Forty seven years ago, on this day, May 22nd, 1979,
President Carter’s chief scientific adviser Frank Press requests NAS to look at CO2
[following MacDonald and Pomerance] Finally, weeks later, MacDonald called to tell him that Press had taken up the issue. On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 3xxppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that from the mid 1970s, various scientists in the United States – we’re talking Gordon MacDonald, Alvin Weinberg, Roger Revelle, perhaps a few others – had been able to lobby the ERDA to start taking climate change seriously and put pressure on the higher-ups in the science establishment in the United States, especially President Carter’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Frank Press. And Press, on this day, asked the National Academy of Sciences to have a look at the issue with new eyes to see if the fears of the carbon dioxide action advocates were fair and justified.
The specific context was that Chief scientists understandably want to make sure a problem they are being told about is actually a problem, before they go to their political pay masters with it. That’s fair and legitimate.
What I think we can learn from this. That for all reasonable circumstances, we knew enough by the late 1970s to be taking action.
What happened next. The NAS did the study. This was the Charney report, and it said, “yeah, if we keep tipping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere there’s absolutely no reason not to believe that the temperature will go up significantly and that will cause a world of pain” and Press clearly didn’t like that, didn’t think it should be something on Carter’s agenda, especially in the following year, which was an election year.
Frank Press died 2020 – a life of magnitude https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2004812117
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:
May 22, 1972 – Horizon doco “Do you Dig National Parks?” – All Our Yesterdays
May 22, 1989 – Greenhouse plebiscite mooted
May 22, 2007 – “Clean coal” power station by 2014, honest…
May 22, 2000 – Industry versus the greenhouse trigger
May 22 – Build Back Biodiversity: International Biodiversity Day