Forty seven years ago, on this day, May 6th, 1977, Swedish scientist Bert Bolin sounded a warning about other sources (besides burning oil, coal and gas) leading to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 334ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Bolin had been looking at carbon dioxide buildup and its consequences since the late 50s. There were concerns about food production; these had been voiced publicly by Henry Kissinger in 1974. And other work was ongoing about that. What Bolin was doing here was pointing out how deforestation and agriculture might be contributing to CO2 build up alongside the vast increases in fossil fuel burning for energy production.
What we learn is Bolin was a mensch and that people reading science knew what was going on.
What happened next? Bolin ended up as the first chair of the IPCC and lived long enough to see the Nobel Prize and died shortly after that in 2007.
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-three years ago, on this day, May 1st, 1981, a scorching editorial was submitted to a new-ish academic journal (I know, hold the front page, right?). The writer reviews some recent studies and says, well…
“Still, these studies of energy and climate might lull us into concluding that we can put off worrying seriously about man-made climate change for a half century or so. For both physical and political reasons, both conclusions may be terribly wrong.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 338.7ppm. As of 2024 it is 425.85ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there was clear consensus among scientists that there was a problem. They had done their level best to get politicians alert, interested, concerned. And it was fairly clear by the time this editorial was submitted, that they had failed, that there would be at least four years of ignorance and resistance ahead, and that the clock was running out.
What we learn from this is that you have to know enough to be able to contextualise a given document. And the first time I read this, I thought, “wow, gee, this guy was prescient.” And, you know, I still think that he was smart. But now that I know how much was going on in the background, with the Global 2000 report, which I was only dimly aware, Council on Environmental Quality, Charney, Department of Energy, AAAS, the European moves, it was clear that this guy was writing at a time when lots of other people were also pointing at climate change and going “shit shit shit”. Other context would be that the journal Climatic Change was set up by Stephen Schneider. Anyway…
What happened next? We didn’t take action, the emissions kept rising. It would be 1988 before the alarm bell was heard widely enough.
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 eight years ago, on this day, March 19th, 1956, the question of possible climate change due to carbon dioxide build-up gets an airing (sorry) in the Washington Post.
19 March 1956 Washington Post story on Revelle’s predictions
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 Roger Revelle as well as being a really good scientist was a really good political operator. He knew how to tell Senators interesting stories so that they would give big science, big money. And one of the stories Revelle was telling in ‘56, ahead of the impending International Geophysical Year was that carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere might cause some interesting physical effects.
What we learn from this is that the idea of the independent scientists mucking around with his test tubes is a comforting myth, but only a myth. And already, by the end of the 40s, this was entirely obvious, given how the war had been one, Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush, all of that stuff.
What happened next? With some of the money, a tiny portion of the money that Revellel got, he hired Charles David Keeling to make fantastically accurate measurements of atmospheric CO2, giving us the Keeling Curve and evidence that yes, carbon dioxide was definitely building up in the atmosphere. Until that point this was not entirely certain, though it was strongly suspected. It’s always good to have proper evidence to back up your suspicions, isn’t it?
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.
References
Norman, L. 1956. Fumes Seen Warming Arctic Seas. The Washington Post and Times Herald; March 19, pg. 3
Ten years ago, on this day, March 17th, 2014, the wheels on the bus went round and round…
‘CARBON BUS’ NORTHERN TOUR 17-20 MARCH 2014
Eleven lucky applicants participated in the tour, which left from Townsville QLD and visited the Lansdown Research Station, ‘Trafalgar’ Station, ‘Wambiana’ Station and the Wambiana Research Site. Participants heard from leading specialists in climate science and agriculture and practising agriculturalists, including:
Professor Snow Barlow, University of Melbourne
Dr Ed Charmley, CSIRO
Dr Chris Stokes, CSIRO
Dr Steven Bray, QLD DAFF
Peter O’Reagain, QLD DAFF
Andrew Ash, QLD DAFF
Geoff Dickinson, QLD DPI
Roger Landsberg, ‘Trafalgar’ Station, Charters Towers
John Lyons and Michelle Lyons, ‘Wambiana’ Station, Charters Towers
The tour was enlightening and beneficial for all participants, but you don’t need to take our word for it, click here to hear from them direct…or watch the Virtual Tour video to see the tour highlights.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 399.9ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Prime Minister Tony Abbott had recently abolished – or was in the process of abolishing – the emissions trading scheme that Julia Gillard had shepherded through parliament in 2011. And climate activists were at a low ebb, and understood that they really had to go out and engage people who didn’t “get” to the climate issue. The trouble is that these sorts of tours from the south, to educate the benighted, ignorant, rural savages don’t work. Now, for the avoidance of any doubt. I’m sure that that’s not what the organisers of this carbon bus tour thought or felt on any level: but it’s easy for their good intentions to be painted.as such. I don’t have a solution. I suppose the climate education has to come from within these communities, from people who are trusted? Who those people are and how they might be supported, is beyond me. I guess. There’s always the internet….
What happened next? Well, the most infamous example of all this is the 2018 tour of Queensland by a whole bunch of greenies who thought that they were helping Bill Shorten get elected, and most definitely were not. This was something that was curiously absent from the Bob Brown hagiography about the tall giants or whatever it’s called. (see film review 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.
Twenty years ago, on this day, February 18th, 2004, some scientists tried to expose the George W Bush (actually Cheney) Administration for what it was.
“Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science”- Statement to Bush from 62 preeminent scientists including Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, former senior advisers to administrations of both parties, numerous members of the National Academy of Sciences, and other well-known researchers
http://www.webexhibits.org/bush/1.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 378ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Bush had pulled out of the negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol, had called for the NAS to do a study and then ignored that study. And was generally being George Bush, aka Dick Cheney’s glove pocket.
What we learn is that National Academy of Sciences sounds prestigious and powerful, but it has very limited power. They’ve been aware of the potential for climate change since well, at least 1957 when they produced booklets as part of the International Geophysical Year that pointed to it as a possibility. Then lots of research in the 1970s and 1980s… Pleaded with Dubya’s dad, to little (no?) effect. (see January 5,1989 – National Academy of Science tries to chivvy Bush.)
What happened next, Bush won the 2004 election and we had another four years of denial, obfuscation, outright stupidity. It is what it is.
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.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 337ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that all through the 1970s, climatologists have become more and more convinced that climate change was happening, and that carbon dioxide was the principal culprit. And so a proposal had been accepted for the first world climate conference. And it opened at some big hall in Geneva where the World Meteorological Organisation is based.
What we learn is that if you want to have an impact, you need these sorts of conferences. Unfortunately, John Mason, the British head of the Meteorological Office was not helpful.
What happened next? There was ongoing momentum around the climate issue ‘79-80. And then as Al Gore said, in 1988, it all ended once Reagan became president. Or rather, US political support did – the science kept going, best it could.
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 six years ago, on this day, January 8th, 1968,
According to a Newsweek report (8 January 1968), Professor L. C. Cole of Cornell University (in a paper delivered at the 134th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) asks whether man is not destroying the earth’s natural supply of oxygen. He points out (1) that the increasing combustion of fossil fuels has greatly accelerated the formation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and (2) that, in the United States alone, some one million acres of suburbanised forest and grassland each year lose their ability to regenerate the oxygen supply through photosynthesis.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there was concern among a few scientists that levels of oxygen would drop and that we would all ultimately suffocate. That was rendered null a year or two after this, but there was generalised concern about oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels, you name it. As the consequences of modernity, as we laughingly call it, were becoming apparent. Cynically, you could also say that people were so fed up with the Vietnam War, but there were costs attached to speaking out against that, that they found something else to be worried about….
What we can learn is that there have been scientists warning of trouble ahead. But those scientists may have sometimes understandably picked something to be concerned about that wasn’t actually there. That doesn’t mean that all warnings are bad warnings.
What happened next, as above, the oxygen depletion thing was put to bed in 1970 or so. Lamont Cole died in I think, 1979.
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.
References
Cole, L. 1968. Can the World Be Saved? BioScience, Vol. 18, No. 7 pp. 679-684 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1294188 .https://doi.org/10.2307/1294188
In this month, 54 years ago, eminent Yale biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson reflected on the effectiveness of Senate hearings for investigating environmental dilemmas, including carbon dioxide build-up.
“Though dire effects on climate of an increase in CO2 have been predicted, this is far from being adequately established (5). The cycle is not really fully understood, as was made clear in the discussion; carbon dioxide may well prove to be the least objectionable or in small amounts the only beneficial addition to the atmosphere from industrial sources. It is rather worrying to find one of our best senators and three eminent scientists trying to talk about the reversibility of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere from industrial sources without a single mention of a green plant”
(Hutchinson, 1970, p18-19).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that some Senate hearings with Democrat Senator Edmund Muskie (who had been Vice President candidate in 1968) and so forth, SR 78, had happened. This was in the context of Richard Nixon being in the White House and trying to pick up the environment issue, but also raising concerns, with Earth Day impending. Yale biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson had been talking about CO2 build up as a factor in changing biology since 1947-48, he was mates with Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. And Hutchinson had promoted the idea of the Conservation Foundation holding a meeting specifically about CO2, in March 1963. And then he’d been too sick to attend.
Anyway what’s interesting in this “Marginalia” thing is there’s a bunch of useful insights about how language works and so forth. But Hutchinson himself is understandably uncertain about what impact raised CO2 levels might have. Just because he’s been familiar with the issue, perhaps because he’d been familiar with the issue for a lot longer than anyone else.
What we learn is that smart people had known about CO2 for a long time when we’re discussing it in ‘69.
What happened next? The only real fruit of all this was UNEP and the modelling work done by Bolin et al as part of GARP. And it would take another 20 years, almost before the issue finally broke through…
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.
References
Hutchinson, G.E. 1970. Marginalia “Wisdom is justified of all her children.” American Scientist, Vol. 58, No. 1 pp. 17-20 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27828926
Forty three years ago, on this day, January 1st 1981,
Climate Change and the Society: Consequences of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
was published.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 340ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that American and European climate scientists had been pretty sure from the mid-1970s onwards serious warming of the planet was coming thanks to the additional carbon dioxide that was being put into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. I think they were also pretty sure that we wouldn’t, as a species, do anything serious to reduce our emissions. How right they were. And so the puzzle began, well, what impacts will come not just physical impacts, but sea level rise, heat, but how will that play out? How will society be affected? And how will society respond? One of the authors, William Kellogg had been in and around climate issues, carbon dioxide issues specifically, for a good 10 years. The other, Schware, had written this in 1980. And the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis (IIASA) had been holding workshops about this sort of thing. So the book, although it seems very, very prescient, emerged as all books do, from strands of academic – or intellectual, for the two are not the same – work.
What we can learn is that smart people could see this coming and couldn’t see a way of stopping it. I think for what it’s worth, there probably were ways of stopping it, but it would have required a fundamental rethink of what resistance to capital looks like. And also how those on the progressive left – or whatever it wants to call itself – organised themselves and each other, how they measured success, etc. None of that happened then. None of it is happening now. None of it is likely to happen.
What happened next – The Republican and conservative administrations of Reagan and Thatcher kept doing everything they could to keep environmental issues down the agenda. With Reagan who kind of overdid it, leading to a backlash (see Dunlap and McCright 2010). And with Thatcher, there was the persistent issues of acid rain and then ozone until finally, in 1988, even she had to concede that the greenhouse effect was a thing. Kellogg lived a long time, long enough to see most of its predictions come true.
In June of 1982 Kellogg and Schware had an article in Foreign Affairs, the major US foreign policy journal.
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.
References
Schware, R. 1980. Toward A Political Analysis Of The Consequences Of A World Climate Change Produced By Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5415330
Seventy six years ago, on this day, December 30, 1957, the English steam engineer Guy Callendar wrote to the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass
“Plass wrote to Callendar that Revelle and Suess and Arnold and Anderson had “attacked the carbon dioxide climatic theory ‘quite vigorously’ at a meeting earlier this year.”
They claimed that it was absolutely impossible to have had a sufficient increase in the CO2 amount in this century for the reasons that were given in their articles. I think you have pointed out several ways that their conclusion could be in error and I feel that there are still several possible explanations. 64 (Fleming 2007, p.81)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 421ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that American scientists who were studying carbon dioxide build-up and had been writing about it were still not quite sure what was going on. Understandably – if all the answers were obvious you wouldn’t need to explore anything, and that’s not how science works
Guy Callendar had written the first serious “carbon dioxide is causing climate change” scientific article in 1938 presented it, to muted response, at the Royal Meteorological Society.
Gilbert Plass was, more than anyone, responsible for putting carbon dioxide squarely on the agenda with his 1953 statements at the American Geophysical Union and then onwards in 1956 with his articles
What I think we can learn from this is that it’s always a messy murky picture in the early days of any issue. Later on it looks like a procession, but a good historian will try to remember the messiness and make it understandable, without removing the messiness.
Obviously that’s an ongoing process that we need to remember how little we knew and how confused the picture was.
What happened next
Callendar kept writing articles and letters. He died in 1964.
Gilbert Plass continued to be engaged for another few years on the climate issue and then wasn’t.
Roger Revelle died in 1991, having spent a long time trying to get the US state and others scientists politicians to take climate change seriously/
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.
