On this day, July 19 in 1976, as drought grips the UK, US scientists are pondering.
“In any market, nervousness reflects uncertainty-and there are few things as uncertain as the weather. “We just can’t confidently predict long-range trends in climate,” says Murray Mitchell, a climatologist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington. Mitchell and other specialists have advanced several theories to explain why droughts occur-and they range from speculation about sunspot cycles to a possible tilting of the earth’s axis. One notion holds that man himself is altering the climate with pollution. By burning fossil fuels, the theory runs, the industrialized world adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, creating a “greenhouse effect.” The carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures on the earth’s surface. “If we’re still rolling along on fossil fuels by the end of the century,” Mitchell warns, “then we’ve had it.”
Mayer, A. (1976) A World Praying for Rain. Newsweek, July 19, page 66.
Why this matters.
Again, by the late 1970s, we knew enough…
What happened next?
By the late 1970s, the scientific reports were piling up. Carter paid a little attention. Then along came Reagan. And Thatcher…
On this day, July 18, in 1979, Senator Abraham Ribicoff asked for some advice about “synfuels.”
The context was, the Carter Administration, desperate to reduce US dependency on problematic Middle Eastern Oil (not the dictatorships – that’s fine – it’s the interruptions to supply that’s the problem) was proposing an expensive crash program to develop synthetic fuels (synfuels). These would be incredibly energy intensive to produce… Not everyone was convinced this was a good idea…
“In 1979 [Gordon] MacDonald wrote an article for the Washington Post arguing that subsidizing synthetic fuels, as proposed by the Carter administration, would be a mistake. He pointed out that synthetic fuels would produce even more CO2 than the current U.S. mix of fossil fuels. The article drew the attention of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), who had recently been warned about the issue by West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt” (Nierenberg et al. 2010: 324)
“Although many complex factors affect the climate, it is generally thought that the result of continued carbon dioxide production will be a warming of the atmosphere “that will probably be conspicuous within the next 20 years,” the report said. “If the trend is allowed to continue, climatic zones will shift and agriculture will be displaced.”
Gordon J. MacDonald, environmental studies professor ad Dartmouth College, who is one of the authors said in an interview that large-scale use of synthetic fuels — made from coal or oil shale — could cut the time involved by half.
“We should start seeing the effect in 1990 without synthetic fuels. . . . but if you use them, the effect would be much more pronounced by 1990,” he said.
Actually, unless I am missing something, Nierenberg et al. have got this wrong – and they don’t actually cite the “article in the Washington Post,” which is pretty poor form.
What Ribicoff appears to be responding to are articles in the Post and the Times about an actual report. This was to the Council on Environmental Quality. And it isn’t just Macdonald – “ the other authors of the report were George M. Woodwell, director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory; Roger Revelle, a member of the National Academy of Sciences; and Charles David Keeling, professor of Oceanography of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography” (Shabecoff, 1979).
ANYWAY, that was the 11th, and this blog post is about the 18th. And here we are –
“One incident provides a small example of the work that the Academy does outside the formal structure of reports and out of public view. On July 18, 1979, even as the Charney panel was gathering at Woods Hole, the Academy’s president, Philip Handler, got a call from Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The Senator was cosponsoring a bill on synfuels, and he wanted to know the implications of greenhouse warming. Handler went to the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, and the very next day, it produced a statement on carbon dioxide and energy policy. The statement confirmed that global warming could be a problem. The statement told Senator Ribicoff that the massive expenditures required to create a national synthetic fuels capability should not commit the nation to large-scale dependence on coal for the indefinite future. This is the first time that an Academy group issued a specific policy recommendation, ambiguous although it may be, related to global warming. Olson 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4077050/
Why this matters.
We. Knew. Never forget, we knew.
What happened next?
Synfuels got killed off by Reagan, along with a lot of good stuff. And we had to wait until 1988 to wake up. A decade lost (but then, we would have pissed it against the wall, I guess).
References:
Nierenberg, N. Tshinkel, W. and Tshinkel, V. (2010) Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 3, pps. 318–349. [online here]
Olson, S. (2014) The National Academy of Sciences at 150. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24; 111(Suppl 2): 9327–9364.
On this day, July 8, 1991 the United Kingdom Prime Minister John Major gave his first, brief speech about environment/global warming, at a Sunday Times.Environmental Conference.
He came about as close as any UK Prime Minister/Satrap of the 51st State can to saying “Hey, America, get your act together.”
All he could really bring himself to say was “The United States accounts for 23 percent, the world looks to them for decisive leadership on this issue as on others.”
“Personally, I have always thought it wrong to call it the greenhouse effect, I dislike the term, I dislike it because the image is too cosy, too domestic and far too complacent. Begonias and petunias it most certainly is not, the threat of global warming is real, the spread of deserts, changed weather patterns with potentially more storms and hurricanes, perhaps more flooding of low lying areas and possibly even the disappearance of some island states.”
The context was that the UK was about to host the G7 meeting, and the USA was digging its heels in during the negotiations for a climate treaty, slowing things down so that only the most minimal deal could be reached.
A recent trip to the US by UK Environment Minister Michael Heseltine had failed to break logjams, and Heseltine had publicly slapped down a senior US official who was trash-talking him.
Why this matters.
We always need to remember that the architecture of international law – the UNFCCC – was shaped by United States hostility to global action.
What happened next?
Major, at Rio the following year, offered to host the follow-up event, to show the UK “mattered”. And the winner was… Manchester. Ooops.
On this day, 1st July 1950, the US publication the Saturday Evening Post ran a story on the world … getting warmer. Nowt on carbon dioxide (at this stage, Guy Callendar’s data were largely ignored/in the doghouse).
Why it matters
People were attuned to some warming (even though at this stage it was relatively mild)
What happened next?
By the end of the decade the answer was “yes” and “carbon dioxide is in fact accumulating in the atmosphere.” It would be another decade before enough scientists started to say it to each other, and do more research, before the real fun started…
Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, a Fulton County (Georgia) Superior Court judge, on 30 June 2008, blocked construction of the first coal-burning power plant proposed in Georgia in more than 20 years, ruling that it must limit emissions of carbon dioxide. This was the first time that a court had applied an April 2007 ruling of the US Supreme Court recognizing that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act to an industrial source.
“The law” is an interesting construct, isn’t it? Sometimes the power of its words force those running the show onto the back foot, at least for a while.
“They make the laws, to chain us well [the clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell]”.
What happened next?
The plant, Longleaf, never got built – as part of a quid pro quo with the Sierra Club, something else did, in Texas. The atmosphere definitely noticed the difference, oh yes.
On this day, June 24 in 1986, A New York television channel showed a documentary with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title of “The Climate Crisis”-
“PICKING up where a high-school chemistry class might end, ”Nova,” the public-broadcasting science series, offers the nonmatriculating viewer an advanced course in worrying. The cause of the concern is all the carbon dioxide that’s being pumped into the industrialized and motorized air. The hour-long broadcast is called ”The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect,” at 9 tonight on Channel 13.
“The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life – animal, plant, human – will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth’s mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.”
Mitgang, H. 1986. Earth’s Climatic Crisis Examined by ‘Nova’. New York Times, 24 June.
Why this matters.
Good to remember that serious efforts were being made. It’s too easy to tell stories about “then this politician did this, then this CEO did that”, and therefore public opinion changed to “x”.
It is an easy narrative device, and it is a career-helper AND it helps with this idea (comforting) that there is a bridge to storm to save the Titanic by grabbing the wheel and yanking.
Yeah, no.
What happened next?
Public education efforts continued. Two years later, eight years after she was first given credible warnings, Thatcher started saying the “right” words, as did George Bush. That went well, didn’t it?
I walked out the first time I saw it, because I was an eighteen year old moron with no idea of what he was seeing.
Anyway, spoilers – this is an homage to Chinatown, but with cartoons’s about a conspiracy to kill off public transport and force everyone into cars.
And there’s folks out there who will quibble (waves at Cameron) or, in fact present counter-arguments, but you know, National City Lines was a thing. This sort of stuff does, in essence, happen.
If you like your politics and economics in cartoon form.
Why this matters.
These are cognitive maps, if we choose to use them. Mostly we choose not to. So it goes.
UPDATE: If you’ve come here for this, you might also be interested in a new post (October 1st 2024) about Jimmy Carter’s climate change actions. Happy birthday President Carter!
On this day, June 20, 1979, US President Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels put on the White House.
It was organised by Dennis Hayes, who had been one of the co-ordinators of Earth Day in 1970, and then headed of Carter’s Solar Energy Research Institute
There is a brilliant blog post by Oliver Carpenter of the UK Science Museum about this here. See also Scientific American.
On this day in 1997, the cuddly-sounding but actually simply evil “Global Climate Coalition” ran the following newspaper advert, as part of the huge, well-funded and well-coordinated campaign to … (checks notes)… render human civilisation quite unlikely in the second half of the 21st century.
Exactly 12 years later, on June 19, 2009 there was a “Mothers Day of Action” in the US, as part of a push for a climate and energy act.
“On Friday, June 19th, 1Sky and groups like MoveOn, Green for All, Oxfam and others are calling for a national day of action to make the climate bill stronger. It’s a day for you to “get visible” in your community. Please invite your family, friends and neighbors to rally at your representative’s district office and make your voice heard loud and clear.
Your voice lets your representative know that there are concerned citizens — like you — who want a stronger bill to create millions of clean energy jobs and begin to tackle climate change. So now it’s time to get louder!…..
Why June 19th? Right now, several committees are working on this bill, and we expect a House floor vote by the end of June. This is the critical moment we’ve been working for in the House, so it’s time to make ourselves visible!
Why this matters.
We need to remember that the language of motherhood has been used a lot (I think it is a two-edged sword, tbh) – that this did not suddenly emerge in about 2018. Corporations and threatened industries can cloak themselves with the mantle of the underdog, of innocence, and go all DARVO too…
What happened next?
GCC shut up shop in 2002, “mission accomplished”.
MAU shut up shop in 2011 – mission not really accomplished. So it goes.
On this day in 1988 we were warned. Again.. With the Toronto conference on The Changing Atmosphere approaching, the WMO released a report, and scientists tried to alert the media.
This from the Associated Press-
“Things are going to change too fast,” scientist Michael Oppenheimer said as the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations Agency, released a report last week on the climate change that could be triggered by the “greenhouseeffect.”
The report painted a picture of a global civilization heating its atmosphere in a myriad of ways, from burning fossil fuel to destroying tropical forests.
Those actions could force the average temperature up by 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the next three decades, the report says. That might not sound like much, but the scientistssay it would be enough to wreak havoc.
Such a temperature increase, for example, would cause the sea level to rise by 10 inches, bringing seawater an average of 83 feet inland, according to Oppenheimer.
“The potential for economic, political and social destruction is extraordinary,” said biologist George Woodwell.
‘Greenhouse Effect’ Could Trigger Flooding, Crop Losses, Scientists Say The Associated Press June 13, 1988
Why this matters.
We knew. Never forget that we knew.
What happened next?
We did nowt, unless you count toothless treaties and wishful thinking as action. Personally, I don’t.
