One hundred and fourteen years ago, on this day, August 14th, 1912, this was published
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 300ppm. 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 it had been understood and accepted for decades that carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) trapped heat (see Eunice Foote and John Tyndall). In the 1890s Svante Arrhenius had spent a year calculating what would happen if the amount of carbon dioxide in the air doubled. The world would get significantly warmer, he showed, but he thought this was a good thing (less severe Swedish winters) and would take thousands of years.
The specific context was that the American magazine Popular Mechanics had done an article on whether the climate was changing and what the various theories were. This had then been excerpted/syndicated all over the show.
What I think we can learn from this is that people misunderstand how well accepted or known the carbon dioxide build-up theory was, and post it online as if “they” “knew.” “They” really didn’t. The absolute earliest date you can say “politicians etc really ought to have paid close attention” is 1953, and really, to be fair, the late 1950s…
What happened next People keep posting this damn thing as a conversation-ending-cliche on social media and I wish they would stop but they don’t and won’t.
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.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Also on this day:
August 14, 1971 – Stanford Prison Study begins…
August 14, 1989 – South Australia creates “interdepartmental committee on #climate change”…
August 14, 2000 – Carbon Capture Technology will save us. Oh yes.
August 14, 2002 – Australian economists urge Kyoto Protocol ratification
August 14, 2007 – CCS report in Australia “between a rock and a hard place”
August 14, 2021 – It’s raining (again) oh no our world’s at an end…