Forty seven years ago, on this day, October 29th, 1979,
Speech by Senator Webster about Cape Grim (Conservation Council of South Australia Newsletter)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 337ppm. 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 super-accurate measures of carbon dioxide had been taken from 1958 at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, and Antarctica.
Since the early 1970s there was a relatively consistent, persistent measuring exercise in Australia. They started measuring on commercial aeroplanes, or with the assistance of, I think, TAA, the state-owned airline, and then a permanent carbon dioxide collection began at Cape Grim, which was already a CSIRO monitoring station.
The specific context here is that you see a senator giving a speech, hardly unusual. It’s what senators are for. This one happens to be the Minister for the Environment under the Fraser government. And emissions were going up, and everyone who was paying attention (not many at this time, to everyone else’s shame) could see there was trouble ahead.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’ve been monitoring this problem for half a century, failing to do anything about it for almost as long.
What happened next Cape Grim kept monitoring, and what it kept monitoring was that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide just continued to rise and rise remorselessly.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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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:
October 29, 1984 – Lord Ashby speaks out
October 29, 2004 – Aussie environmentalists win a court case…