Twenty-seven years ago, on this day, August 30th, 1998,
4th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies, 30 Aug. – 2 Sept. 1998, Interlaken, Switzerland
There’s a book here
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 367ppm. 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 conferences about “greenhouse gas control technologies” had been happening since the early 1990s.
The specific context was that this was the first one after the Kyoto Protocol was “agreed” the previous December. It now looked like rich countries were going to have to something to reduce their emissions. Therefore, a bit more attention was being paid to various
What I think we can learn from this is that the promises of capture/reducing greenhouse gas emissions have been spilling from engineers’ mouths for decades. Proven at scale technologies that capture meaningful amounts of carbon dioxide? Not so much…
What happened next – the conferences kept happening. CCS has gone through periodic periods of rise and fall since then. The only really steady trend is in the Keeling Curve, which measures the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And guess what, that’s starting to point up more. Happy days.
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:
August 30, 1971 – Bob Carr (ex- NSW premier) ‘gets’ climate change
August 30, 1975 – The Science Show does climate change…
August 30, 1986 – Adelaide warned about climate change by Environment Minister Don Hopgood
August 30, 1989 – A global tax on emissions?!
August 30, 1990 -Australian diplomats (probably) tried to water down IPCC recommendations