Sixty six ago, on this day, August 6th, 1960,
https://www.nytimes.com/1960/08/06/archives/earth-warming-up.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 316ppm. As of 2026, 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 from 1953 when Gilbert Plass – building on the work of John Tyndall, Svante Arhennius and Guy Callender – had pointed to the build up of carbon dioxide as a factor in warming the earth. There had been semi-frequent discussions in the United States media, and to a much lesser extent in the UK media.
The specific context was that Charles David Keeling had been taking accurate, fanatically accurate in fact, measures of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at Mauna Loa, and also in Antarctica. And it was clear that the carbon dioxide was in fact building up. What was less clear at this point was whether the earth was warming up, because the warming trend that had continued until about 1940 had gone into reverse. At the time this was postulated that this was due to the amount of sulphur dioxide being put into the atmosphere by the extraordinary volumes of coal being burned. What sulphur dioxide does is it whitens clouds, so more sunlight bounces off them before ever hitting the earth, leading to cooling. This is the albedo effect.
What I think we can learn from this is that if you were reading the New York Times, you were therefore aware that there might be an issue with carbon dioxide. In fact, if you’re reading lots of newspapers, if you’d seen the Bell Telephone documentary Unchained Goddess, none of this was a state secret.
What happened next the New York Times kept reporting, sometimes about things getting cooler, some, but then from the late 60s onwards, pretty consistently about carbon dioxide as a threat. You can make lots of criticisms of the New York Times. I’d stand by those, but then if you think that one source is going to give you the unvarnished truth, then you’re a fool. You need to read widely. But then it becomes a question – who has the money and who has the time? I think we “pick” on establishment newspapers, especially left ones, nominally left, actually liberal ones, as gatekeepers, because we have a broader frustration that we have been unable to build an informed, engaged, and enraged civil society.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
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Also on this day:
August 6, 1990 – another climate documentary shown…
August 6, 2009 – Governor Paterson versus the Greenhouse Effect