Ninety one years ago, on this day, August 25th, 1933, carbon dioxide’s influence on climate gets a mention in an Australian publication, the South Coast Bulletin.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 309ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context being that Svante Arrhenius’s proposal of Anthropogenic Global Warming had been poo pooed thanks to people like Angstrom and his mis-understanding of how carbon dioxide behaves in the stratosphere. There were still people out there interested in Arrhenius’s proposals around the weather, industrialization, etc. There was Lotka. And I think Weber, for example, said something about significantly vaporising coal mines. And this stuff was “in the air” at the time – see New York Times article the year before…
In 1912 Popular Mechanics had run an article which led to syndicated snippets in papers around the world, which occasionally get tweeted at this site as some sort of ‘gotcha’, I think.
Anyway, here we were in 1933. And in the middle of the Great Depression, people probably had a lot else on their mind.
What we learn is that ideas like carbon dioxide impacting climate, were quiet in the 20s and 30s, but they were still there.
What happened next? The next big CO2 event was Guy Callendar in 1938 at the Royal Meteorological Society in London.
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:
August 25, 1970 – Margaret Mead and James Baldwin rap on race…
August 25, 2013 – The IPA loses support, for being stupid climate deniers.