Fifty nine years ago, on this day, April 22nd, 1965, the Manchester Evening News ran another article warning about carbon dioxide build up,
22 April 1965 Article about C02 and global warming in Manchester Evening News
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 320ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that a couple of months earlier, Lyndon Johnson, as President of the United States, had made a special address to Congress, which mentioned CO2 buildup, and other scientists were sniffing around the issue. The Evening News has talked about carbon dioxide buildup before but this was a pretty clear case.
What we learn is that if you were a tolerably intelligent person with a tolerably decent memory, and I don’t know, O-level chemistry and physics, you’d have understood the climate issue from them a lot earlier than I thought even a couple of years ago.
What happened next Manchester Evening News very periodically covered the issue. So did everyone. But it wasn’t really until ‘69 – 70 that it got any traction, and then it went away again until 1988.
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:
April 22, 1975 – UK Civil Service scratches its head on #climate
April 22, 1993 – Clinton’s announcement used by anti-carbon pricing Aussies