Fifty years ago, on this day, October 22nd, 1969,
AMS Symposium on the Future of the Atmosphere, Madison, Wis., 22 October 1969.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that President Lyndon Johnson had made his special address to Congress in early 1965. It had included a short section (from Roger Revelle) about CO2 buildup. And were things going to get hotter or colder and no one knew for sure. So it’s logical that the American Meteorological Society would want to hold a seminar on the future of climate. One of the people present was Canadian scientist Kenneth Hare, who had been at a Guy Callendar’s talk in 1938 at the Royal Meteorological Society. And in his talk at this seminar, Hare talked about CO2 as one potential issue.
What I think we can learn from this is that by the late 1960s, people in the know were beginning to take note…
What happened next The issue was ‘there’ in the lead up to Stockholm, but there was not the hard evidence yet. By the late 1970s, it was obvious to anyone with intellectual integrity that there was a serious problem ahead (but ‘ahead’ might mean another thirty years).
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.
References
Also on this day:
October 22, 1969 – Edmund Muskie mentions CO2 build up
October 22, 1997 – US and Australian enemies of #climate action plot and gloat