Forty years ago, on this day, August 13th, 1986, a newspaper tells the truth.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 347ppm. As of 2026, 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 in Ireland in 1954 there had been warnings about carbon dioxide build up and the warnings had continued. Here we see by 1985 – and I’m thinking of the Villach meeting here- the scientists who studied this sort of thing were willing to come out and say “holy shit.” Thus from late ‘85 onwards, you see more and more reports, more scientists addressing Congress, parliament, etc. saying, “Look, this problem we warned you about tentatively, our warnings are no longer tentative. We’re damn sure there is trouble ahead.”
The specific context was , I don’t know, some National Academy of Sciences report, whatever.
What I think we can learn from this is that it takes a long time to get the attention of politicians, because well, various reasons, but we should not forget the politicians are not particularly bright people, very few of them have a science background, and they’re interested in problems that they can be seen to be solving before the next election, or at least be on a palpable, plausible pathway to solving. They also don’t like to go up against determined, rich, vested interests.
What happened next The climate issue really exploded in 1988. And we now have 40 years of failure to look at and rue.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
Also on this day:
August 13, 1882 – William “Coal Question” Jevons dies
August 13,1991 – clouds and silver linings
August 13, 2004 – “Stabilisation wedges”