Sixty five years ago, on this day, May 20th, 1959, the Times of India ran a letter, under the title “Getting Hotter?” by S.B. Kulkarni and R. Mani about Edward Teller’s warning on carbon dioxide.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 315ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Edward Teller had been talking about CO2 buildup. And this had caught the eye of a couple of people in India who had written letters about it.
What we learn is that people all around the world were aware. They’d already been in January of 1957 the Otago Herald times in New Zealand.
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.
Sixty seven years ago, on this day, May 19th, 1957 the Los Angeles Times asked the question (not for the first time.) This was all part of the pre-International Geophysical Year (IGY) build-up…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Los Angeles Times had already run some articles about this. And here’s another one. In the context that senior politicians, scientists had been talking about this, not just Revelle, but also Kaplan, Wexler, etc. And it was speculative, but Gilbert Plass by this time had come out with his article in Tellus and was working on one for Scientific American.
What we learn is that, again, if you were reading a newspaper the idea that over time the carbon dioxide could build up and cause mayhem was explained to you. Whether you chose to remember it, or believe it was up to you.
What happened next, the International Geophysical Year, Sputnik the Keeling Curve, the remorseless rise of emissions and then 30 years later, greenhouse effect would become undeniable. Except to those who chose to deny it, of course.
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 seven years ago, on this day, May 18th, 1967, NA Leslie, giving the Presidential Address at Institute of Petroleum, quotes from Barry Commoner’s Science and Survival, and mentions CO2 build- up as a possible problem
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Barry Commoner’s book had come out the previous September. The BBC had shown Challenge in January of 1967 and the oil and gas industries’ own environmental body Concawe had been going since ‘63. And Torrey Canyon had just happened too…
[It would be fascinating to know if Concawe had written anything I don’t know where their records might be but I need to talk about them as a body as well.]
What we learn is that the oil and gas industries were aware of the issue at the time, not at the stage of necessarily wanting to do anything about it.
What happened next is that over the next couple of years the possible problem of carbon dioxide build up became much more broadly known in the UK and US (and to a lesser extent in Australia).
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.
Forty-five years ago, on this day, May 17, 1979 an important book on Environmental Pollution, written by Martin Holdgate, came out (with a section on carbon dioxide build-up),
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 336.8ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Martin Holdgate had been working on pollution issues for 10 years by this stage and had a lot of useful data. This book had been finalised a couple of years before. The broader context of course, is that Margaret Thatcher had just taken office. And this unfortunately meant that the work on climate change that had been building under the Callaghan government was largely frozen out and ignored. So it goes.
What we can learn is what you have already learned from the site, which is that smart people knew. We knew. People who read newspapers knew. We knew we knew we knew.
The problem was not lack of information. The problem was plausible pathways to power and influence.
What happened next. Holdgate and others kept writing, kept working. And 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.
Fifty-one years ago, on this day, May 16th, 1973, there was a UNESCO-sponsored conference on Energy and how we live at Flinders University of South Australia,
16-18 May 1973 / Australian Unesco Seminar ; Australian-Unesco Committee for Man and the Biosphere. –
You can see a clip with John Bokris here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-12/professor-john-bockris-on-his-warning-of-impending/13837976
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 329.6ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that UNESCO had been holding conferences about the environment and man’s impact pollution, blah, blah, blah for a while, the most notable of these was in Paris in ‘68. And that had been attended by some Australians.
What we learn is that people who cared about that sort of stuff, were well aware of the dangers ahead, but basically were unable to convince everyone else that the danger was real and that something meaningful could and must be done.
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-two years ago, on this day, May 15th, 1972, a Clean Air Conference in Melbourne is told about carbon dioxide build up by CSIRO scientists, including Graeme Pearman,
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there had been clean air conferences in states and now national or even international in Australia.
There had been the Senate Select Committee on Air Pollution started in 1968 delivering its findings in ‘69. And what’s particularly significant about this conference is the first time there was an explicit specific session on carbon dioxide build up, with Graham Pearman.
What happened next – more reports, more warnings, paths not taken. And now we are on a path that leads nowhere nice. It didn’t have to be like this, but it does have to be like it’s going to be – laws of physics are like that.
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-four years ago, on this day, May 15th, 1950, Time Magazine ran an article about, well, the world getting warmer. It begins as follows
Is the U.S. climate getting warmer? U.S. meteorologists, observing and charting the weather with growing exactitude over the past 20 years, are no closer to agreement on the question than their predecessors of a century ago. Last week a Washington convention of the American Meteorological Society heard strong evidence to favor the warmup theory.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 311ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context is that it’s the postwar world. There’s always atom bombs going off. People are thinking it might heat things up/upset natural balances/humans now acting as Gods etc. Importantly, though, carbon dioxide is not mentioned in the story because it’s really 1953 that Gilbert Plass gives it plausibility or credibility. However, it should be noted that in 1948, the attendees of a seminar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference heard from G. Evelyn Hutchinson that yes, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere.
What we learned is that warming was acknowledged pretty early.
What happened next Three years later, Gilbert Plass named names (carbon dioxide).
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.
Eighty-two years ago, on this day, May 14th, 1932, The New York Times ran an article about a giant flood, with the ice-caps melting and all the rest of it.
“… there will be another deluge. Salt water will sweep over the continents, leaving only the higher land dry. Holland will be inundated. Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, for most of England will lie beneath the waves. The Desert of Sahara will be a great inland see. What is now New York will be marked by the upper stories and towers of the taller skysrapers as they jut out of the water.”
And when can we expect this? “[W]ithin 30,000 or 40,000 years”…
NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 308ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was similar as a few days ago (May 10) with the Daily Oregonian, the world seemed to be warming. Guy Callendar was aware of this. Other people were aware of this. The Arctic seemed to be possibly melting.
For journalists, it didn’t matter – even if it wasn’t really happening, it was a news story that filled some column inches, “all the adverts fit to print all the news printed to fit.”
What we learn is that the idea of warming was not particularly controversial, and was picked up after the war in 1950.
What happened next? The New York Times kept reporting on this stuff. And in May of 1953 science correspondent Walter Kaempffert, wrote an article based on Gilbert Plass’s speech at the American Geophysical Union…
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.
Forty-five years ago today, May 14, 1979, American diplomat Harlan Cleveland made the point that the build-up of carbon dioxide had gone, over the last ten years, from obscure to “almost common knowledge.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 336ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Aspen had been hosting academics and policy wonks on the climate issue for most of the 1970s (see the book “The Great Adaptation” for more details
What we learn is that by the late 1970s, and especially in the aftermath of the first World Climate Conference, educated/informed people knew that there was probably trouble ahead.
What happened next, the climate issue finally got traction in 1988. And the emissions are almost 70% higher than they were then.
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.
Seventeen years ago, on this day, May 14th, 2017, the second “C40 Large Cities” summit was held. Backs were slapped, business cards exchanged, palms probably greased, and all the other things that happen at these events happened. And we are not saved.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Climate Group had been set up in 2004. And this summit, well, I wasn’t there, but it was surely another interminable junket, people getting together to display their virtue and swap business cards and give each other copies of glossy reports full of carefully chosen smiling individuals with the solar panel on their roof.
And it was 2007, being the year that the IPCC fourth assessment report came out, Al Gore, everyone looking towards Bali, for what would be the “roadmap to Copenhagen,” “gosh, we can fix this,” etc, etc. And in the meantime, get some nice contracts.
What we learn is there is an endless circuit of this stuff, this guff. And you can have a nice career feeling good about yourself, going from event to event, talking about how the cat should wear a bell. And some of it does actually happen. Because technology is improved, because social movements have success, because companies see a market. It’s not that nothing has happened. It’s that we smother ourselves in bullshit about how much will happen and how easy it will be to do in the face of obduracy and resistance.
Although the penny does seem to be dropping that we are screwed. So there’s that.
What happened next C40 kept going. The caravan kept rolling. Occasionally the wheels would fall off and need to be glued back on, as after Copenhagen but it’s too valuable to too many people, too essential, in fact, to pretend that business as usual with some tweaks will get us out of the mess that business as usual has created. And to think or, even worse, say otherwise renders you unemployable and a weirdo who might infect others with their weirdo germs.
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.
