The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 370ppm. As of 2026 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that 8 years of Al Gore as Veep hadn’t ushered in the ecotopia. There was the “BTU tax,” foiled by fossil fuel interests in 1993 and then the pre-emptive strike against the Kyoto Protocol. So, not much to post about.
The specific context was that Gore had had the 2000 election stolen out from under his nose by the Supreme Court mates of his opponent’s dad – George HW Bush.
What I think we can learn from this is that there are no saviours. At absolute best politicians can be forced to nudge things into a slightly less rapidly suicidal direction. You want actual change, you need social movements. But they tend to flame out after a few years (repression is exhausting, after all)
What happened next is Gore dusted himself off and gave the world “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.
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, obv
“An important meeting took place in Washington, DC,on 9 January 1946. Convened by Francis Reichelderfer, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s Chief, it was supposed to be secret, but a detailed account of it appeared in the New York Times two days later! There were a dozen meteorologists at the meeting, some of them military men, and there were two guests: John von Neumann, a mathematician from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Vladimir Zworykin of RCA, who had invented the scanning television camera. They had come to explain their startling proposal, that the electronic digital computer planned by Neumann might be used to forecast and ultimately control the weather.”
Walker History of Met Office p318
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 349ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that humans have always wanted to control the uncontrollable, for understandable reasons. Shamans, witch doctors, rain dances, ghost dances etc etc.
The specific context was that after you split the atom and nuke 150,000 civilians with two bombs, what could stop you from controlling everything!
What I think we can learn from this – smart people often don’t understand that smarts will only get you so far.
They tried (and failed) to control the weather. But long-term? They certainly succeeded in climate modification…
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.
The context was that humans (especially men!) have always created stories of being able to do what “gods” do – create life. Ancient myths, modern ones (Mary Shelley in 1816) and contemporary ones – Philip K Dick in “Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep?”, which is a good novel, imo, and the source material for “Blade Runner”
Why care?
Batty is, by most readings, a more sympathetic and interesting character than Rick Deckard, the “Blade Runner” who is hunting him down. The story is worth thinking on.
(How) does it connect to climate change?
Well, genetically engineered humans would be a thing, if we were smart enough/it were possible.
What happened next
He wanted more life (“fucker”) but didn’t get it, despite having seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
How does it help us understand the world?
It’s a compelling myth, and absolutely beautifully shot.
How does it help us act in the world?
Well, if we think about rebels, trying to extend their lives while being hunted down, we get… er.. Help me out here.
The source that it comes from, if necessary,
Xxx
The other things that you could read about this or watch
Idk – Blade Runner 2049?
What do you think?
If you have opinions or info about this, or other things that happened on this day that are worth knowing, let me know!
1. Who are you? (where did you grow up, what contact did you have with ‘nature’ – how much unstructured play in natural settings – I ask because this is a common thread among adults who have become “campaigners”) and what was the path to becoming a scientist working on malaria?
I grew up near Manchester, without much connection to the natural world. I liked maths and science and did an undergraduate degree that covered lots of different disciplines. Having previously sworn that biology was ‘boring’, it was there I became really fascinated by microbial life. I saw a research career in infectious disease as a way to pursue that interest whilst also doing something useful, something that I thought had potential to improve people’s lives. So I followed a pretty traditional academic path and ended up working on malaria parasite biology for about a decade.
2. When and how did you first hear about carbon dioxide build-up as a “problem”, and if you remember your initial thoughts?
It still shocks me that I didn’t learn specifically about climate change at any point in my formal education. When I graduated from a Natural Sciences degree in 2010 I wouldn’t have been able to describe the greenhouse effect, a phenomenon that scientists had been trying to raise the alarm about since well before I was born. Climate change was mentioned in passing around me at work and in wider society but there didn’t seem to be much urgency or fear about it. I’d genuinely believed that world leaders were dealing with it. But that changed in October 2018, when IPPC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5℃ completely dispelled the myth that it was all under control, caused a flurry of press attention, and started to activate a much broader range of people.
3. You mention a presentation by Hugh Montgomery in 2018 as pivotal. What was it he did and presented (was this the IPCC 1.5 degrees report)?
The way Hugh laid out the IPPC’s report felt absolutely brutal at the time, but all he did was summarise what was in that report and make abundantly clear what it all meant for people, including for us in that room. It’s rare to see scientists or most other professionals speak like this, with clarity and unequivocal urgency. To me this was as disruptive as the information he actually presented.
4. Do activists expect too much of scientists still working within academia? Do scientists working within academia expect too little of themselves?
It’s far from unreasonable to expect scientists and the academic community to act in line with their own knowledge and warnings, and I think it’s fair to say that (like most other parts of society) academia isn’t responding robustly to a world that’s literally and metaphorically on fire. I think my own frustration lies in the missed potential for academia to be part of really catalysing and facilitating a society-wide response. From the inside I know how futile it can feel to push against the inertia and how risky it can be to stick your head above the parapet in such a competitive, precarious working environment… but I also know that the stakes are too high for us not to try. My message to scientists is that we have more power than we often realise, and that there are many different ways to use it effectively – especially when we work together.
5. Best case scenario – what changes does the National Emergency Briefing make by the end of 2026? What needs to have gone right – and what do “we” (define as you wish) need to have done differently to make that best case come to life?
It’s an enticing thought that amongst the Briefing’s audience there could have been hundreds if not thousands of people who had a similarly life-altering experience to my own in 2018, and those now-activated people will share what they’ve learned and activate others, leading to vital social tipping points and cultural shifts. From often-bitter experience, I know it’s not that simple. I do think it’s realistic to believe that NEB and the ongoing work that stems from it can contribute to rejuvenating and focusing the climate movement and may already have broadened the range of people who participate. However, the ‘knowledge component’ that the NEB attempts to address is just one of a combination of factors needed to empower action: we need to make sure courage, community, and practical skills are cultivated in parallel.
6. How can people get involved in NEB?The focus for now is to get the information shared in the Briefing to as many people as possible. This involves building pressure on politicians and broadcasters to engage with its content and fulfil their obligations to inform themselves, their colleagues and the wider public, for instance via a televised National Emergency Briefing. A short film based on the briefing is currently in production, with plans for community screenings around the country this Spring. For more information and to get involved see https://www.nebriefing.org/take-action.
Thirty five years ago, on this day, January 8th, 1991, former Federal Treasurer Peter Walsh lets rip,
BACK in 1989 a proposal to spend $6 million on an Australian response to the greenhouse effect and climatic change was being considered. The 1990 Budget Papers identify another $17 million for climate change core research and “multifaceted programme initiatives” – which presumably includes funding various national and international greenhouse conferences so beloved by greenhouse activists.
Walsh, P. 1991. Credibility Gap in Greenhouse Gabfests. Australian Financial Review, 8 January, p.7.
BASED ON DALY GREENHOUSE TRAP
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 355ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Hawke government’s Cabinet had, in October 1990 created the interim planning target of a 20% reduction in the CO2 emissions by 2005 with the notable caveats that it didn’t hurt the economy and that other nations took similar action, i.e., “we’re not going to do it.” And even these caveats were not enough for people like Walsh, who regarded environmentalism as akin to paganism, astrology, whatever.
What’s interesting about this is that the column is based largely on a then-new book called The Greenhouse Trap by a guy called John Daly. So you see here the mechanics of how a book, even if basically self published, can get picked up and used in speeches and opinion columns and reverberate and become part of the actual or possible “common sense”, or certainly part of the acceptable range of opinions. Blah, blah, Overton Window, blah, blah – there’s a kind of conveyor belt going on.
What I think we can learn from this is that Old White Men have a lot of cultural power, or at least influence.
Walsh was involved in the dimbulb denialist outfit the Lavoisier Group, and Daly kept on being daily until he died in January 2004.
And the gab fests, as Walsh called them, became meaningless, principally because the United States insisted that targets and timetables not be included in the treaty text of the UN Convention.
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.
“A small coalition of prominent climate change activists and political operatives huddled on Jan. 8 [2016] for a closed-door meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in Manhattan. Their agenda: taking down oil giant ExxonMobil through a coordinated campaign of legal action, divestment efforts, and political pressure.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 355ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that in the late 1970s Exxon’s scientists got their heads around carbon dioxide build-up (this was not top secret – see the CO2 Newsletter!). But the corporation pivoted in the mid-1980s to, well, funding denial because that’s the growth imperative, isn’t it?
The specific context was that even though the laws are made by the rich to constrain the poor, they offer some kind of venue, sometimes, to blunt/slow our acceleration off the cliff. Maybe. And here we are.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’re fubarred and Cocker Protocol is the only protocol.
What happened next
Well, a news outlet funded by the IPAA is gloating –
Ten years ago, a subpoena from then New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched the Rockefeller-funded legal crusade against America’s energy industry. This week marks a decade since the news broke about the case – but you won’t hear activists bragging about it this week.
Now, ten years later, the story is reaching a full circle moment. The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether to review a case brought by Colorado municipalities that could determine the fate of this climate lawfare. A ruling could close the chapter on a ten-year campaign that has repeatedly failed from the start.
Ultimately, the campaign’s setbacks are primarily grounded in courts’ recognition of the weak legal theories and unfounded claims, but its lack of success also shines light on how politics and public priorities have shifted over the decade.
Articles that appear in my doom-scroll feed about the destruction of our Earth’s natural resources get skimmed, compartmentalized, repressed, and rapidly filed in the “End of World” folder on my email server. (Until mid-2025, the file was named “End of World?” with a question mark.) I have not been able to bring myself to read books on this issue either. They gather dust on my bookshelves, as a matter of self-preservation.
But since the destruction of our only home is now obviously exponential in nature (In nature! Ha!), and in combination with the rapid and shocking downfall of my home country’s democracy that includes deliberate dismantling of Earth-care acts in the name of money and power, I am opening my psyche’s doors to all of the emotions. Go big, go home, and go to a therapist who believes that climate change is real.
Being that Everything is DoomedTM, I am cracking into my untouched trove of Cli-Fi and Cli-Nonfi. I began with The Afterlife Project, by Tim Weed.
It is a used copy, intentionally purchased at a local independent bookstore; no additional production at the expense of resources, and no 2-day delivery by a company overseen by a human who is hellbent on hoarding wealth and power rather than saving our planetary home.
As I shuffled through the bright book covers on my To Be Read shelf, I picked The Afterlife Project first, merely because the cover art reflected my mood at that time: calm, muted, and a bit blurred at the edges. The content within, however, was far from muted or blurred.
If you’ve ever watched a movie about the restaurant industry, (such as Chef or Julie & Julia), you’ll notice that a good director will fill your eyes with the most sumptuous visuals of food. Vegan mouths water because of that slo-mo shot of a chef slicing brisket. Dairy intolerant folks shed tears over the sizzling visuals of cheese melting on a griddle. Stomachs rumble, the pause button on the remote is punched, and refrigerators are raided.
This is much like reading The Afterlife Project. The lush descriptions of 11th millennium Earth and its flora and fauna made me yearn to drop everything and just go. Go…out. Anywhere. Somewhere. A place of green and clean air and toes in dirt and sounds that overlap into a cacophony of life.
While reading, one can’t help but think “this is how Earth is supposed to be and humans are definitely not the superior species here.” The lush narration within The Afterlife Project conjures smells, sounds, textures, and visuals of a planet that should be, of soil that we should long to kneel upon, of animals that deserve to live unfettered by the whims of humans. (For all of our self aggrandizing about our technological and industrial accomplishments, it remains to be seen how increasing amounts of cement and glass can compare to the luxury of untouched nature.) If you’re a city kid, I challenge you to read this book and not have a mustard seed of desire for nature sprout within your hurried heart.
After one particular mind-bending imaginative trip through an 11th millennium Earth forest (a literal trip thanks to the character’s experimentation with Amanita muscaria fungi), a certain sentence punched me in the gut: “Now that humanity is pretty much out of the picture, has the torch of sentience been passed on to some other being?” This musing can really get to you, if you let it. And you should let it, as the author follows with the character’s realization that his life is deeply connected to that which surrounds him: he has not been alone in the woods after all…he is surrounded by life, sometimes unseen but always felt.
And just how did 11th millennium Earth come to be in such a state of untouched beauty in The Afterlife Project? The causes of humanity’s demise and subsequent flourishing of non-human life on Earth are not the main points of the book. Although, when discussed, the causes are uncomfortably familiar or tangential to the content of our actual reality: every climate scientist’s post on BlueSky, every book written by experts which apparently are screams into the void.
The main character eventually absorbs into his very being, his very soul, that the world around him is his life and his life is the world around him. As it should be. Imagine if every human on Earth worshipped our only home in the way it deserved. Just imagine.
Someday, humanity deserves to see this book translated in big screen format. I have specific demands for this theatrical rendition: Christopher Nolan will direct, the trailer song will be “Below Sea Level” by Ben Harper, and the main character will be played by some random person not yet famous (someone unrecognizable to the general public, as to create a sense of “this could be me perhaps this is all of us”.) I want my fellow humans to see the indescribable beauty of what happens when a single human loves the Earth with his whole being.
These are my demands as I close the bent cover of The Afterlife Project and tuck it away on my Keep Forever bookshelf. And I think the point here is…Tim Weed made it beautifully and painfully clear: we don’t have forever.
Then, echoing the random absurdism of his novel, on 7 January 1938, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed in a Paris street when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp, named “Prudent”. Joyce arranged for medical treatment, and Beckett received his page proofs in hospital where he made a few alterations and insertions. https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2024/07/24/murphy-by-samuel-beckett-1938-the-maestro-of-failure/
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at xxx parts per million.
As of 2026 they are ppm at and rising rapidly. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
Beckett had been living in Paris for a couple of years by this time, I think. He’d been under analysis with Wilfrid Bion (watch this space)
Why care?
Well, knowing this about an author can change the way you read them? (Some say it shouldn’t, obvs – nothing outside the text blah blah).
(How) does it connect to climate change?
Beckett’s sense of the absurd, despair, but also ACTION.
“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
What happened next
He kept despairing and going on.
How does it help us understand the world?
Oof. Beckett and Bion – I must really get on with that…
How does it help us act in the world?
Beckett’s sense of the absurd, despair, but also ACTION.
“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
There was the Austrian playwright, Otto Von Horvath who died in Paris on June 1 1938 when a branch of a tree fell on his head, as I recall, about the same time, pre war. Paris, of course, people didn’t know it was pre war, necessarily. They had a fairly good guess but didn’t know it was “pre-occupation Paris”, (see what I did there?)
. I presume a lot of them had a mental model that it would be a rerun of World War One, only with bigger explosions.
Anyway, Sword of Damocles in it all our lives are hanging by a thread/ending of Stand by Me by the late great Rob Reiner
The source that it comes from, if necessary,
Xxx
The other things that you could read about this or watch
I should read the Molloy trilogy – I stared Malone Dies without realising it’s mid…
What do you think?
If you have opinions or info about this, or other things that happened on this day that are worth knowing, let me know!
Fifty six years ago the activists at “Ecology Action East” were drawing the links and parallels. These days it would be smothered in the language of “climate justice” etc. But back then, they had simpler terms.
“[Sherlock] Holmes is generally considered to have been born on 6 Jan 1854. ” https://craigjanacek.wordpress.com/2015/09/13/a-chronological-order-of-sherlock-holmes-stories/
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at 285 parts per million.
As of 2026 they are 428ppm at and rising rapidly. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
The context was that Arthur Conan Doyle was making a go of it as a writer when, in 1891, he invented Sherlock Holmes, who has become a global phenomenon
Why care?
You really don’t need to!
(How) does it connect to climate change?
Hmm, let me think on that…
What happened next
Doyle wrote 56 stories and four novels (he did try to kill the character off, but had to bring him back)
How does it help us understand the world?
This factoid? Not at all. But Holmes in general? Maybe?
How does it help us act in the world?
Yeah, maybe it doesn’t?
The source that it comes from, if necessary,
See above
The other things that you could read about this or watch
In 2026 I am committed to reading all 56 short stories and the four novels, and blog them. That will bring you enlightenment, oh yes.
What do you think?
If you have opinions or info about this, or other things that happened on this day that are worth knowing, let me know!
