Sixty-six years ago today (October 8th, 1958) British meteorologist Gordon Manley wrote to his friend, steam engineer Guy Callendar, who had – for the past twenty-plus years had been banging on about carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere as a (or even the) factor affecting the climate.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 315ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the International Geophysical Year was happening. More people were coming on board with the carbon dioxide theory, Gilbert Plass, GER Deakin, Appleton, etc. And Manley was congratulating Guy Callendar bless.
What we learn is that Guy Callendar was getting a little bit of recognition and was getting published still in journals like Tellus and so forth. But he wasn’t being carried through the streets on people’s shoulders, as perhaps he should have been. Such is the nature of humanity when the wrong person making the announcement, if you’re Miss Triggs.
What we learn is that you can be right and not get the credit you deserve. That’s one of the oldest stories in the book.
What happened next Callendar had a couple of more really astute observations in him about, for example, why theories aren’t popular, and so forth. And he died in 1964, 37 years to the day after Svante Arrhenius died.
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
CP 1, Gordon Manley to Callendar, 8 October 1958, cited in Fleming, 2007
Sixty seven years ago, on this day, October 4th, 1957,
1957 – Space Race: Launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Science budget up etc
Science Budget through the roof
Onion Our Dumb Century
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that at the end of World War Two, there had been an unseemly scramble between the Soviets and the Americans as to who could hoover up more and better German rocket scientists. And the Americans probably thought they were on their way; the Nazis had their reputations cleansed as part of Operation Paperclip. The Soviets didn’t have to bother with PR quite so much – one advantage of the Stalinist dictatorship. And then on the fourth of October, everyone got to take them by surprise, because a small metal ball was launched into space Beep, beep beep.
What we learn what/why this matters, The broader context was that the International Geophysical Year was happening. The Americans had kind of assumed that they were going to get the first satellite into space and start taking measurements of stuff. Their self-image was badly dented. They started throwing serious money at science education and the President’s Scientific Advisory Council was created and that had important implications. It was an important venue for Roger Revelle in 1964, when he was writing about environmental pollution.
What happened next, the Americans continued freaking out about control of space. And also weather modification is a major part of the story in money getting allocated to research that, ironically, would show that weather modification, deliberate weather modification, was not so easy. And inadvertent weather modification was happening all along. But then they’d already been told that by Gilbert Plass in 1953, and had decided not to listen to him, I guess…
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.
One hundred and seventy six years ago, on this day, September 20th, 1848,
1848 – The American Association for the Advancement of Science is created.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science was created on September 20, 1848, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was a reformation of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists with the broadened mission to be the first permanent organization to promote science and engineering nationally and to represent the interests of American researchers from across all scientific fields
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 275ishppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that science was coming along in leaps and bounds, even in the United States of America. You can read the Wikipedia page about it here.
What we learn is that putting together these sorts of bodies is a tremendous amount of hard work, clever politicking. You have to scramble for funds. You’ve got to allay the concerns of people who feel that a bureaucracy has been created or that their own baileywick is being stomped on. And the benefits are not always self-evident, and it could go badly wrong. See that Machiavelli quote about innovation. But anyway, it happened. Its journal Science started to be published in 1880.
What happened next? AAAS was a crucial node in science as you’d hope it would be obviously distinct from the National Academies of Science and the American Meteorological Society and the National Research Council and all the rest of it though there is inevitably circulation of staff and ideas and people
In the 100th year of the AAAS as the English biologist G Evelyn Hutchinson mentioned CO2 build up at a seminar organised by the within the AAAS General Meeting.
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 years ago, on this day, September 13th, 1984
Glaciers, ice sheets and sea level : effect of a CO2-induced climatic change : report of a workshop held in Seattle, Washington, September 13-15, 1984
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 345ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures.
The contextwas that by now, CO2 build-up and its close cousin sea level rise were well embedded in environmental science in the United States. The EPA, the year before, had produced a big fat report. And this workshop, I guess it’s a continuation of that.
What we learn is that our scientists have been warning us about sea level rise with graphs and numbers since the early 1980s. And without necessarily all those graphs and numbers since the 1950s.
What happened next, scientists kept sciencing and the rapid increase in temperature and warmth of the planet led in 1988 to James Hansen giving his famous testimony to the Senate committee in June of 1988.
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-three years ago, on this day, August 13th, 1991, we had our heads in the clouds.
Symposium on Aerosol-Cloud-Climate Interactions. August 13-20, 1991, convened by the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, at the XX General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in Vienna.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that scientists were looking at clouds because clouds matter. And you know, water vapour is a potent, albeit extremely short lived greenhouse gas. And this is in the context of the denialists launching their “It’s all water vapour” nonsense.
What we learn is that there are always scientists saying “it could be x, it could be way it could be z.” And you know, sometimes they’re right. But sometimes it’s just ABC.
What happened next? In 1992, we got the climate treaty. Which was piss weak thanks to Uncle Sam.
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 330ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that after the 1972 Stockholm Environmental Conference the United Nations Environment Program had been set up, and there was money and interest sloshing around for computer modelling of climate. It was fairly crude by today’s standards, but, you know, baby steps. There was Bolin, Flohn and the others. And presumably, Olof Palme was being kept informed. Flohn certainly briefed Palme at some point. I think that year
What we learn is that the scientific understanding of the build up of the consequences of the buildup of CO2 came along in leaps and bounds in the 70s. They’re only a couple of years away from “yellow danger light” as per Thomas Malone in July of 1977. Of course, the old beasts – Landsberg Charney and John Mason, were pooh poohing it all together. And Reid Bryson was angry that his dust theory was going tits up. But it was real, the emerging carbon consensus. That’s what we learned.
What happened next. A meeting in Norwich the following year put the death to the cooling idea. The Energy and Climate report of the National Academy of Sciences came out in 1977. And then, of course, the First World Climate conference in 1979. And that’s the end really, of there being serious debate about the CO2 problem.
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 six years ago, on this day, June 6th, 1988 there is a well-publicised warning by scientists in Stockholm (Bolin etc) releasing study.
We are entering a new phase….
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 351ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that ever since the pivotal meeting in Villach, in September 1985, scientists had been trying to raise the alarm – briefing senators, writing reports etc etc.
What we learn is that James Hansen’s testimony, on June 23 1988, did not appear in a vacuum. The terrain was being prepared by many others.
What happened next was that Hansen’s testimony – and the Changing Atmosphere meeting in Toronto the week after, at the end of June – set the ball rolling.
The emissions have kept climbing, of course. As have the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. And here we are.
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 one years ago, on this day, May 24th, 1953, the New York Times reported on Gilbert Plass’s statements at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting a couple of weeks earlier. The article was by Waldemar Kaempfert, who’d write something else on the topic in October 1956, just before his death.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The New York Times makes explicit mention of carbon dioxide buildup from industry as something that will heat the planet. This is from their science writer Walter Kaempffert.
The context is that a couple of weeks later earlier, Gilbert Plass, a Canadian physicist had made a startling presentation to the American Geophysical Union, and this had travelled around the world [Conversation article link].
What we learn is that it’s been 71 years since the warnings started coming from people who weren’t “merely” steam engineers.
What happened next – It was taken seriously, as it were, in the 1950s, then seemed to fall off for 10 years. And then came back in the late 60s and then fell off again, came back in the late 80s. And here we are 35 years after that, having increased our emissions by about 70%.
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.
Professor Jason Scott-Warren (Twitter account here) is the organiser of an open letter signed by 2500 academics to the Royal Society about its climate stance. He has kindly answered a few questions about the campaign. (You can read an August 2023 article in TheGuardianhere. There’s a piece in the Financial Times[paywalled] today, about the RS saying ,in effect, “yeah, nah.”
BTW, the Royal Society has – understandably – a long history in the UK around climate change, which will have to wait for another day. For now, there’s this from 2006, when it chided Exxon for funding denialist groups.
1. What is the campaign trying to achieve?
The campaign is asking the Royal Society to speak out about the fossil fuel industry and how dangerous it is, both in its determination to carry on exploring for new reserves and in its lobbying activities. Both aspects of its behaviour should be red lights for scientists, at a time when the Paris Agreement goals are hanging by a thread. If the Royal Society were to make a statement about this, it would help to galvanise action in the UK academic community, and to sway public discourse.
2. How did it get going?
I’ve been involved in campaigns at the University of Cambridge, initially to persuade the University to divest from fossil fuel companies and more recently to ask it to cut all research and philanthropic ties with them. It became clear to me that some scientists at the University were willing to give the likes of BP and Shell the benefit of the doubt because the Royal Society had not given a clear steer in this area. So I decided to start an open letter calling for an unambiguous statement. The letter now has more than 2500 signatures from UK academics.
3. What has the Royal Society’s response been – was it in anyway surprising?
The Royal Society has engaged with us, albeit at a pace that has not always inspired confidence. They agreed to hold a meeting with a small group of signatories, and discussed our demands in detail. But we were not surprised when they eventually turned our request down, pointing to all the other worthy things that they were doing on climate, and saying it would be inappropriate to condemn one sector ‘within a complex system where multiple actors need to engage urgently with these challenges’.
Decoded, this means they have swallowed the fiction that fossil fuel companies are ‘part of the solution’. At some point in the future, the story goes, these companies are going to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it under the ocean, just so long as they can carry on generating obscene profits in the here-and-now. The susceptibility of the Royal Society to this narrative is not entirely surprising. The idea of a technological solution to the climate problem flatters their rather narrow sense of their mission. More broadly, the entanglement of some parts of the scientific establishment with the petrochemical industry is so deep that they cannot register what is happening before their eyes. They cannot admit that they have created a machine that has run out of control, and which is rapidly destroying the biosphere.
4. What are the next stages, and what help are you looking for?
In a way, this is all just more evidence (as if we needed it) that petitions and polite debates don’t work. Money trumps everything, and institutions would rather watch the world burn than bite the hand that feeds them. We need more direct action to demand changes that will never come by asking nicely. But I do think we need to keep putting pressure on the timid institutions that we inhabit, and to alert them to the fact that they have urgent moral responsibilities that they are failing to address. Their behaviour is going to look as shameful in retrospect as propping up the slave trade or apartheid. They still have an opportunity to rectify this.
5. Anything else you’d like to say.
We should celebrate the institutions that are taking a stand in this area—the UN, the International Energy Agency, the BMA and others.
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.
