Forty nine years ago, on this day, April 15, 1965, Murray Bookchin’s second book “Crisis in Our Cities” becomes one of the first to contain a warning about the long-term build up of carbon dioxide.
On page 187 we have this –
And this – “Meteorologists believe that the immediate effect of increased heat leads to violent air circulation and increasingly destructive storms…. theoretically, after several centuries of fossil-fuel combustion, the increased heat of the atmosphere could even melt the polar ice caps of the earth and lead to the inundation of the continents with sea water.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
Herber (real name Murray Bookchin) had written about “Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, ahead of the publication of Rachel Carson’s far more influential “Silent Spring.”
This, his second book, mentioned the danger of climate change. I will try to dig into it more, but I strongly suspect Bookchin will have read the Conservation Foundation’s report on its March 1963 meeting about the C02 problem, held in New York.
The timing was good too – just two months earlier, in his special address to Congress, President Lyndon Johnson had name-checked carbon dioxide build-up.
What I think we can learn from this
Educated people have known for yonks.
Bookchin had to operate under a pseudonym because he was (checks notes) … an anarchist…
What happened next
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.