You stumble upon a document – in this case an article in the Times, published in April 1980, warning of climate change – and think ‘bingo’. In this case, if I recall correctly, it was via reading Australian newspapers and finding it as a syndication thing.
It’s by a ‘big name’ – the diplomat Crispin Tickell. You know Tickell had been on a sabbatical year at Harvard in 1975-6 and had written a thesis about the impact of carbon dioxide build-up on the atmosphere, food production, politics etc. You know that that that document had been circulated in Whitehall and then published, as ‘Climatic Change and World Affairs‘ with a foreword by former Chief Scientific Advisor Solly Zuckerman.
You also know that in February 1980 – two months before the article hit people’s breakfast tables – the Thatcher government had finally, grudgingly, allowed a report on “Climatic Change” to be released (the report had said, in effect ‘meh, probably nothing to see here’).
So you put two and one and a half together and you get… the amount of heating the Earth will experience this century. No, you get a narrative that says Tickell got this published as a kind of – if not ‘rallying the troops’ (were there any?) but a way of reminding people that the issue is actually real and important, despite what the official document said.
And you write a blog post to that effect, and then that’s okay – it’s not wrong, per se.
And you’re dimly aware that Tickell had been involved too in European Community (later, after 1992 it was called the European Union) politics, and also that the G7 had mentioned climate change the year before. And that Margaret Thatcher’s Chief Scientific Advisor had, at some point in all this, tried to get Thatcher to take climate change seriously.
But you don’t really think much more about it, and there’s no need to think differently about the Times article…
But THEN you re-read a really good (albeit incomplete – because everything is incomplete) article about the British government’s response to climate change. And you see something that your eyes simply passed over last time you read it.
“The timing of this sighting of Margaret Thatcher’s scepticism towards climate change is highly significant. It comes a week after Crispin Tickell presented on the carbon dioxide problem at a preparatory meeting for the Venice G7 summit”
(Agar 2015: 623)
And then you do some more digging via GoogleBooks and find more interesting things (1)
And you realise that the Times article you had situated in one context is almost certainly (2) a condensation/popularisation of the briefing he was going to give, and perhaps a way of letting those who would attend his briefing (who presumably took the Times, not the Morning Star) to get familiar with the issue beforehand
And it changes the way you think about the Times article – you see it in a different context. You weren’t wrong before, but you didn’t know the ‘whole story’. And, tbh, you probably still don’t.
And this goes on and on. Presumably historians with real training (rather than self-taught) have a name for this kind of palimpsest thing, this re-layering, this re-examining as new surrounding facts come to light? Anyone want to tell me what that word is?
Footnotes
- “By [the meeting] held in Venice in 1980 [Roy] Jenkins’ participation was complete. Likewise his personal representative was able to play a full part in the preparatory discussions, without needing to fear French walkouts or boycotts. The fact that climate change—an unfashionable topic in the late 1970s but a subject upon which Tickell had become a prominent expert—featured on the agenda for the Venice summit is for instance a fairly clear indication that the Commission sherpa was now sufficiently well established within the preparatory group to persuade his counterparts to direct their leaders’ attention towards an issue that was unlikely otherwise to have been discussed at so exalted a level.”
(Ludlow, p109-110, emphasis added)
Ludlow, N.P. (2016). Growing into the Role: The Battle to Secure G7 Representation. In: Roy Jenkins and the European Commission Presidency, 1976 –1980. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51530-8_4
(2) You can’t say for sure, because Tickell is dead and didn’t leave a memoir (and even if he had, this kind of granular detail doesn’t usually make it into memoirs).