“Kasherman quickly resumed publishing the Public Press, and set his sights on Mayor Marvin L. Kline, a Republican, whom he accused of allowing gangsters to run rampant. The December 1944 issue of the “Public Press” featured the headline “Kline Administration Most Corrupt Regime in the History of the City.” A month later, on the night of Jan. 22, 1945, Kasherman was ambushed after eating dinner with a friend and shot dead on a sidewalk at 15th and Chicago avenues in Minneapolis. His death made the front pages of newspapers across the Twin Cities, but few in the city were surprised when the police investigation quickly petered out…”
Journalists who don’t get the memo about afflicting the poor and comforting the rich sometimes need reminders of who is in charge….
(How) does it connect to climate change?
Most journalists are basically mostly-house-trained lapdogs. Occasionally they are allowed to nibble a finger to make themselves feel Independent. But pretty much a wing of the public relations industry…
What happened next
How does it help us understand the world?
Know that what you are seeing is, well, filtered.
How does it help us act in the world?
“All the adverts fit to print, all the news printed to fit” etc etc.
The source that it comes from, if necessary,
Xxx
The other things that you could read about this or watch
The carbon dioxide issue attracted more and more attention from scientists through the 1970s. They worried that plans to expand energy production using fossil fuels would lead to catastrophe. They (and some far-sighted politicians) began to lobby President Carter, and in July 1977 Carter’s Science Advisor Frank Press wrote a memo to Carter about it. But Carter as trying to boost the “synfuels” (synthetic fuels, basically turning coal into liquid fuel) as a way of reducing vulnerability to price shocks.
In early 1979 Press asked top scientists to look at whether the CO2 problem was indeed a real issue to worry about. An ad hoc panel, chaired by Jule Charney (a very big fish), met for a couple of weeks in July, and then released its report, under the title Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. In October 1979 William Barbat released the first issue of his CO2 Newsletter. The lead article on the second issue’s front page was about the Charney report.
Report to president’s adviser: CO2 buildup can change climate
The introduction of the CO2 issue into U.S. energy policy moved a step closer in November as a scientific advisory panel reported “If the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is indeed doubled… our best estimate is that changes in global average temperature of the order of 3 degrees C will occur and that this will be accompanied by significant changes in regional climatic patterns.”
At the request of Frank Press, science adviser to the President, the National Academy of Sciences had convened this group of experts who had little previous involvement in CO2 studies to make an impartial examination of the validity of CO2 forecasts.
The group stated in its report that the basic model relating CO2 to global warming is correct, so far as they can see. “We have tried but have been unable to find any overlooked or underestimated physical effects that could reduce the currently estimated global warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 to negligible proportions or reverse them altogether.”
Barbat, W. (1979) “Report to President’s adviser: CO2 buildup can change the climate.” CO2 Newsletter, Vol. 1, No 2, p. 1
Wade, N. 1979. CO2 in Climate: Gloomsday Predictions Have No Fault. Science, Nov 23.Vol 206, Issue 4421 pp. 912-913 DOI: 10.1126/science.206.4421.912.b
“It was an event billed as the smackdown between the baddest coal baron around and the environmental heir to the liberal Kennedy legacy, live on stage and in the heart of Appalachia mine country. Stage right, appropriately, was Don Blankenship, chairman of Massey Energy, a meaty impassive presence, his Kentucky drawl never picking up speed or volume. On the left, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has spent his life defending waterways, making lawyerly argument out of staccato bursts of statistics.
The pairing at the University of Charleston was the perfect personification of America’s deep divides: Republican versus Democrat; old industry v new, global warming denier v impassioned advocate for climate change laws.”
The specific context was RFK wasn’t bonkers. Or he was, but hiding it better?
What we learn is that people can have some good ideas and then completely off the rails.
What happened next
Yeah, well, read a newspaper. He’s killing millions, helping diseases were were keeping in check stage a comeback.
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 world revolves around Washington. It was there, in May 1953, that Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass warned a scientific conference that the carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere when humans burnt ever more oil, coal and gas would heat the planet, with the impacts being obvious by the century.
It was there in November 1965 that President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee released a report saying Plass’s concerns might well be justified.
It was there in January 1982 at another scientific meeting that at American and German scientists warned “the signs are so ominous that we must expect (a large climatic impact) and take action to avoid it.”
And it was there, on Thursday, that The Trump administration announced its intention to pull out of both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), alongside many other organisations.
By the late 1970s the build up of carbon dioxide was attracting serious attention by ever more alarmed scientists (see, for example, the 1979-1982 CO2 Newsletter I recently uncovered). President Carter’s science advisor asked skeptical scientists to “kick the tires” on these views. The “Charney Report,” produced to meet this request said they could find no reason to doubt that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled, then there would be a warning of anywhere between 1.5 to 3 degrees.
The incoming Reagan administration was uninterested (or, hostile) to these concerns. By 1985 two things had changed. The scientific consensus around carbon dioxide build-up as a problem had become even firmer, and thanks to the discovery of the Ozone Hole, the credibility of atmospheric scientists was sky-high (sorry about that, but it was there and I had to use it). After a pivotal meeting in Villach, Austria scientists grabbed every alarm lever they could, and pulled. In December, Carl Sagan gave his famous, gripping, testimony, In… Washington.
Speaking to reporters after giving testimony in Washington (where else?) in June 1988, scientist James Hansen famously said“it’s time to stop waffling and say that the greenhouse effect is here.”
Well, if there HAS to be a treaty…
1989 saw a flurry of international summits, both specifically on climate, and “sustainable development” more generally. Not coincidentally, the “Global Climate Coalition”, made up of mostly but not exclusively US oil companies, automobile makers and other usual suspects (on their attacks on the IPCC, which the Trump administration is also pulling out of, see here).
As I wrote when President George HW Bush died, the US could have got in on the ground floor. He didn’t. Once the push for a treaty became inevitable, the Americans decided to make the best of it, and prevent outcomes that would be too challenging (some within the US Department of State had felt bruised over the speed of a treaty to protect the Ozone Layer, a few years earlier.)
The main sticking point for the Americans – and there were competing factions within the Bush administration, which led to some whiplash statements and negotiating positions, at least until the “skeptics” won – was that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich nations were not to be included in the any climate treaty. As Bush repeatedly and publicly said “American way of life is not negotiable.”
Only once the offending targets and timetables by rich countries were removed from the negotiating text did the Bush Administration agree that Bush would attend the Rio Earth Summit and sign the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Article 2 of that treaty makes for rueful reading now. It states that the goal is
“to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”
Fine words butter no parsnips.
Thirty years of dummy spits
However, the idea that rich countries, which had caused the problem and were wealthy, should go first on emissions reductions could only be delayed, not defeated. The first “Conferences of the Parties”, in early 1995 ended with the Berlin Mandate, calling on rich countries to come to the 1997 COP with a plan, which ended up being held in Kyoto Protocol.. This sparked a huge pre-emptive effort against the “Kyoto Protocol” driven by the Global Climate Coalition, with other bad-faith actors adding their two cents (some will have seen the play Kyoto, about the Climate Council), leading the US Senate to vote, 95-0 in favour of a motion that said, in effect, “we’re not cutting until poor countries agree to”
The US – with help from Australia – pushed a “technology will fix it” line, but once Kyoto was ratified by enough nations to become law, in 2005 (a quid pro quo with Russia, which wanted World Trade Organisation membership), then the US had to re-engage.
Famously at the 2008 G8 meeting Bush said – revealingly – “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
The 2009 “last chance to save the world” meeting at Copenhagen ended in disarray and the next five years saw the pieces of the dropped vase were glued back together in time for the Paris Agreement, which managed not to mention the dread words “fossil fuels.”
Trump announced in 2017 that he would pull out of the Paris Agreement. That man Biden from 1986 re-entered in 2021, and Paris, and introduced huge incentives for “clean tech” (renewable energy and other more dubious ventures, such as direct air capture under the “Inflation Reduction Act and other pump-priming schemes. Although the IRA should have made big business happy, they decided not to try to defend it in the face of Trump’s obvious hostility.
And now this. A couple of random observations;
As the costs pile up, and reality becomes harder and harder to ignore
The Trump administration is not doing what is in the long-term interest of American capital, which could have made more money via Biden’s IRA. While there was a “logic” to anti-Kyoto activity, this anti-climate crusade seems far more ideological
What next?
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
IF the US goes ahead and pulls out (and there’s little reason to believe they won’t – their claims should be taken both literally and seriously) then several things happen.
There will be an audible sigh of relief from Australia – especially Adelaide – that they lost out on hosting the next COP.
The various academics who critique the whole UNFCCC process as not fit for purpose will try (and sometimes fail) to keep from saying “I told you so.”
There will be a blizzard of academic papers on “multilateralism” and bilateral deals between states, with the focus switching to what cities and technologies can do.
People invested in the COP process will insist it continues, and say the role is to keep the US seat warm for the glorious day in 2029 when a Democratic president restores “order” and “sanity.”
Regardless of what happens, we should remember the following
When Gilbert Plass made his warning, humans (mostly in the West) were pumping out about 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 314ppm
When the UNFCCC was agreed, emissions were about 23 billion tonnes and the CO2 level was 355ppm
Today, despite all the pledges, all the renewables and so forth, we are pumping out about 40 billion tonnes, and the CO2 in the atmosphere is 428ppm, and galloping upwards.
More emissions means more CO2 hanging around in the atmosphere. More CO2 means more heat in the Earth System, means more extreme weather events and – between them – a remorseless rise in temperatures, with all that that entails.
On this day, January 12, in 1946 Frankie Fay, a fascist asshole who had been the “first stand-up” held a rally of 10,000 fellow fascist asssholes.
And this AFTER the truth of what the Nazis had done was out there….
“… Actor’s Equity stood by Brooks, Darling, Malina and Osato. Rather than expel them from his union, Lytell censured Frank Fay for “conduct prejudicial to the association or its membership.”
…
In response to the censure, allies of Franco, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi party organized a rally at Madison Square Garden in January 1946 called “The Friends of Frank Fay.” Speakers included Klan ally Joseph Scott, Nazi Laura Ingalls, publisher of anti-Semitic pamphlets John Geis, and the prolific Joseph P. Kamp, who had used the KKK’s mailing list to distribute his work about “Jewish influence” and America’s “Communist President” Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The context was that the truth of the extermination camps and the industrialised murder of millions of Jewish people, Roma, and other “undesirables” was kinda hard to ignore in 1946. But never underestimate the fash, I guess.
Why care?
This stuff matters! We need to remember that there is nothing that cannot be denied/ignored/minimised if it gets between you and your a) money and b) sense of yourself as a Good Person.
(How) does it connect to climate change?
See above.
What happened next
The white supremacists took a series of defeats through the 50s-70s, but have come roaring back.
Fay died, unlamented, in 1961.
How does it help us understand the world?
That evil never goes away. It can be contained, on a good day.
How does it help us act in the world?
Xx
The source that it comes from, if necessary,
Xxx
The other things that you could read about this or watch
There’s a Kurt Vonnegut novel I should read again, about 1930s White Supremacists…
What do you think?
If you have opinions or info about this, or other things that happened on this day that are worth knowing, let me know!
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 370ppm. As of 2026 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that 8 years of Al Gore as Veep hadn’t ushered in the ecotopia. There was the “BTU tax,” foiled by fossil fuel interests in 1993 and then the pre-emptive strike against the Kyoto Protocol. So, not much to post about.
The specific context was that Gore had had the 2000 election stolen out from under his nose by the Supreme Court mates of his opponent’s dad – George HW Bush.
What I think we can learn from this is that there are no saviours. At absolute best politicians can be forced to nudge things into a slightly less rapidly suicidal direction. You want actual change, you need social movements. But they tend to flame out after a few years (repression is exhausting, after all)
What happened next is Gore dusted himself off and gave the world “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.
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, obv
“An important meeting took place in Washington, DC,on 9 January 1946. Convened by Francis Reichelderfer, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s Chief, it was supposed to be secret, but a detailed account of it appeared in the New York Times two days later! There were a dozen meteorologists at the meeting, some of them military men, and there were two guests: John von Neumann, a mathematician from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Vladimir Zworykin of RCA, who had invented the scanning television camera. They had come to explain their startling proposal, that the electronic digital computer planned by Neumann might be used to forecast and ultimately control the weather.”
Walker History of Met Office p318
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 349ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that humans have always wanted to control the uncontrollable, for understandable reasons. Shamans, witch doctors, rain dances, ghost dances etc etc.
The specific context was that after you split the atom and nuke 150,000 civilians with two bombs, what could stop you from controlling everything!
What I think we can learn from this – smart people often don’t understand that smarts will only get you so far.
They tried (and failed) to control the weather. But long-term? They certainly succeeded in climate modification…
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.
On this day 43 years ago, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (created 1848) held its annual meeting, this time in Washington DC. The climatologists held panels within that.
They were pretty blunt about what was on the way.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2026 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was the AAAS had been around for a long long time. By the late 1960s its annual gatherings were a site for scientific discussion of what was coming (see here and here).
The specific context was by the late 1970s the climate scientists were beginning to get sure of the eventual result of tipping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (though they varied on time frames). AAAS was involved.
Efforts to get policymakers interested had had some success, but it all fell in a heap after the Reagan Administration came in in January 1981.
What I think we can learn from this is that we have known for a long time. This. Was. Not. A. State. Secret.
[LINK]
What happened next. The climate stuff at the AAAS meeting was covered in newspapers around the US, sometimes featuring quite prominently. The scientific work continued. And continued.
1988 was the pivotal year. [LINK]
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.
Seven years ago, on this day, December 26th, 2018,
On December 26, 2018, the Ninth Circuit denied the requested writ of mandamus as moot but granted the interlocutory appeal by a 2–1 vote.[52]
Juliana vs United States
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 409ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was the law is there, mostly, to protect the rich from the poor. You can dress it up how you like (and people are well paid to do so).
What I think we can learn from this – the law is there to protect the rich (present generations) from the poor and the claims of other species and the future generations of hairless murder apes, rich and poor. There, is that better?
What happened next
On January 17, 2020, on a 2–1 vote, the Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case for lack of Article III standing. Writing for the majority, Judge Hurwitz wrote that “it is beyond the power of an Article III court to order, design, supervise, or implement the plaintiffs’ requested remedial plan. As the opinions of their experts make plain, any effective plan would necessarily require a host of complex policy decisions entrusted, for better or worse, to the wisdom and discretion of the executive and legislative branches.”[60] In dissent, Judge Staton characterized the majority as shirking its judicial responsibility to rectify a grave constitutional wrong in the manner the U.S. Supreme Court laudably did in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, stating, “My colleagues throw up their hands, concluding that this case presents nothing fit for the Judiciary.”[61] She further argued, “No case can singlehandedly prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change predicted by the government and scientists. But a federal court need not manage all of the delicate foreign relations and regulatory minutiae implicated by climate change to offer real relief, and the mere fact that this suit cannot alone halt climate change does not mean that it presents no claim suitable for judicial resolution.”
And
On Dec. 29, 2023, Judge Aiken ruled that her court would hear the case as based on the amended complaint.[76] The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled on May 1, 2024, that the plaintiffs lacked standing and ordered the lower court to dismiss the case with no option to amend their filings.[77] On Sep 12, 2024, the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit’s dismissal of the case.[78] The Court declined to hear the appeal in March 2025.[79]
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 332ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that the use of violence – up to and including assassination – against political opponents/”the rabble” is as American as apple pie.
The specific context was that one of the key goals of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was to prevent coalitions forming across race and class. Nightmare scenario is when you can’t divide and conquer. So, Fred Hampton, who eschewed the gun-toting of other Panthers, and was trying to build a Rainbow coalition with poor whites and Puerto Rican activists was a nightmare.
What I think we can learn from this – the Nation did (does) some good journalism.
What happened next
“The families of Hampton and Clark filed a $47.7 million civil suit against the city, state, and federal governments. The case went to trial before Federal Judge J. Sam Perry. After more than 18 months of testimony and at the close of the plaintiff’s case, Perry dismissed the case. The plaintiffs appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed, ordering the case to be retried. More than a decade after the case had been filed, the suit was finally settled for $1.85 million.[77] The two families each shared in the settlement”
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.
