Seventy years ago, on this day, December 9th, 1955,
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 313ppm. 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 from the late 1940s the possibilities of what we would not call geo-engineering – melting the Arctic on purpose etc – were popping up in the popular press and the left-wing press.
The specific context was that the International Geophysical Year was coming up, and questions of changes in the weather/climate and the possibilities of man-made weather were becoming a commonplace.
What I think we can learn from this – the knowledge was there, for a very long time, but mostly “lost in the noise.”
What happened next – these sorts of articles kept getting published. The emissions kept climbing.
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:
December 9, 1974 – UK Department of Energy launches “energy efficiency” programme