Forty three years ago, on this day, October 21st, 1983, University of Maine student paper editorial Doomsday revisited
“The news coming from Washington Tuesday was gloomier than usual. The Environmental Protection Agency warned the continued warming of the earth’s climate due to pollution could create serious problems as early as the 1990s.
The EPA released its report, titled, “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?” and concluded that regardless of any future restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels, the warming of the earth’s atmosphere is inevitable….”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 343ppm. 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 the late 1960s university publications had been going into depth on global environmental issues, including the possibility of climactic change, either colder or warmer. By the mid 70s, it was pretty obvious it was going to be warmer.
The specific context was that the Environmental Protection Agency had just released a report called, “Can we delay a greenhouse warming?” with the answer “almost certainly not.” And then two days later, I think after this publication, the National Academies of Science, Academy of Sciences had released the Nierenberg report, basically pouring cold water on everything.
What I think we can learn from this is that this stuff was understood in 1983 though, to be fair, this was the most dangerous and tense part of the Second Cold War, and you could easily be forgiven for not worrying about climate change and the greenhouse effect, because nuclear war was going to get you first.
What happened next. Nuclear war didn’t get us first, which is of course a good thing.
See also University of Wollongong, 1989
Someone could do a thing about university newspapers and all this shit.?
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
Xx
References
xx
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:
October 21, 1824 – Cement patent granted
October 21, 1933 – Melbourne Age newspaper tells readers about… carbon dioxide
October 21 1980 – Conference on “Climate and Offshore Energy Resources” in London
October 21, 1991 – “Environment agencies start to flex their muscles”
October 21, 1983 – “Changing Climate” report released
October 21, 1989 – Langkawi Declaration on environmental sustainability…