there was a problem. We have forgotten that, partly because the story then receded and nobody really did anything. And so we skip over we skip forward to 1988, but that’s not really historically accurate.
What happened next
Teller didn’t really talk that much more about carbon dioxide. I personally think it was all part of his pro-nuclear rampage. And for various reasons, the pronuclear rampage hit the buffers.
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.