On the 29th of March 1995, in Berlin at the first “Conference of the Parties” of the UNFCCC, Kuwait, put forward a scientist, who said that if global warming was happening, it wasn’t the fault of coal and oil. Of course, they would say that; “Mandy Rice Davies applies.” You need to think about Kuwait, as a spoiler in all of this, along with Saudi in the US and Australia. And if you’re looking for the gory details, Jeremy Leggett’s book, The Carbon War is really good on this.
What happened next?
COP1 ended with the Berlin Mandate – rich countries agree to cut emissions first. Two years later, in Kyoto, the first agreement to reduce emissions was agreed for what that was worth (not much). Kyoto was not replaced, and eventually a laughable “pledge and review” system got implemented (Paris). And the emissions climb and climb.
On this day in 1979, a few weeks after the end of the First World Climate Conference, Wally Broecker, the oceanographer met with Exxon scientists who were studying climate change and fossil fuels.
Broecker, to his apparent dismay, had coined the had been the first to use the term global warming in an academic context. (According to Alice Bell’s book “Our Biggest Experiment”, he offered 200 bucks to anyone who could find an earlier example so he wouldn’t be lumbered with the unwanted title.
What’s Exxon in all this? Well, “Exxon knew”. Exxon was doing its own studies of the climate problem, the carbon dioxide problem in the late 70s, early 80s. And this involved talking to scientists who knew what they were talking about. And Broecker most certainly was one of the scientists who really knew what he was talking about
You can read more about this at the truly excellent “Inside Climate News”
We need to remember that Exxon knew, and that scientists, quite rightly will talk to different constituencies they are paid out of taxpayer funding, and they should talk to not just the grassroots groups, but the biggies. And we need to know that in 1979, there were people seriously worried about climate. And these weren’t just hippies living in communes. This was the elite and it would be another 9 or 10 years before the issue would successfully break through and the co2 concentration had gone up and more kit had been built, and more norms around production and consumption had been established. And yes, yes, the population had gone up too; we have two problems. The one that we in the West really need to do something about is overconsumption, exploitation, imperialism, hyper-extractivism, murder, you name it. And once we’ve done all of that, and paid reparations, then we can start to lecture other people about having too many babies.
On March 23 1989, cold fusion was announced by a couple of overexcited scientists. (the gory details of why they came to be releasing this when they did can be found here).
The implication in fusion (hot or cold, but especially cold) is of limitless energy, which sounds like a good idea until you start thinking about how infantile human societies would actually use that limitless energy: we would just intensify our exploitation/exploration. [Comedy fact, the Portuguese have one word that covers both of those].
And limitless energy would accelerate our doom in all probability without some serious wisdom in our institutions. And I see no evidence of any wisdom in our institutions. (There may have been some, but we have moron-ified ourselves over the last 40 years or more.)
But anyway, this particular bout of cold fusion was quickly debunked, and there were many articles and books about what it all “meant.” Science and Technology Studies was then a relatively new thing.
On this day in 1963, the first ever policymaker meeting – in the West at least(1) – specifically around carbon dioxide bonding happened in New York under the auspices of Laurence Rockefeller’s organisation, the Conservation Foundation, (not to be confused with the Conservation Society launched in the UK three years later, and not funded by Rockefeller.)
The account of the meeting, which you can read here, had the snappy title “Implications of rising carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; a statement of trends and implications of carbon dioxide research reviewed at a conference of scientists.”
Present at the meeting were Roger Revelle, Gilbert Plasss, Charles Keeling, and an Englishman called Frank Fraser Darling – someone we will return to…
The context was that as of 1959, it has become clear that carbon dioxide was indeed building up in the atmosphere, and that eventually, this would lead to warming of the planet. And this would lead to ice caps melting in flooded cities, changing weather patterns, etc.
But at this stage, in early 1963 the assumption was, this would be a problem in a couple of 100 years as per Svante Arrhenius
Why this matters.
The Conservation Foundation report of this symposium was not a best-seller, but it DOES pop up in the reference list of various books and articles over the rest of the decade, before it starts to be supplanted by later events with more information.
What happened next?
Revelle worked on a report for Lyndon Johnson’s science subcommittee with Margaret Mead Frank Fraser Darling would talk about the build up of co2 as a problem and his reef lectures for the BBC in November of 1969
And the CO2 would continue to accumulate
For more about the Rockefellers role in postwar environmentalism this article “The Eco-Establishment “by Katherine Barkley and Steve WeissmanRamparts Magazine, May 1970, pp. 48-50
Footnotes
(1) “Fedorov and Budyko were both key instigators of a specially convened meeting on the transformation of climate which took place in Leningrad during April 1961.40 This meeting, together with a related workshop the following June, represented the first focussed Soviet discussions concerning anthropogenic climate change” (Oldfield, 2018: 45).
Oldfield, J. (2018) Imagining climates past, present and future: Soviet contributions to the science of anthropogenic climate change, 1953e1991. Journal of Historical Geography 60 41- 51.)
On this day in 2012 the famed and Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Sherry Rowland died. Rowland had been instrumental in the 1970s in translating scientific concern around the ozone-depleting effects of chlorofluorocarbons into policy action. (Ozone depletion concerns and action were key to the development of awareness of climate issues and the ability to “do” something about them).
As Rowland said, “What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true.”
You can read a lovely “in memoriam” about him here.
On this day in March 5 1950, Jule Charney and Jonny von Neumann produced the first computer simulation of the weather. Who were these people? Jules Charney was, according to Wikipedia considered “the father of modern dynamical meteorology, Charney is credited with having “guided the postwar evolution of modern meteorology more than any other living figure.”
And in 1979, he helmed what’s now known as the Charney report, which told the politicians that yes, there was no reason to doubt that a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to a three degree temperature rise.
Jonny von Neumann was Hungarian, possibly the smartest person who’s ever lived. And in 1955 he would warn Fortune magazine of the buildup of carbon dioxide shortly before his death in early 1957.
Why this matters.
The work Neumann and Charney did was foundational for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, set up in 1963 under NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to model the atmosphere.
Computer simulations, computer models of the climate have been extremely important for creating the understanding (and global awareness) of weather and climate. And there is a book by Paul Edwards called A Vast Machine which will tell you a lot more.
What happened next?
It would be another five or six years before the buildup of carbon dioxide started to impinge properly on people’s consciousness.
On this day in 2010, Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, gave testimony to a parliamentary committee (the Science and Technology Select Committee since you ask) on the subject of the so-called Climategate hack (or the “Climatic Research Unit email controversy”).
In late 2009, in the run up to Copenhagen, the servers of the University of East Anglia had been infiltrated, a vast archive of emails downloaded, and then selected releases to make it look as if climate scientists were colluding to keep critics out of peer review. And this was designed to make the negotiations at Copenhagen COP more problematic. Whether it mattered or not is impossible, perhaps to say, but no single bullet ever wins a war…
The broader context is that climate scientists had been coming under fierce public attack since at least 1989. (Never mind James Hansen’s funding being pulled in 1981 because of a New York Times front page article displeasing the Republican Administration).
But the kind of personal, bitter ad hominem attacks really took off 1995-96 around the second IPCC assessment report. Michael Mann, who became the subject of attacks himself, calls this the Serengeti Strategy.
Why this matters.
The narrative of “there is doubt about how severe climate change will be/the climate scientists may be – if not lying – exaggerating” is an immensely powerful narrative. Because it allows middle class professional people to continue not to pay attention to the issue. And that’s why the predatory delayers have played the card for so long.
What happened next?
The “climategate” emails were found, after multiple investigations, to be – in the words of the right wingers – a “nothing burger.” Jones continued his career, having admitted that he had contemplated suicide at the time. Meanwhile, the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have continued to climb
Atmospheric C02 concentration at that time: 390.1ppm
Atmospheric C02 concentration at time of publication: 416.71ppm
On this day, in 1861, Irish scientist John Tyndall read his paper about carbon dioxide at the Royal Society at the annual Bakerian lecture. Tyndall was not, we now know, the first person to point out what he called carbonic acid had greenhouse water warming potential. That honour belongs to Eunice Foote in the United States a few years earlier. There’s an interesting and useful summary of this at the beginning of Alice Bell’s excellent 2021 book “Our Biggest Experiment.” And of course the idea that there must be something, some gas, keeping the planet warmer than it otherwise would be dates back to Fourier in 1824.
Tyndall did the research, reported it. It wasn’t for another 35 years that someone, Svante Arrhenius. said, “this is in fact going to be a thing (but not for centuries, and it will be a good thing.”. He was trying to distract himself from a messy divorce by doing laborious calculations, which your mobile phone could probably do in about three seconds now.
Why this matters,
We’ve understood the science – this is 19th century physics – for a very long time. Unfortunately, we have not acted. And as I’ve said before, I will say again, that “we” first person plural pronoun is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
On this day, the New York Times released a report, written by Andy Revkin, about how famed climate scientist James Hansen was being subjected to attempts at gagging him by some of George W Bush’s appointed goons. You can read all about it here. There’s a whole (very good) book about the campaign, called Censoring Science.
Hansen had already been up against this sort of stuff in 1981, when the incoming Reagan administration had cut his funding in retaliation to a previous front page story on the New York Times.
Why this matters?
Because if scientists, charities, think tanks, civil trade unions, etc, are gagged and silenced, then the public don’t get a real sense of “what’s up” (though by now, it amounts to wilful ignorance, and anyway, information on its own counts for nothing). This is all part of the long war against impact science, usually by no means exclusively, on the part of the “ right “. You have to remember that when the “left” is in charge, it also doesn’t go particularly well for independently minded scientists.
What happened next
Hansen is still publishing. You can see his Google Scholar page here because Hansen is in the old Yiddish term, a mensch.
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”.