Sixty seven, on this day, November 27,1956 Waldemar Kaempffert, New York Times science writer dies.
A month earlier, on October 28, the Grey Lady had run this below.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Kaempfert had been a journalist for a long time, and he had done a couple of really good articles in the New York Times about industry warming the world. He was probably good mates with Gilbert Plass. He had written the NYT article about Gilbert Plass’s comments at the AGU in May 1953.
What I think we can learn from this
Smart people were switched on to the threat in the 1950s. It wasn’t rocket science.
What happened next
Walter Sullivan became the chief science writer at The New York Times. Sullivan was heavily involved in reporting on the International Geophysical Year and at that point became aware of the potential problem of climate change from carbon dioxide build-up.
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.