Fifty four years ago, on this day, November 27, 1969, the Canberra Times ran a piece about pollution….
Paul Backshall of London Reuters with Pollution: Gases in the Atmosphere article, reprinted in Canberra Times Thursday 27 November 1969, page 18 Check out Trove here.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone was writing articles about air pollution at this point. Someone in Reuters in London had written something of that ilk, and the Canberra Times had syndicated it.
What I think we can learn from this is that newspapers are hungry beasts and will syndicate things, even if it doesn’t have much of local spin to it, especially if the issue is popular enough.
What happened next
The Canberra Times kept reporting. Everybody was aware of what was at stake. What didn’t happen was that we didn’t stop the party. And now, the hangover…
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.