Seventy years ago, on this day, March 2nd, 1954, Peter Ritchie Calder, the Scottish public intellectual, wrote about carbon dioxide build-up for a popular audience, in a major British newspaper.
It is happening: but authorities are not agreed why.
One popular theory is carbon dioxide in the air.
Normally air contains only 0.03 per cent of this gas, which acts like greenhouse glass. It lets the sun’s rays through to heat the ground and then traps this radiant heat, which remains to warm air and ground.
Experiments indicate there is a tenth more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than 50 years ago. This could account for that 2 deg. F. rise.
But why has it increased? Is it man-made? It is estimated that each year 6,000 million tons of carbon dioxide pour into the atmosphere from burning coal.
Ritchie-Calder, P. (1954) Who Said it’s getting colder! News Chronicle, 2 March, p.4.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in May 1953, Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass had made an announcement at the American Geophysical Union meeting about the consequences of CO2 buildup, although it got no attention in the quality British dailies. Someone like Peter Richie Calder, who was extremely scientifically literate and hooked into UNESCO would have known about it. The timing indicates that this might come from an early read of a UNESCO Courier article by Gerald Wendt.
What I think we can learn from this is that readers of a newspaper like the News Chronicle, which was left-wing-ish were introduced to the idea of carbon dioxide buildup as early as 1954, 70 years ago.
What happened next
Richie-Calder kept being a public intellectual and kept warning about climate change. Three examples will suffice in 1963. He talked to the Town and Country Planning Association in 1968. He had carbon dioxide buildup as one of the possible mechanisms for how on earth his presidential address to the Conservation Society in November 1958. And then, very shortly after that, he had an interview with a BBC researcher for Horizon ”Muck Today, Poison tomorrow”, where he also raised the co2 issue.
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.
Also on this day: