On this day, August 15 2010, Russia announced it was halting grain exports because of drought and heat waves
The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 388.54ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Prices went up. The spark that lit the Arab Spring? Food prices.
Why this matters.
Fortunately it doesn’t, because a new era of justice, peace, love and understanding emerged, and nobody goes hungry anymore.
Mmkay.
What happened next?
We learned nothing.
On this day, August 15 1989, an ex-Gold Coast mayor revealed his Einstein status when it came to understanding 19th century physics.
“At the same time as Lester Brown, president of the prestigious Worldwatch Institute, was in Australia speaking about the grim state of the environment, former Gold Coast mayor Robert Neumann was comparing the greenhouse effect to “a bird urinating in the Tweed River while in flight”. “That’s what I think of this nonsense,” he added.”
Anon, 1989. ‘People who claim that greenhouse is bunkum and hysteria. Green Week 4, August 15, p.6.
Green Week was a super-comprehensive news and analysis publication, which could not survive the end of public interest in “the environment” from 1992…
On this day the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was was 351.84 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
It’s called “anti-reflexivity” – the unwillingness (or inability) to think about environmental problems caused by “modernisation”.
What happened next?
That level of wilful ignorance has persisted, sadly.
On this day, August 14, 1971, police cars pulled up at various houses in middle-class Stanford and “arrested” a bunch of young men.
These fake arrests happened with the arrestees consent, because they’d agreed to take part in what was supposed to be a two week experiment. Half the participants were randomly selected to be prisoners, the others guards. The experimenters thought they’d have to study video tapes, tease out nuance…
Ha ha ha ha.
After 6 days the experiment had to be ended because the guards had – basically – gone completely fascist apeshit.
Turns out humans are a lot more susceptible to some gnarly ways of thinking and being than they want to believe.
That insight will be a great comfort as the Great Acceleration leads us all to accelerate off the Great Cliff onto the rocks of the Great Post-Anthropocene below.
On this day the PPM was 325.43 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
Obedience, conformity, hatred of “The Other” – all just below the surface, as Dr Bernie Rieux rieuxfully warned us….
What happened next?
No long-term studies on the effects on the young men, but it profoundly affected the grad student, Craig Haney, who went on to do enormous amounts of advocacy work around Death Row inmates, and criminology. I was lucky enough to do a class of his (Social Psychology) at University of California at Santa Cruz, 20 years after the Stanford study.
On this day, 14 August 1989,
“The South Australian Government established an interdepartmental committee on climate change… to prepare a strategy addressing the greenhouse issue. The Committee’s first report, `Implications of Climate Change for South Australia’, was released in August 1990 and described the possible impacts of climate change.”
Page P.29 of Industry Commission report http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/greenhouse/15greenhouse2.pdf
Why this matters.
It doesn’t. But I am from South Australia. So, call it a self-indulgence. These sorts of committees and “strategies” were dime a dozen in 1989.
What happened next?
There followed a hell of a lot of talking, not really much doing. But through the 2000s and into the 2010s South Australia – under the canny stewardship of Labor premiers Mike Rann and then Jay Weatherill, managed to leverage the various renewable energy targets that Howard hadn’t managed to kill off.
South Australia managed to make use of its land and wind and start to properly decarbonise its energy sector. Housing and transport and food? Well, not quite so much. But we shall see…
btw, on this day the PPM was 351.84 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
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/
PS 1882 happened to be the First International Polar Year.
On this day atmospheric PPM was – dunno, 292 ppm, according to the ice cores. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
The rebound effect matters very much
What happened next?
Fourteen years after Jevons died, Svante Arrhenius’s work on the build-up of carbon dioxide was released…
On this day, August 12, 1970 a US Senator (Democratic, Texas) had a newspaper article about environment – and climate change – read into the Senate Record. This came a few days after Nixon was warned about climate change.
Richard Yarborough (interesting life – see here) had the late-July article in the Washington Post by Claire Sterling read into the Senate Record.
On this day the PPM was 324.69. Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
We knew. People who were elected to, paid to, make decisions, were warned of potential trouble from the late 60s/early 70s. By the late 70s it was obvious enough that there was a problem, and something needed doing. Nothing was done.
What happened next?
See above.
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?
Video here
Transcript here
https://web.archive.org/web/20080527135745/http://fufor.twoday.net/stories/3428768/
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 11 August in 2010, responding to the “Deep Horizon” disaster, the world’s most trusted news source, The Onion, spoke the truth.
Read it, and weep.
On this day carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 388.54 ppm. Now it is 421ish – but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
You have to laugh, don’t you? No, I mean, you HAVE to laugh.
What happened next?
The disaster kept happening.
On this day, August 10, 1980, the Australian And New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science held a seminar with the ominous title “Energy, Climate and the Future.”
The wonderful Alan Pears takes up the story (from an interview conducted in 2015)
I was on the Victorian organising committee for a scientific seminar on climate research, which included presenters like Graeme Pearman, Barrie Pittock and a range of those people. And at it my question to them was ‘why aren’t you out on the streets telling everyone about this?’
And what did they say?
And Graeme Pearman’s response, which was a very measured one was ‘Well, look, we’ll know for certain by the turn of the century. And at the moment we can’t say for certain. ‘ But certainly the laws of physics did apply in [then], just as they apply now
On this day, atmospheric carbon dioxide was 3367.67 ppm. Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
People have been studying this for a very long time.
What happened next?
There was a symposium in Canberra, a monograph published. Once Barry Jones became Science Minister and was able to create the “Commission for the Future” – which created “The Greenhouse Project”, it started to move forward. But that wasn’t till 1987…
On this day, August 9, 2001, the OECD called on Australia to introduce a carbon tax. Was told to piss off.
CANBERRA, Aug 9 AAP – An OECD call for Australia to introduce environment taxes was today ruled out by the government and opposition despite support from rural backbenchers.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest report showed that Australia’s economy was faring well, and that a carbon tax would be a cost-effective way to benefit the environment.
“Setting up a trading scheme or a carbon tax of broad sectoral coverage is the most cost-effective way to achieve emissions reductions,” the OECD report said.
Environment Minister Robert Hill branded the call Eurocentric, saying the government was instead focused on building economic growth with a low-tax environment.
McSweeny, L. 2001. Fed – Major parties reject OECD call for environment tax. Australian Associated Press, 10 August
Hill’s “Eurocentric” line would later be deployed by his boss John Howard, when Nick “Stern Review” Stern was dismissed for being (checks notes) English.
The depths of banality and venality. It is staggering, isn’t it?
Fun fact – Matthias Cormann, who helped stop the Liberal Party do anything even remotely un-cray on climate in the 2010s is now head of the OECD. Oh how we laughed.
On this day atmospheric co2 was 369.78 ppm. Now it is 421ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
A carbon price was not a communist conspiracy. It really wasn’t. And it would have, with other measures, made some difference, delayed the apocalypse by a few days/weeks/months. Oh well…
What happened next?
The Howard government kept on shitting on everyone’s future. The Rudd government said it would do better. Didn’t. The Gillard government got the climate legislation through, but in the process gave the Murdoch press and the wrecking ball known as Tony Abbott all the ammo they needed (but to be clear, no matter WHAT Gillard did, they were going to try to destroy her).