Seventy six years ago, on this day, December 30, 1957, the English steam engineer Guy Callendar wrote to the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass
“Plass wrote to Callendar that Revelle and Suess and Arnold and Anderson had “attacked the carbon dioxide climatic theory ‘quite vigorously’ at a meeting earlier this year.”
They claimed that it was absolutely impossible to have had a sufficient increase in the CO2 amount in this century for the reasons that were given in their articles. I think you have pointed out several ways that their conclusion could be in error and I feel that there are still several possible explanations. 64 (Fleming 2007, p.81)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 421ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that American scientists who were studying carbon dioxide build-up and had been writing about it were still not quite sure what was going on. Understandably – if all the answers were obvious you wouldn’t need to explore anything, and that’s not how science works
Guy Callendar had written the first serious “carbon dioxide is causing climate change” scientific article in 1938 presented it, to muted response, at the Royal Meteorological Society.
Gilbert Plass was, more than anyone, responsible for putting carbon dioxide squarely on the agenda with his 1953 statements at the American Geophysical Union and then onwards in 1956 with his articles
What I think we can learn from this is that it’s always a messy murky picture in the early days of any issue. Later on it looks like a procession, but a good historian will try to remember the messiness and make it understandable, without removing the messiness.
Obviously that’s an ongoing process that we need to remember how little we knew and how confused the picture was.
What happened next
Callendar kept writing articles and letters. He died in 1964.
Gilbert Plass continued to be engaged for another few years on the climate issue and then wasn’t.
Roger Revelle died in 1991, having spent a long time trying to get the US state and others scientists politicians to take climate change seriously/
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.