On this day, forty years ago, American scientists and science communicator Carl Sagan hosted a conference on the consequences of nuclear war…
Sagan and his colleagues orchestrated the “Conference on Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War,” held in Washington DC to garner as much public and political attention as possible. The steering committee scheduled the two-day event to begin on Halloween. On October 30, 1983, Sagan published an expose on nuclear winter in Parade Magazine, a popular Sunday newspaper supplement with more than twenty million readers. Chaired by George Woodwell and kicked off by Stanford University’s eloquent president, Donald Kennedy, the conference itself was less a scientific meeting than an extended, staged press release. A satellite link – relatively new technology in 1983 – connected an audience of several hundred scientists, journalists, and politicians to members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
(Howe, 2014:139)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 343ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
Context
With the coming of the second Cold War (with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, sharpening with the arrival of Reagan and his lunatic friends), scientists started thinking about what would happen if a nuclear war happened. Even a “small one”, some thought, would burn forests, releasing huge clouds of dust that would blot out the sun, creating a “nuclear winter.”
What we can learn
Climate change from carbon dioxide has been tied up with other global atmospheric threats (real and perceived – oxygen depletion, ozone depletion, acid rain, nuclear war). There is no “clear” narrative that ignores those…
What happened next
There were claims and counter-claims about this, and some scientists disagreed with Sagan (notably Steve Schneider). By 1986, with the coming of Gorbachev (in 1985) and the Chernobyl disaster, it seemed less likely that a war would happen. Meanwhile, along came the Ozone hole, and then the climate stuff kicked in, post-Villach…