Forty eight years ago, on this day, August 30, 1975, the very first edition of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s new science program carries a segment about climate change.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-science-show-celebrates-35-years/3023384#transcript
Peter Ritchie-Calder: In the course of the last century we’ve put 360,000 million tonnes of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. On the present trends the accumulated requirements between now and 2000 AD will come out as something like 11,000 million tonnes of coal a year, 200,000 million tonnes of crude petroleum and liquid natural gas, and 50 million million cubic metres of natural gas. Remember, this is coming out of the bowels of the Earth, and now we are taking it out and we’re throwing it back into the atmosphere, and into the climatic machine, into the weather machine, where it is beginning to affect the climate itself. Now this is a very serious matter, and to me there is no question that our climate has changed.
Robyn Williams: Do you expect the limitation to this ever-expanding use of fossil fuels to be due to either running out of them, or to this second question of climate effect?
Peter Ritchie-Calder: I think definitely that environmental factors…that you will simply be confronted with a situation which will make life virtually intolerable.
Robyn Williams: We’ve got these different possible techniques, there’s a nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, solar power, tidal power and so on. What do you think will happen to determine which of these will become the satisfactory energy source? Do think it will be questions of scientific ingenuity. Do you think it will be questions about changing social patterns and use of energy or questions of money?
Peter Ritchie-Calder: If we’re looking at what I regard as the absurd oil situation, the OPEC situation…I must say I just get a lot of sardonic pleasure out of it because here you’ve got these fellas really cocking a sniff at us and saying to the people who went for that cheap oil, ‘You’re going to pay the price that we’re going to determine for you.’ It also reminds us of the enormous stupidity of our whole scientific policies over the last 40 years. We were very emphatic in 1963, that’s 12 years ago…these are the years that the locusts have eaten, we’ve really wasted our opportunity…in 1963 we were talking at the Rome conference, the UN conference, on new sources of energy, which is rather sardonic because we weren’t talking about atomic energy at all, we were talking about the oldest sources of energy which is the sun and the wind and the water and geothermal energy.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 331ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Scottish public intellectual Ritchie-Calder had been aware of the potential problem of climate change since 1954 at the latest (probably earlier). He had been speaking of it as a serious problem by 1963 at the latest. His January 1970 article about “Mortgaging the Old Homestead,” which had been serialised in the Bulletin and elsewhere, included a relatively lengthy mention of the carbon dioxide problem.
At the time this show was broadcast the Australian Academy of Science was conducting an investigation into “the carbon dioxide problem”. It was Nugget Coombs who’d set that ball rolling, using Kissinger’s speech to the General Assembly as a pretext.
What I think we can learn from this is that intelligent Australians who listened to the Science Show knew from 1975 what was going on.
What happened next was that the Science Show kept covering the climate issue and we’ve already talked about it on this website – the Nirenberg and O’Brien episode and others… well done Robyn Williams!
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.