Sixty six years ago, on this day, April 28th, 1959 a doctor, Gordon Fair, talks about carbon dioxide as a possible long term public health issue during his Chadwick lecture,
,
28 April 1959 NEW FACTORS IN MAN’S MANAGEMENT OF HIS ENVIRONMENT *
Especially Fluoridation, Air Pollution and Radiation
by GORDON M. FAIR, HON. F.R.S.H.
Professor of Public Health Engineering, Harvard University, U.S.A.
I am deeply grateful to the Chadwick Trust for its invitation to deliver a Chadwick Lecture at the 66th Annual Congress of the Royal Society of Health. Although the prevention of local or metropolitan air pollution is the most immediate concern of health authorities, the threat of possible future world-wide effects must not be overlooked. Most real is the accumulation in the atmosphere of the radioactive by-products of nuclear fission (see part IV of this paper) which could endanger life in all parts of the globe. More speculative is the possibility that the combustion of fuels and wastes may eventually build up the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere so fast as to influence world climate by creating the so-called “green-house effect”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 316ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that already in the United States, carbon dioxide buildup was being spoken of by public health personnel alerted to it as part of the general problem of air pollution, but also just reading a newspaper. If you were a scientifically trained intelligent person in the 1950s who was reading American scientists and paying attention to science journalism in mainstream newspapers, you would have been aware of the potential problem of carbon dioxide buildup.
What I think we can learn from this is that people have been talking about carbon dioxide buildup for longer than most of the five or six people reading this website will have been alive. And we have never managed to even get a cursory grip on what is a slippery, growing and ever more slippery problem that has always been wicked, then became super wicked and is now probably “hyper wicked”, whatever that means.
What happened next People kept talking about carbon dioxide build up as an issue and by the late 60s, it was more significantly on the agendas of biologists, clean air, folk, etc. For all the good that did.
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 28, 1975- Newsweek’s “The Cooling World” story.