Forty four years ago, on this day, July 31st, 1981, American politicians held hearings on,
“Carbon Dioxide and Climate, the Greenhouse Effect”
Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agriculture Research, and Environment and the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, First Session, July 31, 1981
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 340ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that through the 1970s scientists – including American ones – had been studying the carbon dioxide build-up issue and become increasingly alarmed. There had been the First World Climate Conference in Geneva, in February 1979. More scientific work was being done, and there wasn’t much doubt among those studying the issue – there was trouble ahead.
The specific context was that some politicians (Paul Tsongas, Al Gore – who’d been taught by Roger Revelle at Harvard) got it. And at this point, it really had not become a culture war issue – the culture war thing happened thanks to deliberate efforts by incumbents (see Ross Gelbspan’s books on this).
What I think we can learn from this is that we could have begun to take climate action in the early 1980s. But we didn’t. And we in fact never have. And here we are.
What happened next A 1985 scientific meeting in Villach, Austria, led to scientists making bigger efforts to inform politicians and policymakers. In 1988, the issue “broke through.”
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:
July 31, 1981 – US politicians hold “carbon dioxide and climate” hearings.