Thirty seven years ago, on this day, July 27th, 1988 a highly entertaining and informative article by Australian chemist Ben Selinger is published in the Canberra Times.
Selinger, B. 1988. The greenback affects the greenhouse effect. Canberra Times July 27, p.8
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 351ppm. As of 2025, 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 Australian scientists (and probably especially the chemists!) had been looking at carbon dioxide build-up for at the very least a decade and saying “oh, there will be trouble at some point.”
The specific context was in 1988 the issue had hit the headlines (in part thanks to sterling work by the Commission for the Future and the CSIRO’s division of Atmospheric Physics). By 1989, we were into the blustering and “funding for further research” dodges and wheezes as politicians began to understand quite how disruptive to the status quo that real greenhouse action would be.
What I think we can learn from this is that there is a very identifiable pattern to the recurrent booms in awareness – we live in a kind of Groundhog Day, but without quite realising that. So, a boring tragedy instead of a Buddhist comedy…
What happened next – the counter-attack to climate concern got properly going in late 1989 and then picked up momentum and support. Meanwhile, the emissions kept going up, as did the atmospheric concentrations…
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.
Also on this day:
July 27, 1977 – Pro-nuclear professor cites #climate concerns at Adelaide speech
July 27, 1979 – Thatcher’s Cabinet ponders burying climate report
July 27, 2001 – Minerals Council of Australia versus the Kyoto Protocol