Category: Ignored Warnings

Categories
Antarctica Ignored Warnings

Jan 23, 1995 – The Larsen B starts to break up with us.. (Ice, Ice, baby)

January 23 1995, the Larsen B ice sheet starts to splinter. This is in Antarctica. And it probably gave us the opening scene of “The Day After Tomorrow”, a not very good disaster flick from 2004f essentially a retread of nuclear war movies of the 1980s. 

The MP Chris Mullin, refers to this in his diary entry of the same day, but I cannot get hold of it right now – will update when I do.

Meanwhile, this from Squall, a wonderful newspaper from the 1990s.

Why this matters. 

The signs of the times have been with us too long before. Those poor children protesting as part of youth strike don’t always realise that since long before they were on planet they have been betrayed again and again.

 What happened next?

 We got more and more sure that the Antarctic is not stable. We’ve had warnings since 1978, (see Jan 26th post). And now well, it’s really not looking good, is it?

Categories
Australia Ignored Warnings Industry Associations

January 20 (1992) Gambling on climate… and losing #auspol

On this day 30 years ago…, well, let me speculate. Imagine a middle-aged Australian businessman. Let’s call him Dave (“Dave-o” to his mates). Two kids, chasing his third tawdry affair with his fourth secretary, trying to dodge a second heart attack. Doctor telling him to cut back on the booze and the smoking.

Dave is sitting at the lunchtime talk of the CEDA in Australia, and he’s listening to the keynote speaker Don Carruthers of mining giant CRA (now Rio Tinto) say that the federal Government’s stance for the Rio Earth Summit in June – lead by that silly woman minister Ros Kelly – is going to threaten the Australian economy. And Dave’s next pay rise.

Here’s what the Australian newspaper reported the following day

Stewart, C. 1992. Green policies ‘flawed’. The Australian, January 21, p.3. 

“The Federal Government’s environmental proposals for the United Nations inaugural earth summit conference in Brazil in June are seriously flawed and run counter to our own economic interests, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia heard yesterday. Mr Don Carruthers, a director and group executive of mining giant CRA Ltd, told a CEDA lunch in Melbourne that the Australian stance in the lead-up to the Rio de Janeiro conference – which will be the world’s largest environment forum – would, if adopted, pose a direct threat to the international competitiveness of our economy.”

Let’s imagine, Dave is sat there, hearing Don Carruthers fulminate, and he remembers that before coming to the event he had, uncharacteristically, idly leafed through the Canberra Times (one of the more serious newspapers in Australia).

On page three, he had seen the following. 

Anon, 1992. Greenhouse cynics gambling with future. Canberra Times, 20 January. 

“One of the CSIRO’s top scientists says doubters of the greenhouse effect are gambling with the future of the world. Dr Graeme Pearman, coordinator of the CSIRO’s climate change research program, said yesterday there was little doubt global warming was a reality according to all the best scientific models.”

I wonder how Dave reconciled these two items. Does he decide that he’s 45 or 50 in a position of authority, but not necessarily power and there’s no margin in rocking the boat? That it might not be happening, anyway. Is he gonna think about being able to retire and leave the problem  – if it exists – for his teenage children, who’ve been on the demonstrations have encouraged him to join Greenpeace and buy recycled toilet paper, to deal with?

Which way does Dave-o jump? Any given individual might jump one way or the other. They might struggle (see Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg’s book about Australian middle-managers at a later date). 

But ultimately, as a species, as a society, as a political class, we know which way Australia jumped – towards ever more fossil fuel exports, and disdaining the domestic possibilities of renewables until the late 2000s.

As a species, it turns out that we lost Pearman’s gamble. What would you say to those people, to Dave, if you could have them here now for five minutes?

Categories
Activism Ignored Warnings United Kingdom

1972, Jan 14: “A Blueprint for Survival” hits the headlines

[Update 31st January – see foot of this post for comment by David Taylor]

On Friday 14th January 1972 a bombshell report, ‘A Blueprint for Survival,’ was released onto an increasingly worried world. Produced by the team at The Ecologist, it laid out not just the environmental and social problems, but also offered – the clue is in the name – a blueprint for survival.

Fifty years is a nice round number for reflecting, and this 30 page report [pdf, word.doc] is designed to help with that.

It explains little of the background to the report – the world it entered, who wrote it, how it was received

It doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about what the Blueprint actually says – read it yourself!

It does however talk about what happened next – what the media response, and the political response was [spoilers – scientists warning of trouble ahead will be derided as scare-mongerers, the public’s attention span is short, it’s really hard to ‘capture the moment’ – to do so you need absorptive capacity up the wazoo].

For any Doctor Who fans out there – there’s mention of two classic Pertwee stories.

It then talks a bit about the longer-term, and the birth of the “Ecology Party” (now known as the Green Party), before turning to some of the lessons we might learn around

  1. Abeyance
  2. Absorptive Capacity
  3. Arrogance

Would love to hear people’s comments

Comment received on 31st January 2022 by one of the people behind the excellent “Green History UK” website.

I’ve read your article and it’s got loads of good perspectives. Hopefully we can add that to the site as well.

I trust you won’t mind if I draw your attention to one or two issues where I have a different perspective:-

  1. The founders of PEOPLE always wrote the name in capitals, not lower case.
  2. They did not, initially call themselves a ‘political party’.  If you look at the early PEOPLE literature you will see that they were always just called ‘PEOPLE’. On some occasions (as on the material advertising the Jigsaw Conference) they referred to themselves as a ‘movement’. . Lesley W had researched the issue and found that you didn’t have to be a ‘party’ to contest an election, so they weren’t. It was others, particularly journalists, who referred to them as a ‘party’, because they contested elections. This later led to PEOPLE referring to themselves as both a ‘movement’ and a ‘party’.
  3. In that it intended to contest elections Movement for Survival was as much a ‘party’ as PEOPLE. The two movements had similar strategies.  This isn’t surprising as PEOPLE arose directly from Survival. The similarity wasn’t just because PEOPLE took over Movement’s box of contacts. The PEOPLE founders were also supporters of Movement and the Whittakers, in particular, had been meeting with Teddy throughout 1972. Teddy told me back then how delighted he was to have found a group of professional people (estate agent, solicitors) to take over Movement. There was no formal handover but the reality was that PEOPLE grew directly out of Movement, and took it over. There is a widespread misconception (reinforced by repetition) that the modern Green Party began when PEOPLE was publicly launched in February 1973. This ‘fact’ was one of the answers in a recent Mastermind quiz. The truth is that Survival’s launch, in the January edition of the Ecologist magazine, marked the actual beginning of the global movement of green parties.
  4. You describe Goldsmith as ‘authoritarian’. During his time he was labelled many things -all of them wrong really. There were no good labels for what he was espousing. This is understandable as he was originating a new political philosophy and it didn’t fit comfortably into any of the existing categories. You describe Blueprint as promoting ‘radical de-centralisation’. I think this phrase better describes Teddy’s outlook. He was, after all, a big admirer of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin…

Thank you for what you’re doing. We need this history!

Very best,

David (Taylor)

Categories
Ignored Warnings United States of America Weather modification

1958, Jan 8: “The masters of infinity… could control the world’s weather”, says LBJ

On this day in 1958 future President Lyndon Baines Johnson was speaking at the Democratic Caucus

“From space,” declared Johnson at the Democratic Caucus in January of 1958, warning of the technologically and scientifically superior Russians, “the masters of infinity could have the power to control the earth’s weather, to case drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream, and change temperate climates to frigid” (Howe, 2014:27).

Why this matters – this sense of paranoia and fear, that matters might be beyond our control, and that we must redouble our efforts to be In Charge –  is, I fear, what is behind the coming push for geoengineering “solutions” as a kind of last throw of the dice. It’s good to remember that weather modification predates concerns about atmospheric build up of C02, and that the same types of people have been advocating both (this is not to say that there aren’t well-intentioned ‘progressive’ types who want a better world and don’t see a way out of the mess that doesn’t involve more god-technology japes).

What happened next?

As president, Lyndon Johnson gave a “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty“ which included the prescient lines

“Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places”. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials.”

This was in February 1965  though, while LBJ was tag-teaming the USA into the thousand year long invasion of Vietnam, so the sentences possibly didn’t get the attention future generations might have hoped they would.


See also

Jan 1st: blog post – Control the weather before the Commies do…

Further reading

Monbiot,, G. (2006) No Quick Fix on Paul Cruzen

Wasser, A. (2005) LBJ’s space race: what we didn’t know then. The Space Review, June 20.

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.