Seventy-one years ago today… Rachel Carson book The Sea Around Us is published. It includes observations (uncontroversial) on Arctic climate warming…
“It is now beyond question that a definite change in the arctic climate set in about 1900, that it became astonishingly marked about 1930, and that it is now spreading into sub-arctic and temperate regions. The frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up.”
After revising the completion date, Carson completed the manuscript in June 1950. By that time, several periodicals (The New Yorker, Science Digest, and The Yale Review) were interested in publishing some of the chapters.[6] Nine of fourteen chapters were serialized in The New Yorker beginning on June 2, 1951, and the book was published on July 2 1952 by Oxford University Press.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 312ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in the 1950s DDT was good for you. As was Technology. Everything was going to be better living. And Carson came along and said ‘not so fast’… She wasn’t the only person to say this, but she said it well…
What I think we can learn from this
Resistance is fertile
What happened next
In 1962, when Silent Spring came out, the Chemicals industry, etc. went apeshit, unused to being challenged. Attacks of all sorts ensued. Of course. And have kept going…
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.