Author: drmarchudson

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Activism Australia UNFCCC United States of America

1992, Jan 3: Greenpeace vs POTUS on Climate Change

On this day, 30 years ago, to coincide with the visit of President George HW Bush to Australia, Greenpeace Australia took out newspaper adverts of the Statue of Liberty with smoke billowing from her torch, calling on the United States to drastically reduce its carbon emissions. 

The context for this was that negotiations for the climate treaty to be signed in Rio later that year were well underway. And all the signs were that the US would play a spoiling role. 

This matters, because that’s exactly what Uncle Sam did. The French said rightly, that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by wealthy countries should be included in the text of the treaty. The Americans replied, “if you put those in, we’re not coming.” The French blinked, reasoning that timetables and targets could be inserted later. They were at Kyoto, vastly inadequate, but there. And then the Americans didn’t ratify and withdrew from the process.

We are still living with the consequences of this. And our children, other people’s children, other people’s children will all also live with those. Not to mention all the other species we “share” this planet with. 

It’s always worth remembering that these agreements that we live with now were the result of previous proposals, compromises and in this case -as in many others – naked veto power.

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Weekly updates

Weekly Update #01 – of weather modification, guest posts and Big Plans

Welcome to week 01 of All Our Yesterdays.

Obviously not much to report yet. Three posts up (two on January 1st – most days will just be one). I’ve set myself some notional targets –

I’d like (at least) 36 guest blog posts during the course of the year, with no more than half of them (fewer if possible!) by white male academics like me, writing about the wider world (what New Internationalist rightly calls ‘the Majority World‘, because that’s where the majority of humans live. We have one for January 31st already, and if you’d like to do a guest post, get in touch, in the first instance via Twitter – @our_yesterdays.

I’d like (at least) 2000 Twitter followers by the end of the year (I started with 48, now up to 50). This is an even-more-than-usual arbitrary number, perhaps over-ambitious.

More generally, the point of the site, for myself, is to get (much) better at the whole digital humanities thing. If you have skills/knowledge you think I should have, please get in touch…

As ever, here’s what this site is for, here’s how you can help/get involved.

What you may have missed in the last week on the site

Er, not much, beyond Weather Modification (Jan 1st) and the like.

What I’ve been reading/watching/listening to

Don’t Look Up – liked it. Submitted a 2.5k piece to a journal. watch this space

Finished “The Big Bang Theory” (yes, all 12 seasons). Liked it a lot.

About a forgotten 1988-9 Environmental group in the UK. Am writing about this- watch this space.

Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon. Wow, unrepentant and undisguised political education/anti-corporate jeremiad (take your pick).

What’s coming up in the next week on the site

The week of 3-9 January is brought to you by the letter S: Posts about social movement resilience, spoofing the stock market, sulfur taxes and sea-level rise.

What’s coming up in the next week in the real world

Nothing in particular, climate-wise, that I am aware of (over time I hope to build up some horizon scanning capacity..

Categories
anti-reflexivity

2014, Jan 2: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop”

Jan 2, 2014 

On this day, eight years ago, Donald Trump tweeted that global warming was a hoax. Specifically –

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014

This was neither Trump’s first or last tweet on the subject. There’s this corker from a couple of years previously:

[see this Vox collation of all the tweets].  Of course, as President, he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and tore up environmental regulations, rendering the already weak Environmental Protection Agency even more toothless. 

We can see this as a morality tale of a wicked man or we can take an historical and sociological view. Historically, we could look at the 1991 campaign especially aimed at older white men. Under the name or  Information Council on the Environment (“ICE” – geddit?), as described in Ross Gelbspan’s book “The Heat is On” and elsewhere (see the climatefiles too!)

Sociologically, we could use anti-reflexivity, the concept of McCright and Dunlap developed, to explain not just Trump, but Trump’s enduring popularity with people who pine for an imagined 1950s where straight, white men. were in charge. Women were in the kitchen, people of color were “colored” people who knew the place and Mother Nature was under the thumb.

I don’t need to tell you what happened next – you’re watching it.

Further Reading

Dunlap, R. and McCright, A. (2010) “Climate change denial: Sources, actors and strategies” 

1991 Information Council on the Environment Test Denial Campaign Plan and Survey https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-campaign-plan/

Categories
International Geophysical Year Technophilia United States of America Weather modification

1958, Jan 1: Control the weather before the Commies do…

On this day, 64 years ago the New York Times had a front page story with the title “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1

Written by one John Finney it begins…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — A special advisory committee recommended to President Eisenhower today an expanded and vigorous Government research program into how to control or modify the world’s weather

This was of course peak-Cold War. A few months previously the Russians, having captured better Nazi rocket scientists than the Americans had managed to paperclip, had aput a small metal ball into orbit, causing panic and despair.

It was also in the middle of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) ( at topic to which we will return).

Given the general paranoia and offense to the Uncle Sam’s amour propre, it’s surprising we didn’t end up with a “cloud gap” to match the illusory-but-useful bomber gap and missile gap…

Why this matters: we need to remember that the early history of understanding the climate is wrapped up in military needs (think about the British Navy and the Met Office) and computational models – see Edwards, 2010). It’s all part of the whole “give me absolute control over every living soul” thing that is steadily dooming us.

There is a strand of conspiratorial thinking, and fiction, which has ‘weather wars’ successfully being fought (I have a bunch of these novels, and should write about them. They’re fun, while bonkers).

What happened next? The IGY yielded a great findings (though the Pentagon briefly baulked at continuing to fund the C02 measures on Mauna Loa – that’s for another time). Weather modification experiments continued, but came up against the limits of human power.

References

Edwards, P. (2010). A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press

Finney, J. (1958) “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1

Further reading

Fleming, J. (2012) Fixing the Sky: the Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia University Press.

Hamblin, J. (2013) Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford University Press

Harper, K. (2008). Climate control: United States weather modification in the cold war and beyond. Endeavour, Volume 32, Issue 1, pp. 20-26.

Categories
Ignored Warnings Scientists

2007, Jan 1: “If we fail to act, we end up with a different planet”

On this day, 15 years ago, the now defunct newspaper the Independent, ran a front page interview with famed climate scientist James Hansen.

This came with climate change already high on the agenda – the previous year had seen the first “Camp for Climate Action” and the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. New Conservative Party leader David Cameron had decided environmentalism was a leading way to detoxify the Tory brand, and in April 2006 had travelled to the Arctic to ‘hug a huskie’. More generally, humanity was going through its second big “something must be done” moment on climate (and its third on environmental matters more broadly – see “issue attention cycles” in the concepts page of this site).

In the interview Hansen, famous for his efforts to raise public awareness and concern, predating his iconic June 23 1988 testimony in front of a Senate committee (which we will return to later) said

““If we go another 10 years, by 2015, at the current rate of growth of Co2 emissions, which is about 2 per cent per year, the emissions in 2015 will be 35 per cent larger than they were in 2000. But if we want to get on a scenario that keeps global temperature in the range that it’s been in for the last million years we would need to decrease the emissions by something of the order of 25 per cent by the middle of the century and by something like 75 per cent by the end of the century“

Hansen is usually out in front on these matters. Events have overtaken him on this one, and there is now scientific consensus around much much steeper cuts in emissions. There is an alleged political consensus around “zero carbon” by 2050.

So, an ignored warning from the past. So what? This matters because there will still be people who tell you ‘”we’ve only just become aware of the problem, we need to give technology time to work”.

What happened next? We kept burning the fossil fuels – (we’ve burnt more between 1991 and 2019 than we did from 1751 to 1990). Hansen wrote a book (see further reading), and, well, Groundhog Day has kept on coming around again…

References

Connor, J. (2007) ‘If we fail to act, we will end up with a different planet’. The Independent, 01 January, p.1

Further reading

Hansen, J. (2009) The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. Bloomsbury Press

Millman, O. (2018) Ex-Nasa scientist: 30 years on, world is failing ‘miserably’ to address climate change. The Guardian, 19 June.

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The site itself

Welcome to “All Our Yesterdays”

This site is a starting point for people who want to know more about climate science, climate politics and the history of the efforts to get “us” to take it seriously. It’s also an opportunity for me (Dr Marc Hudson) to gain new skills and knowledge in the “digital humanities”.

There will be a new blog post (very very occasionally two) every day. Every Sunday there will be a weekly summation blog post. As I gain new skills, other bells and whistles will be added.

If you have questions, suggestions etc, well put them in the comments.