Sixty two years ago, on this day, September 3rd, 1963, at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Aberdeen on the morning of September 3, Ritchie Calder gave a speech on “Man and his Fellow Lodgers; a Question of Co-existence”.
Discharge of combustion products into the atmosphere had increased its content of carbon dioxide by 10 per cent in a century. The ‘green house effect’ could be expected to increase average mean temperature by 3·6° C in the next 40-50 years. This would radically affect the extent of glaciers and ice-caps with resultant rise in sea- and river-levels and increasing precipitation.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 319ppm. 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 Ritchie-Calder had known about the carbon dioxide problem from at least 1954 (possibly earlier). He had written an article in the News Chronicle, as their science correspondent in 1954.
The specific context was that in March 1963 the Conservation Foundation had held a one-day conference in New York. Frank Fraser-Darling was there, and may have alerted Ritchie-Calder, who was already aware of the issue (he wrote a newspaper article in 1954).
What I think we can learn from this is that members of the British scientific elite were informed about the possibility by the early 1960s (some earlier, obviously).
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.
