On this day, December 27 in 1989 the Canberra Times reported that a Queensland mining chief had called the greenhouse effect “socialist hokum”,
Mussared, D. (1989) Global Warming The Evidence The Canberra Times Wednesday 27 December 1989, page 32
I’ve not been able to find the name of this clown, or the date, but it will have happened at some point in 1988 or more likely 1989.
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 353ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
By 1989 “The Greenhouse Effect,” as Global Warming/Climate Change was briefly known, was ‘everywhere’ in the media (to be bumped only by the build-up to the First Gulf War, from August 1990.)
Why this matters.
The point is this – we all assess new things in the world through various lenses – of what seems ‘right’, what fits our cosmology. If there is something like “the greenhouse effect”, which implies things we have always thought of as Good (more cheap energy) might have downsides, or presents a problem that is going to upset our way of life, then of COURSE we look for ways to dismiss it. That’s who we are. And an entire industry of professionals has built up to make this easier rather than harder to do.
What happened next?
Queensland got megarich from selling coal, both thermal and metallurgical (or rather, some people – in and beyond Queensland – got rich. Others, not so much).