Proceedings of a Workshop Held on 28–30 Sept. 1992 at IIASA
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 356ppm. 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 IIASA had been established in the early 1970s as a way for scientists on either side of the “Iron Curtain” to meet and share notes. IIASA was one of the key places where discussions about energy and climate were happening in the mid-1970s – it’s where, for example, the idea of CCS was broached.
The specific context was that the conference was planned and announced before the Earth Summit, so will have been one of the first opportunities for scientists and some policy-makers to take stock, and look at the implications of what had been agreed.
What I think we can learn from this is that the “smartest” people in the room haven’t been able to prevent civilisational failure – maybe they aren’t all that smart, and/or have been looking at it all wrong…
What happened next – the workshops kept happening. The conference class like their privileges.
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.
Eighteen years ago, on this day, September 27th, 2007,
2007 Kyoto Protocol Inaction Demonstration, Washington D.C.
Four environmental organizations including Greenpeace, Oil Change International, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, staged a protest against climate change inaction and the Bush Administration’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Demonstrators gathered outside the State Department, where Bush was (ironically) holding an international meeting on climate change. Nearly 50 activists, including Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando, were arrested on civil disobedience charges, i.e. refusal to disperse.
and more here – https://climateandcapitalism.com/2007/09/23/dc-rally-to-protest-bush-climate-change-conference/
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 364ppm. 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 the US had signed up to the UNFCCC treaty in 1992, having made sure – via threatening to boycott the Earth Summit – that the text contained no commitments for reductions of emissions.
The specific context was that there was a huge industry lobbying effort in the run-up to the Kyoto conference (to be held in December 1997) to ensure that profits would not be harmed. This effort by the green groups is part of the fight.
What I think we can learn from this – the green groups are always outspent, of course, and are up against the Western belief that “some technology will turn up at the last minute…”
What happened next – the Kyoto conference delivered a weak protocol, which the US pulled out of in 2001. There was then an effort to create a sequel, in Copenhagen in 2009. That failed. Then, in 2015 the world-saving “Paris Agreement”, oh yes.
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.
This one you should listen to. I listen to a lot of podcasts, especially on climate and energy (policy, politics, etc) and they are mostly very very mid (at best). Here’s a recent rant about the whys of that.
This one (and another, to be reviewed soon) was the exception and perhaps almost exceptional.
It’s by a bunch of 17 year old Americans. To repeat myself , smart 17 year olds are potentially a very good source of info because they
a) have more skin in the game re: 2nd half of the 21st century
b) haven’t had obedience beaten into them by The System (“man”).
It’s a podcast by City Atlas. Who they? Well, City Altas
“was founded to help New Yorkers and the public everywhere understand and prepare for the future, as described in the reports of the IPCC, C40.org, and the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), and to strengthen the democratic process towards equitable responses to climate change. Our emphasis is on building public energy and climate literacy as a way to create support for a fast transition to a zero carbon world.”
They interview a guy called Professor Adam Aron, (personal website here) who was on one academic track (cognitive neuroscience) and has recently jumped to another (the psychology of collective action).
They interview Aron about, well, building social movements and for once from an academic it isn’t banalities, generalities and apple pie.
The transcript (not quite tidy and unhyperlinked – I have added those) is here.
The first bit that made me sit up and take real notice was this
“There’s a very beautiful example of this, given there’s a book called Let This Radicalize You by Haber and Kaba, two women of color in Chicago. And in one of the chapters, I think, Kelly Hays describes how they’re busy, Miriam tries to bring her into a struggle to try and get restitution for victims of torture by the Chicago Police. It’s called reparations. Now this is back in 2014 and in that chapter, Kelly explains, you know, I didn’t think we could win. There’s no way that we would win this thing, but I nevertheless joined Miriam in her struggle anyway, even though I very much doubted we could win, in fact, they ended up winning. They actually ended up getting restitution from the Chicago Police. Kind of amazing story. So why did Kelly join Miriam? And she says, Well, I joined Miriam because I thought it would be meaningful and generative. We had a history of trust. I thought I would have an adventure. I thought that I would learn things by doing the process. I thought that I would discover sort of the limits of my courage. I would develop new skills. So I think this phenomenon of social obligation to each other and how we build that in small groups is kind of a key part of how to get the larger social mobilization.”
On the barriers facing academics (YO, THIERRY!)
“we actually published a paper last year in 2024 with first authors, Fabian Dablander, a brilliant young guy from the Netherlands and colleagues. And it was a survey of over 9000 academics and scientists, sort of trying to understand, you know, what are the barriers to them acting”
Aron isn’t pollyann-ish about the difficulties facing us as a species, and the barriers facing social movement organisations.
“But I think more broadly, there’s a whole suite of issues, the sort of lonely, atomized and fragmented reality in which we find ourselves. I referred to that earlier. This kind of I’m all alone and with my family in my house, or, you know, everything society is telling me, I just need to get ahead and get my brand and develop myself as an entrepreneur, I’m kind of deterritorialized from the place, I don’t belong anywhere. I’m a consumer. I’m locked in this kind of, you know, hyper-consumption machine, and I just need to kind of selfishly take care of myself. I mean, there’s enormous pressures on people to have that attitude psychologically. I think that is one of our major barriers, and one of the major reasons people aren’t acting, but I think also people don’t know what to do, even people who completely get that global heating is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, who understand, as many adults do, who have children, that this is really a threat now to people’s livelihoods and wellbeing and their kids lives in the next few decades, people don’t know what to do. I think that’s a really that gets back to a bigger question you asked me about, how do we mobilize the wider society? Because there’s myriad things people can do, but we really need them to act together towards really strong policy.”
Does the interviewer always follow up on the interesting stuff Aron says? No, she sticks to her list of questions but a) that’s okay and b) they are good questions. Over time, I suspect she will develop the skills and confidence start to go down (and come out of) rabbit holes with interviewees. (NB there is absolutely nothing wrong with what she is doing now).
Is this podcast worth your time? This episode, hell yes, and I have high hopes for the others in the series.
Fifty five years ago, on this day, September 26th, 1970, the Medical Journal of Australia runs an article on “Notes on Some Aspects of Pollution”.
“The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has increased by 14% since 1960. If it continues to build up at anything like that rate, it could, by the end of the century, form a blanket around the earth, raising the temperature appreciably, turning the tropics into hothouses, making the temperate zones tropical, and beginning to melt the polar ice caps. If the trend continued until the ice caps were completely melted, all maritime cities would be drowned, and the surf that now beats on Bondi beach would be beating on the lower slopes of the Blue Mountains.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 325ppm. 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 there was a global ecological awareness/concern springing up.
The specific context was from late 1969 carbon dioxide build up was mentioned among all the other dangers facing us. It had been on ABC radio in September 1969, and was popping up in articles like these.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’ve had warnings about carbon dioxide build-up for a lot longer than most people realise.
What happened next: The warnings were, of course, ignored. From 1988 onwards, there have been various games of kayfabe.
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.
Seventy five years ago, on this day, September 26th, 1950,
On 26 and 27 September 1950, the U.S. Navy conducted a secret experiment named “Operation Sea-Spray” in which balloons filled with S. marcescens were released and burst over urban areas of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Although the Navy later claimed the bacteria were harmless, beginning on September 29, 11 patients at a local hospital developed very rare, serious urinary tract infections. One of the afflicted patients, Edward J. Nevin, died.[27] Cases of pneumonia in San Francisco also increased after S. marcescens was released.[28][29] (That the simulant bacteria caused these infections and death has never been conclusively established.) Nevin’s son and grandson lost a lawsuit they brought against the government between 1981 and 1983, on the grounds that the government is immune,[30] and that the chance that the sprayed bacteria caused Nevin’s death was minute.[31]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 310ppm. 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 the “Cold War” and all the “national security” stuff was offering opportunities to conduct wild experiments with pretty much no oversight or risk of exposure. So scientists went wild.
What I think we can learn from this That when governments bang on about “national security”, watch out for your health. Or watch it decline because – absent an extremely vigorous civil society – you are gonna get used as some kind of guinea pig.
In the Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the Army revealed:
Between 1949 and 1969, open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times. In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless. In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria.
In the 1950s, army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City and Key WestFlorida with no known illnesses resulting.
In the 1950s, army researchers dispersed zinc cadmium sulfide, a known cancer-causing agent, over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere. The particles were detected more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away in New York state.
Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people, was released in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places.
In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system. Army officials concluded in a January 1968 report that: “Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic disease-causing agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death.”[17]
In a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington’s National Airport and its Greyhound Lines bus terminal, more than 130 passengers were exposed to the bacteria and traveled to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks following the mock attack.[5]
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.
Thirty years ago, on this day, September 26th, 1995,
Senator Cook opens CRC that “will help maintain Australia’s export coal trade in an increasingly competitive and environmentally sensitive international market”
Cook, P. 1995 Black coal goes green at new Cooperative Research Centre.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 361ppm. 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 Australia had become the world’s biggest coal exporter in 1984, and Australian politicians had been trying to “square the circle” with environment concerns since the late 1980s. See for example Bob Hawke in January 1989.
The specific context was that there were various research institutions happy to relieve the taxpayer of cash – god forbid industry fund research and development in a meaningful way…
What I think we can learn from this is that the taxpayer is always on the hook.
What happened next “Clean Coal”? Yeah, like dry water.
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.
Fifty five years ago, on this day, September 24th, 1970,
“The British Society for Social Responsibility in Science has formed an Art and Technology group…. the first demonstration sponsored by the group coincided with the opening of the Arts Council’s international KINETICS exhibition 24 Sept. The work MOBILE was presented to critics and spectators and driven around London. It consists of a box covered with PVC, and mounted on top of a car. The box contained meat, flowers and vegetables. A tube fed the exhaust of the car into the box, with stunning visual (and chemical) results. The group hopes that the idea will be taken up by people around the world.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 325ppm. 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 from about 1969 British scientists and activists were starting to link local and global air pollution (and pollution more broadly).
The specific context was that London’s air seemed much cleaner thanks to the Clean Air Act of 1956 – and was, in some ways. In other ways, not so much…
What I think we can learn from this is that cars have been a catastrophic invention, on ecological, social, psychological levels. God help us all.
What happened next
By 1973 the eco-wave was basically gone, and wouldn’t be back until the late 1980s. These waves, they come and go…
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.
On this day in 2022 the the CEO of the ad agency (well, behemoth) IPG announced it was revising its policy on fossil fuels.
In what the company said is a first for the industry, Interpublic Group and its agencies are now proactively reviewing the climate impacts of prospective clients that operate in the oil, energy and utility sectors before accepting new work.
IPG said it was working with climate change consultant Planet + Purpose Solutions to develop a set of questions that the company expects prospective clients to affirm before agreeing to partner with them.
The questions include:
Have these potential clients set specific emission reduction goals that are aligned with 1.5°C ambition to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 or sooner with no greater than 10% off-setting?
Are these companies publishing clear climate reporting, including scope, baseline, timeline, and the tracking of Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions?
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 418ppm. 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 white colour people with educations and eyes were beginning to see the webs of complicity, and not liking it so much. And were trying to change the system from within (as per Leonard Cohen).
The specific context was that “creatives” etc within the agency were pressuring for a pledge.
What I think we can learn from this. You can – with effort and luck – get some promises of action from our Lords and Masters.
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.
Eighteen years ago, on this day, September 23rd, 2007,
After ten years of being a climate sceptic, John Howard begrudgingly pronounced himself a climate change realist. But while the rhetoric has changed, Government policy hasn’t. Australia’s greenhouse pollution continues to soar as the renewables industry slowly but surely packs its bags and heads overseas. Meanwhile the coal industry continues to expand with the help of massive public subsidies.
Anon, 2007. Govt climate ad campaign not so clever. Greenpeace 23 September.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 384ppm. 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 Australian policymakers had been shitting on climate policy since the beginning.
The specific context was that Prime Minister John Howard, an enemy of sanity on climate, had been forced, in late 2006, to attempt a “reverse ferret” on climate policy. He’d appointed a panel to produce the “Shergold Report” on emissions trading. This convinced no-one, and with an election coming what could be more natural than to spend taxpayers’ money to propagandise them.
What I think we can learn from this. Stupid Evil is gonna Stupid Evil, and expect a subsidy to Stupid Evil from the public. And mostly, Stupid Evil gets what it wants.
What happened next – Howard lost the November 2007 election and, indeed, his own seat.
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.
Seventy years ago today, on Thursday September 22nd 1955, a scientist employed by General Electric stood in front of an audience of engineers and told them that the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “may be having a greenhouse effect on our climate” because mankind was “contaminating the earth’s atmosphere faster than nature can clean it.”
The audience was a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, hosted by the Cleveland Engineering Society. The scientist giving the after-dinner speech, titled “Fact and Fantasy” was John G. Hutton, originally English, who had gained a PhD in electrical engineering at Yale.
The following day the newspaper the Plain-Dealer carried the story under the headline “Clears H-Bomb as Weather Climate.” From there the story got picked up by UP (United Press) which quoted Hutton – having explained that trees and plant life absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen – as saying
“However… when people chop down trees, bulldoze once-rural land for suburbs, and build factories on former open fields, they lessen the amount of carbon dioxide nature is cleaning from our air.”
Hutton also referred to the Los Angeles smog problem (see Rebecca John’s investigation for DeSmog on how fossil fuel companies warped the scientific research effort around this, burying the carbon dioxide aspect).
Hutton had been born in 1916, Sunderland, England. Having failed his exam to enter secondary school, he worked in manual labour and went to night school in order to be accepted to Durham University. From there he was awarded a fellowship to attend Yale, where he got his Masters and Doctorate. After brief stints in Canada and teaching at Cornell, he started working for General Electric in 1943 as an electrical engineer.
Hutton’s inspirations
Hutton already was an experienced after-dinner speaker by this time, and it is not clear why he chose to talk about climate change.
Two years previously Gilbert Plass, drawing on the work of Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius, and the more recent work of English Steam Engineer Guy Callendar, had pointed to the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a long-term threat. Also in 1953 economist Willam J. Baxter, author of the very popular “Today’s Revolution in Weather” had touched on the theory. When Hutton spoke, Plass’s first academic paper on CO2 build-up had been submitted but not published, and Roger Revelle, the famous scientist and administrator, had not yet begun to use carbon dioxide build-up as one part of his (successful) campaign to convince US federal politicians to fund expensive science.
It may simply have been that the International Geophysical Year – a world-wide collaboration of data gathering – was coming soon (1957-1958) and he thought it worth talking about; he told his Cleveland audience that carbon dioxide build-up would be investigated during the IGY.
Two other possible sources of inspiration deserve a mention. In June 1955, Fortune magazine had published an article by the extremely well-known and respected Jonny von Neumann. In “Can we survive technology?” the Hungarian genius noted that
“[t]he carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry’s burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere’s composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.”
The second source is internal to GE. Another – far more prominent – General Electric scientist was already making waves on the question of carbon dioxide and the atmosphere, albeit from another perspective.
From the late 1940s, pursuing work he and others had conducted during the second world war, Irving Langmuir advocated using frozen carbon dioxide (“dry ice”) to see clouds.
On the afternoon of October 13, 1947, an Air Force B-17 aircraft penetrated a hurricane 415 miles (667 km) east of Jacksonville and dumped several pounds of crushed dry ice into the storm, just to see what would happen. This was the first attempt to modify a tropical cyclone by seeding it with freezing nuclei.
Regardless of Hutton’s specific impetus, the idea that man might modify the weather and climate – either deliberately (as a weapon of war, or to improve crop growth) or accidentally was “in the air.” In June 1953 tornados had occurred in places that had rarely had them before, and there was a great deal of speculation and anxiety around the possibility that H-bomb tests had caused them (for a great summary of this see McBrien, 2019).
What happened next
There was immediate newspaper coverage around the United States in local papers. Usually this was buried in later pages, but on several occasions it was front page news. (e.g. “Engineer lays hotter weather on growing industrialization” The Buffalo News, September 23, page 1) and “Auto Exhaust May Change Climate More Than A-Bomb” Omaha World-Herald, November 18, page 1)
Over the following months, the story was syndicated elsewhere, often with the “no, it’s not H-bombs” angle emphasised.
In February 1956 the science correspondent for the Washington Evening Star (then a far more important paper than the Washington Post) covered Hutton’s speech.
Other publications, including Journal of the Franklin Institute, “Management” and “Power Plant Engineering” also ran articles covering his speech.
Most intriguingly, in 1956 the long-running radio program sponsored by GE, “Excursions in Science,” covered the question of carbon dioxide build-up. Hutton’s speech was not mentioned – the episode was based on Gilbert Plass’s paper which had just come out. You can listen to it here: Climate Change and Industrial Activity – Excursions in Science Radio Program from 1950s
What we learn and what happened next
The value of this is that it builds a picture of carbon dioxide build-up as a persistent (albeit minor) factor in US print media coverage of what would later be called “pollution” narratives. The carbon dioxide theory had received a boost thanks to Gilbert Plass’s May 1953 presentation to the American Geophysical Union. Hutton’s speech, the first I have found, came before Revelle, Teller and others, before we even had “the Keeling Curve”
Hutton seems not to have repeated his warning. He spent 39 years working for GE, retiring in 1981. He died in 1995 after an extended illness, just after the first “COP” meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and a few months before the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report stated that human activities were already having a “discernible” impact on the world’s climate.
When Hutton made his speech in Cleveland, the atmospheric concentration of C02 was 313ppm and annual human emissions were 7.4bn tonnes.
When he died they were at 360ppm, with emissions at 23.27bn tonnes.
Today they stand at 424ppm, with emissions at 37bn tonnes.
There is a very great deal of trouble ahead. Some of it has arrived, but much much more is on its way. We can’t say we were not warned.
McBrien, Justin. 2019. “‘The Tornado Was Not the A-Bomb’s Child’: The Politics of Extreme Weather in the Age of Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Autumn 2019), no. 40. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8814.
