Forty-seven years ago, on this day, May 3rd, 1979
Costs and benefits of carbon dioxide. Nature 279, 1 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1038/279001a0
Bondi, H. David Davies’ editorship ends. Nature 283, 1 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1038/283001b0
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 336ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Nature magazine had been reporting on CO2 build up, or at least mentioning it in passing, since 1964, and had editorialised that it was a ‘scare’ in 1971 under the editorship of John Maddox.
The specific context was that from the mid-70s onwards, there was a build up of awareness internationally, especially in Europe and the United States, about CO2 as a pollutant. And in April, as alluded to in the editorial itself, there had been a four day workshop on CO2 build up and societal impacts in Annapolis, Maryland. Among the British attendees were Crispin Tickell, who at that point was a consigliere for British European Commissioner Roy Jenkins, and Tom Wigley, who was head of the Climatic Research Unit.
And this is exactly the same time that obviously Margaret Thatcher is coming to office, and the report by the Interdepartmental Group on Climatology is working its way through the system. There’s no mention of the Nature editorial in the files I’ve seen National Archives, which does not, of course, mean that it was not discussed. It simply means that there isn’t a surviving minute of it.
What I think we can learn from this is
That intelligent people from the mid-late 70s were well aware of the CO2 build-up issue.
That our Lords and masters didn’t pay any attention and that they simply sought advice from the people who were going to tell them the things they wanted to hear
Or maybe they had the misfortune to go to the wrong advice-givers and would it have been different if they’d gone to CRU? I don’t know. We’ll never know. We can’t know history doesn’t provide those experimental points.
What happened next. Nature fell back under the editorship of John Maddox, and in 1988 he was still at his bullshit games of publishing editorials about “jumping the gun” and getting chided by Wally Broecker this time.
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:
May 3, 1978 – First and last “Sun Day”
May 3, 1989 “Exploration Access and Political Power” speech by Hugh Morgan
May 3, 1990 – From Washington to Canberra, the “greenhouse effect” has elites promising…
May 3, 2024 – Friends of the Earth and Client Earth win a court case