On this day, September 4 2006, the Royal Society (venerable Science outfit, 360ish years old) asked the American oil company Exxon to knock it off with the climate denial support.
On this day the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was 379.04 ppm Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
Exxon had been/has been an enormous source of climate denial, despite their own scientists saying in the 1970s that yes, indeed, global warming because of the burning of fossil fuels was going to be a serious thing. A bunch of scientists who don’t like hand-to-hand combat coming out and saying “stop right there thank you very much” was a big deal.
Sawyer, in four pages, summarised what was known and what could be reasonably expected in the short-term (up to the year 2000).
In September 2007, 35 years later, the Australian meteorologist Neville Nicholls had a letter in the same journal, argued that “Sawyer’s prediction of a reversal of this trend, and of the correct magnitude of the warming, is perhaps the most remarkable long-range forecast ever made.”
On this day the atmospheric CO2 level was 324.84 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters
It is unfair to blame politicians for not having acted in 1972. But they could/should have started paying attention then. By the late 1970s there really was enough certainty among scientists for real action to begin (to be clear, real action has still not – 40 years on from that putative deadline – begun. Oh well).
What happened next?
Sawyer kept working.
As Agar (2015) notes “In 1974, the Met Office had marked an expanding interest in climate by starting a working party on world climatology, ‘with specific emphasis on climatic change’, under J.S. Sawyer, the Met Office’s director of research.”
Sawyer was asked by the Cabinet Office in 1976 for his opinion of American climate scientist Reid Bryson (see All Our Yesterdays post about that here).
On this day, August 31, 2005 the “Stop Climate Chaos” coalition was launched in the UK – the usual suspect NGOs big and small.
“Up to 500 campaigners formed a giant human banner next to the London Eye to launch a major new alliance. Eighteen groups representing millions of supporters have created the UK’s biggest climate change coalition.
“The Stop Climate Chaos group wants to put pressure on the government to reduce gas emissions. At the G8 summit, the US and UK called for greater investment in clean technology to replace Kyoto-style curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. But others warn new technology will come too late and emissions targets are needed to tackle the problem. The group of volunteers lined up along London’s South Bank to form a giant “human banner” in Jubilee Gardens in the shape of the group’s logo.”
[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 378.9 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]
Why this matters.
We’ve had coalitions of NGOs. They tend to be “lowest conman denominator”, with the most staid organisations vetoing anything at all useful, so that even a march comes to be seen as “edgy.”
FFS.
What happened next?
The terminally stupid “wave” march in December 2009 was the end of the road for “Stop Climate Chaos”, and, effectively, that particular “wave” of climate concern. It was avoidable, but would have required guts and brains that outfits like Stop Climate Chaos did not have. So it goes. There are other outfits now, I think there is one called the “Climate Coalition”. All failed, all useless. We’re toast.
On this day, 26 August 2006, after many months of planning the first “Camp for Climate Action” begins, near Drax Power Station, in Yorkshire.
However, we now know that the police let it happen as a “wave through”. Given how many undercovers there were (just the ones we know about!) they could have stopped this if they’d wanted to. They didn’t, because they didn’t want to. Too many opportunities to track who got involved. A honey pot. And here we are.
[The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 380.6 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.]
Why this matters.
We mustn’t forget previous resistance, or what happened to it. Hell, we might even learn something from it, and not make exactly the same mistakes, over and over again.
What happened next?
Climate Camp kept having annual camps for a few years, and then imploded.
Climate camps happened in other countries, for a whiile.
On this day 13 August 1882, William “Coal Question” Jevons died
Eh? What AM I talking about?
Well, Jevons (a very interesting character) had written a book called “The Coal Question” in 1865. In it he pointed out that if you make a procedure more efficient, you don’t actually reduce the total amount of resources used, because when a producer is now using less of a resource, the price drops, more producers enter the market and the total consumption of the resource goes up. This is known as “Jevons Paradox.”
And somebody even made a video about it.
And for more on this, see, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/02/16/207532/debunking-jevons-paradox-jim-barrett/
On this day, August 12, in 1990 a crackpot documentary was broadcast on Channel 4. The “Greenhouse Conspiracy” criticised the theory of global warming and asserted that scientists critical of global warming theory were denied funding. Lindzen, Pat Michaels, Roy Spencer, Sherwood Idso etc the usual suspects. Directed produced and presented by Hilary Lawson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Lawson
And, of course, he got to write a 3000 word piece in the Sunday Times (the Murdoch press already spewing shite about climate change, something they have – mostly – kept doing over the last 30 years).
I wonder if Lawson admits he got that one a bit wrong?
On this day the atmospheric C02 was 353 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
To be totally fair, at this stage, such a documentary MIGHT have been makeable in good faith. Maybe. Hmmm. The denial has kept on keeping on.
What happened next?
Oh, the smear merchants kept at it, and still keep at it. “The Great Global Warming Swindle” in 2007 was probably the last time they were effective, in documentaries, but the theft and misrepresentation of emails from UEA in late 2009 (so-called Climategate) was also pretty potent.
The ABC, to its credit, did not bow to the IPA sorts who campaigned for it to be shown. It ended up being screened on SBS…
On this day, August 4, 2008, the forces of law and order provided law. And order. Forcefully.
At the Third Climate Camp
“Police used pepper spray on the crowd at the Climate Camp 2008. It was around 6am Monday 4th August and campers had been woken to the alarm of ‘cops on site’. They were trying to seize vehicles that campers had parked at a top gate of the camp. It was denied later the same day by Sir Ian Blair that any pepper spray would have been used, but this footage clearly shows its unnecessary use.
This was the same Climate Camp where the Met put it about that police had suffered injuries and been hospitalised. A Labour Minister said 70 police had been injured.
The right wing media picked this up (of course) and ran stories about crazed violent eco-anarchists.
But guess what, it turned out that NONE OF THIS WAS TRUE.
The Liberal Democrats put in a Freedom of Information Act request. The answer
“showed that no officers in the £5.9m police operation at Kingsnorth power station in Kent during August had been injured by protesters. Instead, police records showed that their medical unit had dealt mostly with toothache, diarrhoea, cut fingers and “possible bee stings”.
Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, told MPs at Commons question time yesterday [December 15]: “I was informed that 70 police officers were hurt and naturally assumed that they had been hurt in direct contact as a result of the protest. That clearly wasn’t the case and I apologise if that caused anybody to be misled.”
On this day the PPM was 384.32 ppm. As of August 2021 it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
The media love a good beat-up. And most are in a symbiotic relationship with our lords and masters.
What happened next?
Climate Camp imploded (it wasn’t just down to the undercover cops, btw). Various groups kept the NVDA flame alive. Extinction Rebellion came along in 2018 and learnt absolutely nothing from the history. Nothing. Nada. Nowt.
On this day, July 30 1989 Conservative Politician Sir Ian Lloyd was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying ‘we have, at the most, a quarter of a century to make the assessments and take action. The life of the planet may be at stake.’
Wikipedia has him saying “civilisation is clinging by our fingernails to the cliff”.
for which academic (and other) researches owe him a debt of gratitude.
Lloyd was a prescient guy who, well, later started wittering on about pyramids of uncertainty, and Bjorn Lomborg. It happens. It’s sad when it does, but it happens. See obituary here.
Why this matters.
Did the rhetoric help us resist our own death grip? No, it didn’t. It never does.
On this day, July 28 1990, journalist John Gribbin (author of several books about climate change published in the 1970s and 1980s) had a nice snippet to help us build the picture of the international efforts to scupper climate action, back in the crucial 1988 to 1992 period.;
“last month, when members of the George C. Marshall Institute, a privately funded think tank based in Washington DC, were flown in to present their maverick views on climate change, it came as no surprise to find that the room at the Hyde Park Hotel in which they gave their talks… had actually been booked by British Coal’ (John Gribbin, Why caution is wrong on global warming’.
New Scientist, 127, 28 July 1990, p. 18)
The “George C. Marshall Institute” had been set up in 1984 to slow down environmental regulation (slippery slope to Pol Pot and Stalin, don’t you know) for a while. They became an early and important node of organised climate resistance. They were – and this is gonna shock you – funded by fossil fuel companies.
The transatlantic links have not weakened. They have, in fact, strengthened.
What happened next?
The UK accelerated the decline off its coal industry, and imported lots of natural gas. This made it seem like they were making progress on emissions reductions. So that’s nice.
We need to remember that organizations come and go, and are creatures of their time, and can be “trapped” – by their own cognitive and emotional settings, by others expectations and perceptions of them. A little like humans themselves, donchathink?
What happened next?
The Conservation Society was influential and important in the late 60s – we will come back to the 1968 lecture by Ritchie Calder. Its apogee was 1971-2, when it hosted a conference with Paul Ehrlich as a guest speaker. Its decline in influence through the 1970s and 80s (it was wound up in 1987) was tied to the rise of groups like Friends of the Earth and The Ecology Party (aka The Green Party), not tied to population concerns and not perceived as old, white and conservative.
