The climate is nearing tipping points. Changes are beginning to appear and there is a potential for explosive changes, effects that would be irreversible, if we do not rapidly slow fossil-fuel emissions over the next few decades. As Arctic sea ice melts, the darker ocean absorbs more sunlight and speeds melting. As the tundra melts, methane, a strong greenhouse gas, is released, causing more warming. As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.
Hansen, J. 2009. Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them. Guardian, 15 February.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 387ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that we have known since the fifties that putting enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was going to have consequences. We didn’t know how big, how soon, but by the late 1970s, that was becoming clear…
The specific context was that the UK government was busy bullshitting about allowing the building of new “carbon-capture-ready” coal-fired power stations. For fuck’s sake.
What I think we can learn from this is that scientists can tell the truth all they like. The truth, on its own, will not – in fact – set you free, no matter what St John wants you to believe.
What happened next: Hansen kept writing and sciencing. The politicians kept ignoring him and thousands of other scientists. So did, for the most part, the publics of the Western democracies.
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.
Thirty six years ago, on this day, February 14th, 1990,
“The command sequence was then compiled and sent to Voyager 1, with the images taken at 04:48 GMT on February 14, 1990.[19] At that time, the distance between the spacecraft and Earth was 40.47 astronomical units (6,055 million kilometers, 3,762 million miles).[20]”
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Voyager had been launched years earlier, and they turned round and looked at the earth and took the photo. There’s a nice story about how it got found, just like one pixel.
What I think we can learn from this is that beautiful images are sometimes found by accident. See also Earthrise in 1968 as pushed for by Stewart Brand.
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.
Thirty two years ago, on this day, February 14 1994, Friends of the Earth UK tried to get councils to take action on climate change.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 359ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that the UNFCCC had been signed in 1992. Part of it was “Local Agenda 21” – we were all supposed to be doing governance together…
The specific context was that FoE was trying, bless it, to get the system to change itself from within. It had already tried this sort of thing with environmental issues more broadly a couple of years previously. Twenty plus years of boredom and futility and all that…
What I think we can learn from this is that we had our chances, we blew them.
What happened next: FoE kept campaigning. People kept ignoring them. Emissions and atmospheric concentrations kept climbing.
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.
PARIS, Feb 13 (Reuters) – Carbon capture is not a solution for the energy transition and political leaders need to provide real, non-greenwashed, commitments to encourage investment, Andrew Forrest, executive chairman of Fortescue Metals, said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the 50th anniversary meeting of the International Energy Agency, Australian billionaire Forrest said the investment community needs a level-playing field and honest answers from political leaders on phasing out fossil fuels in order to invest.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 424ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that CCS has been around as a theoretical “solution” to climate change for fifty years, since Cesar Marchetti brain-farted it out at an IIASA conference.
The specific context was that Twiggy Forrest has been banging on about climate change for a little while now.
What I think we can learn from this is that CCS is a silly fantasy, but that’s all we have left now.
What happened next: Money kept getting thrown at CCS.
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.
Thirty five years ago, on this day, February 12, 1991 a report about
“Reducing the Impact of the Greenhouse Effect.” by the Senate Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (CA 6703).
See the committee details, contents of the report, terms of reference and Chapter 1 overview here.
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 various Australian parliamentarians (the smarter ones) had been warning about carbon dioxide build-up since the 1970s. In the late 1980s the issue finally hit the headlines, and the obvious question was “well, what do we DO about it?”
The specific context was that the Senate report was trying to add to the pressure to actually get something done. However, it was released, inevitably, after the military effort to push Iraq’s armed forces out of Kuwait was underway, and anyway, the Greenhouse issue was booooring by then.
What I think we can learn from this is that detailed reports take time, and by then something else has come along and distracted everyone. I don’t know what to do about this, beyond having really resilient social movement organisations that understand the dynamics of issue-attention cycles.
What happened next: The issue went away, and then got reduced to “ratify Kyoto or not”? It finally returned in 2006, twenty long long years ago. Meanwhile, the emissions kept climbing and the concentrations kept climbing. Fafocene.
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.
Every issue of the CO2 Newsletter had an editorial. They are William Barbat’s attempt to share (and shape) situational awareness.
Here, in March 1980, he is breathing a sigh of relief because it seems the various elements of the state (the Department of Energy, the Council on Environmental Quality) is finally beginning to get its act together. Sadly, all that would be wrecked from November 1980, with the coming of the Reagan gang. (And yet, Barbat persisted. The man had brains and guts).
The new decade begins on an optimistic note as the CO2-greenhouse problem is beginning to receive deserved attention in scientific, political, and economic institutions. Also this particular environmental issue may unite former adversaries in a common effort. David Burns, head of the AAAS Climate Program, has noted a great increase in the number of major papers which are being prepared for publication on the CO2 problem. Also our growing readership indicates to us that the Newsletter is fulfilling its role of enlightenment. Soon a European distributorship for the Newsletter may be established. Most heartening though is the apparent absence of polarization toward the CO2 problem.
Still much skepticism remains concerning the seriousness and urgency of the CO2 problem. Although a rapidly growing number of scientists feel that we now have sufficient knowledge of impending CO2– induced impacts on which to base energy policies, others feel that much more concrete evidence must first be gained throughout the world to substantiate theories and models. Some non-technical people grossly misinterpret this skepticism as representing negative proof.
From the very beginning, much work on the CO2 problem has been performed under adverse conditions or severe financial restraints. Tyndall had to trouble-shoot his galvanometers and have them reconstructed in order to measure the absorption and radiation of heat by CO2. He found that the green dye used in the silk covering of the copper coils of the most delicate instruments of his day contained some iron compound which caused the needle to deviate. Arrhenius lacked laboratory determinations of the absorption coefficients for CO2 and water vapor at plus 15 degrees C, and he also lacked the laboratory equipment needed to make the determinations. “Such experiments . . . would require very expensive apparatus beyond that at my disposal.” Ingeniously, Arrhenius used the earth’s atmosphere instead as his laboratory. Ernest Rutherford described the challenges of those days clearly’ “We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.”
Modern workers on the CO2 problem seem to be little better off. The federal funding of Keeling‘s invaluable monitoring of atmospheric CO2 concentrations fell victim to the race to put a man on the moon for several months in 1963. The General Circulation Model of Manabe and Wetherald reportedly contained a programming error, which apparently could only be eliminated by a computer rerun which exceeded their resources. Glaciologists are asked to make predictions of future ice sheet behavior from very sparse data. As far as we can tell, the only available forecast of the warming threshold for West Antarctica Ice Sheet destruction relies solely on a temperature datum provided by a map made from Russian observations taken during the International Geophysical Year. Polar research has been funded meagerly by the U.S. in recent years.
Meetings which bring together atmospheric scientists, climate modelers, terrestrial and marine biologists, ocean geochemists, and other workers to analyze the CO2 problem collectively are greatly limited as to frequency and numbers of invited participants. Publications concerning such meetings are usually incomplete and much delayed. Some important results of the scientific analyses are not even available for purchase through normal channels because some agencies seem to act more as a sink than a source of information. Thus, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the relatively small number of scientists who have brought us so much understanding with so little.
FRED Prata was flicking through some satellite pictures one day when he saw a “funny looking cloud”. It got him thinking. A few years later, that train of thought produced a piece of technology worth tens of millions of dollars — possibly hundreds of millions — every year to the international airline industry.
Chandler, J. 2006. Discarded scientists fail to grasp CSIRO logic. The Age, 11 February.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that since the permanent invasion in 1788 Australia has always been a set of settler colonies keen to exploit natural resources for short term gain. Great god development and all that… this required knowledge, science (production and, inevitably, impact science). The CSIRO was born.
The specific context was that CSIRO scientists had been at the forefront of investigating climate change impacts, from the early 1970s onwards. By the 2000s, they were under the cosh.
What I think we can learn from this is that the distinction between production science and impact science is crucial, and under-understood. And that our lords and masters are basically morons who kill the goose that lays golden eggs.
What happened next: The attacks on scientists producing inconvenient truths have continued, regardless of the party in charge. Because the parties are there to keep the “show” (or relentless extraction and accumulation) on the road.
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.
Michiel van den Broeke, Professor of Polar Meteorology at Utrecht University (longer bio at end of post) very kindly agreed to read William Barbat’s article “Glacier melt: How soon? How fast?” and explain what Barbat got right (and wrong) and where the science has gone in the almost 50 years since then. It’s a brilliant (imo) piece, and I hope you learn as much as I did. Please do share it, comment on it.
Professor van den Broeke
In the March 1980 edition of the CO2 NEWSLETTER, William Barbat reported about the threat of melting ice sheets and the rapid, multi-metre sea level rise that could ensue. Undoubtedly, Barbat had been triggered by the 1978 scientific publication of British glaciologist John Mercer (1922-1987), then employed at (what would later become) the Byrd Polar Research Centre of Ohio State University (Mercer, 1978). In his Nature article: “West Antarctic ice sheet and CO2greenhouse effect: a threat of disaster“, Mercer pointed out that the increase in CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels would result in strong Antarctic warming, potentially leading to the disintegration of the large Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves. In the absence of their buttressing effect, the West Antarctic ice sheet would collapse, raising global sea levels by several metres.
Today’s cryospheric research relies heavily on three complementary techniques: in situ observations, satellite observations and numerical models. In situ observations are often scattered in space, but to their credit have relatively long time series (typically decades in the Polar Regions), indispensable for trend detection. They moreover provide ground truth for satellites and serve to evaluate/calibrate climate and ice sheet models. Satellites, on the other hand, with their limited mission lifetime of typically 5-10 years, produce short time series, but they have the advantage of near-complete spatial coverage, filling in the spatial gaps left by the in situ observations. Numerical models, once evaluated and/or calibrated with the in situ and remotely sensed observations, can help us isolating the physical processes at work and, when they perform satisfactorily, make credible future projections.
When Mercer published his study almost 50 years ago, he had to make do with very limited observations and crude models. Although the density of in situ observations in the polar regions increased sharply after the 1957/58 International Geophysical Year (IGY, also referred to as the Third International Polar Year), observations remained very scarce notably in the ice sheet interiors. While some satellites for earth observation, notably Landsat, were available at that time, time series were less than a decade long. For Earth’s cryosphere, the satellite era started in earnest more than a decade later, with the launch of European Space Agency‘s radar-equipped ERS-1 in 1991. Finally, in the late 1970’s, climate and ice sheet models were still in their infancy; the model projections of future Antarctic warming used in Mercer’s study were from Syukuro Manabe, who in 2021 was co-awarded the Nobel prize in Physics for his pioneering contributions to climate modelling.
In spite of this, both Mercer’s 1978 Nature paper and William Barbat’s 1980 report in the CO2NEWSLETTER highlight the remarkable body of knowledge on the world’s ice sheets that had been gathered. Their reported total volume expressed in sea level rise equivalent of 66 m only deviates by 1% from today’s numbers1. Estimates of sea level stands of 6 m above present during the last interglacial (~125.000 years ago) fall well within the range of current estimates (6 to 9 m) (Dutton et al., 2015). Other remarkably accurate statements concern the approximately 50/50 partitioning of meltwater runoff and iceberg calving as sink terms in the mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet and the importance of ice shelf buttressing for grounded ice flow in Antarctica, which decades later was observationally confirmed after the sudden disintegration of Larsen B ice shelf in 2002 (Scambos et al., 2004). Mercer also correctly identified the apparent temperature threshold for the viability of Antarctic ice shelves, later corroborated by the demise of Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves after several decades of strong warming (Morris & Vaughan, 2013; Scambos et al., 2004). Also recently been confirmed is Mercer’s statement that a 5 K atmospheric warming could destabilize parts of the large Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves (Van Wessem et al., 2023).
Inevitably, these early reports also have flaws and large uncertainties, which the authors frankly admit. Lacking direct observations, and realising that around 1980 mass changes of both ice sheets were significantly smaller than they are today (IMBIE, 2018, 2020), not much could be said about the magnitude of mass loss of the ice sheets, let alone the processes that caused them. It would take the launch in 2002 of the satellite pair of the Gravity Anomaly and Climate Experiment (GRACE) before mass loss from both ice sheets was convincingly demonstrated (Velicogna & Wahr, 2005; Velicogna, 2006). GRACE also showed that the recent mass loss in Antarctica is concentrated in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas sectors, and is associated with ice shelf thinning owing to increased ocean melting at their base, rather than weakened buttressing of the Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves. Making projections based on scanty information proved even harder. Mercer’s assumption that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would double in 50 years was too pessimistic: atmospheric CO2 levels increased by 26%, from 337 to 426 parts per million, between 1979 and 2025. As a result, Antarctic warming remains far from the values reported in his paper.
This begs the question: if we were in Mercer’s shoes today, would we do much better in projecting the future of the Earth’s big ice sheets? Based on the latest IPCC report (IPCC, 2021), my take is that the uncertainties are still surprisingly large and not so dissimilar to what they were in 1978. Since then, our knowledge and technical (observational, modelling) capabilities have of course expanded tremendously, but we have also identified numerous new unknowns. The net result is that future ice sheet mass change and associated sea level rise remain highly uncertain, and that we still may be in for unpleasant surprises from nonlinear processes leading to tipping points that are currently not or poorly understood. Given the complex interactions between atmosphere, ocean and ice sheets that straddle several orders of magnitude in temporal and spatial scales, it is clear that this deep uncertainty will not be resolved anytime soon. It thus seems fitting to conclude with the statement made by Mercer in his 1978 paper, which still firmly stands: “…despite the crudities and inadequacies of present techniques for modelling the climatic effects of increasing atmospheric CO2content and the resultant doubts […], we cannot afford to let the atmosphere carry out the experiment before taking action because if the results confirm the prognosis, and we should know one way or the other by the end of the century, it will be too late to remedy the situation…”.
Bibliography
Dutton, A., Carlson, A. E., Long, A. J., Milne, G. A., Clark, P. U., DeConto, R., Horton, B. P., Rahmstorf, S., & Raymo, M. E. (2015). SEA-LEVEL RISE. Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods. Science, 349(6244), aaa4019. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa4019
IPCC. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157896.
Morris, E. M., & Vaughan, D. G. (2013). Spatial and Temporal Variation of Surface Temperature on the Antarctic Peninsula And The Limit of Viability of Ice Shelves. In Antarctic Peninsula Climate Variability: Historical and Paleoenvironmental Perspectives (pp. 61-68). https://doi.org/10.1029/AR079p0061
Scambos, T. A., Bohlander, J. A., Shuman, C. A., & Skvarca, P. (2004). Glacier acceleration and thinning after ice shelf collapse in the Larsen B embayment, Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 31(18). https://doi.org/10.1029/2004gl020670
Van Wessem, J. M., Van den Broeke, M. R., Wouters, B., & Lhermitte, S. (2023). Variable temperature thresholds of melt pond formation on Antarctic ice shelves. Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01577-1
Velicogna, I. a. J. W. (2006). Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica. Science, 311(5768), 1754-1756. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1126/science.1123785
Footnotes
1 Combining radar flight lines of ice thickness with mass conservation provide us with accurate estimates of the sea level equivalent volumes of the ice sheets of Greenland (7.4 m) and Antarctica (57.8 m), (Morlighem et al., 2017; Morlighem et al., 2019).
Michiel van den Broeke (Rotterdam, 1968) has been Professor of Polar Meteorology at Utrecht University since 2008, where he studies the interaction between the climate and the large ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. Between 2016 and 2022, Michiel served as Scientific Director of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht (IMAU), where around 90 people work on developing a fundamental understanding of all components of the climate system.
“On February 10, 2006, the Friday of the week that George Deutsch resigned, Jim spoke at a conference on politics and science, sponsored by the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. (He was added at the last minute on account of his recent notoriety.) IN a talk derived from the Keeling talk, which was now about two months old, he decided to add a brief discussion of tropical storms, because the topic was “especially relevant to this conference.”
See these two pages from Mark Bowen’s Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.
2006 Hansen at conference on science and politics at New School for Social Research (Bowen Censoring Science page 143)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Hansen had been abused, ignored, sidelined in 1989 by the George HW Bush administration, and had basically gone back to the lab (that’s no criticism of the man, btw).
The specific context was that by 2006 the climate issue was heating up again – the Kyoto Protocol had been ratified (thanks, Russia) – so the international negotiations were “back on”, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme was underway, and Al Gore’s film was about to come out. Last summer (2005) Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans, with thousands dead.
What I think we can learn from this is that the Bush regime was full of assholes.
What happened next: Hansen started getting arrested at protests about coal plants and pipelines, and has kept on with the science.
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.
Over three decades of cartooning he won many plaudits, and millions of fans of his work.
One of his most famous cartoons is of a scientist trying to warn of climate change.
In April last year he very kindly did an email interview for All Our Yesterdays, which you can read here. Of that cartoon he said ““If I did a sequel it would probably involve a scientist swearing a great deal”
If you have favourite Kudelkas (from the 10,000) please do post them here.
