Thirty seven years ago, on this day, May 9th, 1989, Crispin Tickell tried to move things along.
Boston Globe, May 10 1989.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Tickell was a career diplomat. In 1975 he had done a sabbatical at Harvard University and wrote his thesis on Climatic Change and International Affairs. He could see what carbon dioxide build-up would do to geopolitics. He tried repeatedly to get Margaret Thatcher to be concerned about the question. Eventually, in 1988 he succeeded.
The specific context was that in the second half of 1988 the problem had become an issue. Thatcher gave a speech at the Royal Society in late September 1988 that was, in effect, the starting gun for international diplomacy. The administration of George H.W. Bush, however, was dragging its heels.
What I think we can learn from this. There was a chance to fix this – or if not actually fix it, then manage it. To buy us extra time. Instead we went lead head and lead foot off the cliff. Oh well.
What happened next. The US threatened to boycott the Earth Summit if targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich countries was in the text of the Climate Treaty. This threat worked, the targets and timetables weren’t in, and we have spent the last 34 years trying to get them in.
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.
recent climate updates published by Australian scientists
a way forward out of our Climate and Nature Emergency through a rapid energy descent, simpler lifestyles and restored relationships with our planet and each other
opportunity for a group discussion
When: Wednesday 20 May, 2026
Where: St. Mary’s Hall, Glenelg Catholic Parish, High St, Glenelg
“All three networks on May 8, 1989 did greenhouse effect stories based on Senate sub-committee hearings in which NASA scientist James Hansen told Senator Al Gore that he had been ordered by the Bush administration to change the conclusions in written testimony regarding the seriousness of global warming.”
Sachsman 2000:5)
And
“More specifically, on 8 May 1989, the Office of Management and Budget confirmed that it had altered the Congressional testimony of NASA’s James Hansen, thereby weakening his conclusion that enough was known about the phenomenon to justify immediate action. The Whitehouse defended this action by claiming that it wanted to avoid the appearance of policy disagreements within the Administration. The political fallout from this episode was considerable, not only within the United States but also internationally.”
Rowlands (1995) Page 76
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that scientists had been warning politicians and had mostly been simply ignored. But from 1988 onwards, ignoring came with costs.
The specific context was that James Hansen had given testimony to a Senate Committee on 23rd of June, 1988 and this, as much as anything else, had set the ball rolling. Happy dogs. But new president, George H.W. Bush was opposed to an environmental agenda. I think it’s fair to say, despite his promises on the campaign trail. And here we see evidence of Hansen’s testimony being altered and sidelined, and this being exposed by Democratic senator from Tennessee, Al Gore.
What I think we can learn from this is that if you’re a politician, you can ignore people, but actually actively changing their words… well, someone is going to leak it, and you’re going to get in hot water.
What happened next. Hansen decided just to go back to doing his science, understandably, but he changed his mind in 2005 and has since then been an incredibly effective, active scientist and advocate for action. Bush continued, and scuppered the chance of any strong response to the climate threat by threatening to boycott the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, if targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich countries were in the treaty on climate that was up for signature. This worked. Targets and timetables for rich countries were taken out of the text. And here we are.
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.
But it was rather by luck than design that FoE’s first action, the return of bottles to Cadbury-Schweppes’ offices on Saturday 8 May 1971, achieved phenomenal publicity and launched FoE onto the public’s attention. As Weston remarked “The bottle dump event was really a media coup for FOE. That style of political activity had not been seen in Britain before and was, until then more associated with the American system of pressure group politics” (Weston 1989: 35).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 385ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that concern about pollution, resources running out, overpopulation, etc, were all growing steadily in the late 1960s helped by the Torrey Canyon oil tanker disaster, and then the Santa Barbara oil spill, the Earthrise photo, etc, various pollution incidents.
The specific context was that in the UK, the main environment group at that time was the Conservation Society, but it was small-c conservative, and didn’t want to do eye-catching stunts. Therefore there was an ecological niche for other actors. And here we see Friends of the Earth doing a brilliant publicity stunt, leaving lots of empty bottles that would otherwise go to landfill en masse outside Downing Street. Very visual, very obvious.
What I think we can learn from this is there is a time when these sorts of stunts will work. You have to look at what’s happening within the broader social system.
What happened next. These stunts have diminishing returns. “Hippies protest,” @man bites dog”, but as late as 2006 loads of coal were being dumped outside Downing Street by Greenpeace.
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.
Twenty five years ago, on this day, May 8th, another ignored warning,
Canberra – Pressure mounted on the Australian government on Tuesday to resume international climate change talks after a report by a government agency foreshadowed a dramatic surge in temperatures in the next 70 years.
Australia’s key government research organisation, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), predicted a drier and hotter Australia, with average temperatures rising by up to six percent by 2070.
“Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are the culprit,” head of CSIRO’s atmospheric research group Peter Whetton said in a statement.
Cox, G. 2001. Overheating Australia needs ‘wake-up call’. IOL 8 May.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 371ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that scientists have been warning about carbon dioxide build up for a very long time. There had been warnings and warnings and warnings. There had been the Brian Tucker monograph 1981. In the same year, there had been the secret Office of National Assessments report on fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect. From 1986 the Australian Environment Council, and onward and onward, but none of it had landed.
The specific context was that the Millennium drought is ongoing, and the IPCC Third Assessment Report has come out but none of it is going to really shift the dial, because little Johnnie Howard is a scumbag.
What I think we can learn from this is that we as a species, struggle with the long-term, we struggle with collective cognition, shall we say? And it was more comfortable simply to ignore the truth, especially if everyone else was doing it.
What happened next. More warnings, more please. Reminds me of this cartoon by the late great John Kudelka – “Is this thing on?” Oh, my Lord.
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.
This marvellous book is about much more than how it feels to be alive and aware on a changing planet. It’s about how it feels to want not only to stay alive and aware ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren to do so too, while truthful awareness painfully requires facing the knowledge of the avoidable death and extinction of all we love through the burning of the planet. Kate Marvel begins by quoting poet Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”. Like Whitman, and as a grandparent and psychologist (with a career stretching back through a lot of yesterdays) I too contain multitudes and am glad to feel the resonance with such a gifted storytelling scientist as this nominally determinative writer. I agree when she says that we can be good, if we choose to be, and that there is no such thing as “human nature” (though who chose the book’s title?), and that we humans contain squabbling contradictions, both within and between ourselves. It’s reminiscent of an earlier important book: Why we Disagree About Climate Change (2009) by climate scientist Mike Hulme, who like Marvel, explained that because climate change shapes the way people think about ourselves, communicating well about it requires a mixture of scientific knowledge, personal experience and human imagination. Humanness involves storytelling, while physics and cosmology are immune to our desires and meanings. In her book Kate weaves human emotional meanings with the certainties and uncertainties of the science of complex systems, reminding us that the only place we can live is here within the limits of a gentle climate. Survival, such as it might now be, requires us to face the complexity of our emotions, the fragility of our defences and the powers of our interdependence with one another, including the more than human species with whom we share the planet.
Marvel explores nine feelings: wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope and love. She creates a compelling blend of scientific knowledge with mythology and history, illuminated by her own life and loves for her children, people, places and creatures – and with a shocking revelation in the final chapter. As a cosmologist, she is well able to conjure wonder and awe for the fragility and beauty of the earth, and for the science that enables the modelling of what is happening – echoed now by the astronaut crew of the 2026 Artemis moon shot. Her anger is directed at the idea that things are hopeless, and that humans have to accept the inevitability of climate catastrophe. As a scientist she calls for the necessary and huge experiment to reshape society and culture in ways that would enable us to mitigate future harm and adapt fairly to what is baked in already (an experiment that could well draw from indigenous ways of life that modernity and colonialism have all but stamped out). In the chapter on guilt she tells of the Little Ice Age between 1550 and 1880, and how in the search for responsibility for the bad cold weather the most powerless were singled out to blame – largely women, thousands of whom were executed for witchcraft. It is not hard to see the resonances of victim blaming now, as misogyny rises, and asylum seekers and refugees are falsely accused of causing societal ill, while the rich and powerful spread disinformation and clamp down on protest. Marvel says that the most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to one another.
Grief is in the centre at the heart of the book: conjuring death, mourning, and our anticipatory grief for all that is to be lost and squandered, all happening frighteningly fast and much, although not all, now inevitable: “the breaking of billions of hearts all at once”. Surprise comes in the form of an on-screen climate story for teenagers in which the teenagers rightly ask: wasn’t this story told way back in the 1970s (and as readers of this blog know, many decades before that too). Why didn’t you act?, they ask. On pride, Marvel alerts us to the dangers of hubris, explaining how geo-engineering stands little chance of making a substantive difference relative to the absolute necessity of stopping carbon emissions and generating renewable energy sources. She rightly calls for the other world that is possible: “one where the power to make decisions about the climate is invested in the people, not corporations or billionaires.” And on hope, she summons up the potential of people coming together, collectively doing our best, generating positive stories to help generate the sort of world we want to live in and working to bring the stories to life.
Marvel’s final chapter is on love: being alive, although risky and dangerous, can be joyful, wild and lovely. Change for good has happened before, many times, and it can happen now, if enough of us determine so. This book must surely help our determination.
Twenty four years ago, on this day, May 7th, 2002,
The Australian mining industry still has a long way to go in its quest for sustainable development, but a major report on the sector has found it has made considerable progress in meeting its social and environmental obligations. WMC chief executive, Hugh Morgan, will today unveil the Facing the Future report, which investigated the Australian mining industry as part of the Global Mining Initiative undertaken by the world’s biggest miners.
Howarth, I. 2002. Report card on mining industry to be unveiled. Australian Financial Review, May 7, p. 14.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 373ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that there had been repeated greenwash efforts in Australia around mining and the environment, stretching back to the 70s, probably earlier. One of my favourites was AMEEF launched in 1991.
Anyway, here we see reality catching up with the mining industry. Glossy books were published but the reality was that nothing substantive was being done, because doing anything would cost loads of money or mean not progressing with profitable projects, and neither of those is going to fly in the C suite and at the AGM with the shareholders, who are interested in returns and dividends. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together, and the courage to use them, ultimately knows this.
The specific context was that the Howard Government was clearly not going to ratify Kyoto, or put any constraints at all on the ability of the mining companies to do whatever the hell they wanted.
What I think we can learn from this. It’s all kayfabe.
What happened next. More reports, more pleas for capitalism and industrialism and humanity to act in its long term interest. Meanwhile, the waste remains and the damage accumulates,
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.
Seventy three years ago, on this day, May 6th, 1953,
The Hobart Mercury runs a story on the presentation by Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington DC.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that in the 19th century scientists had figured out that something must be trapping a certain amount of the Sun’s heat from bouncing back into space. Eunice Foote and John Tyndall had figured out it was carbon dioxide (aka carbonic acid). At the end of the 19th century Svante Arrhenius had said that – over thousands of years – man’s release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels would heat the planet. In 1938 British steam engineer Guy Callendar said it probably wouldn’t take that long.
The specific context was that World War Two had boosted the ability of humans to collect data and to analyse it. Plass had access to data and computers. And had ‘institutional heft’, being at Johns Hopkins University.
What I think we can learn from this is that the idea we might toast ourselves was well-reported a very long time ago.
What happened next. Sixteen years later a Tasmanian chemistry professor warned the Senate Committee looking at Air Pollution about carbon dioxide.
The emissions kept climbing…
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 seventh edition of the CO2 Newsletter, (Vol. 2, no. 1) published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982 is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
The eight page issue has a front page story pointing out that “Hottest summers result in lowest summer rainfall in the five ‘Wheat Belt’ states” Barbat does a good job (as ever) in being fair and balanced. At one point he notes
Projections of cyclic global temperatures with an added CO2 greenhouse effect (at 2 to 3° C global temperature rise for a CO2 doubling) give an expectation of global temperatures warmer than the dustbowl era before 2000 (e). Good analogies are not available to predict what climatic effect a continued CO2 increase and further global warming might produce eventually, other than past global warmings have generally been accompanied by a widening and slight poleward shift of the semi- tropical arid belts.
There’s also an editorial, feedback from readers, excerpts from recent reports and a concluding article “A need for rational answers about energy.”
It remains heart-breaking, of course. Barbat’s editorial begins
Whether the divisiveness of the previous decade will end with the November 4 elections in the US. remains to be seen. Some express hope the ‘me’ decade is ending and the ‘we’ decade is beginning, which would help greatly is combating the CO2 problem.
Potential impacts of the CO2 buildup appear to represent by far the largest, most serious, man caused environmental problem that the world will face in the not-too-distant future. Because the threat of famines from climate change and of mass migrations due both to hunger and the potential sea level rise will impact almost everybody, the CO2 problem should be expected to bring together opposing factions on environmental and energy problems. Any delay in closing ranks to halt the CO2 buildup is seen by some knowledgeable workers as leading to more human grief.
Forty six years ago, on this day, May 5th, 1980, Frank Press writes to President Jimmy Carter
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 355ppm. As of 2026 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that American scientists had been trying to raise the alarm for some years about carbon dioxide, and even before his inauguration, Carter was being lobbied in December ‘76 about the CO2 issue. And from early days, early in ‘77 that had been ongoing, his Chief Scientific Advisor, Frank Press, was, I think it’s fair to say, relatively lukewarm on the issue. He had been lobbied in early ‘77 by, I think Weinberg and someone else.
In 1979, Press had, perhaps feeling a little bit cornered on the CO2 issue, asked the National Academies of Science people, especially Jule Charney, to look into the question. And the Charney report that had said, basically, there’s no reason to believe that if we continue putting vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, then the temperature will do anything other than rise markedly.
The specific context was that here we are in an election year, and Frank Press has already chided Gus Speth of the Council on Environmental Quality, about CO2 as a non issue. We’ve already had the Global 2000 report, which mentions CO2, and Press writing to Carter, minimising what the Charney folks wrote, because a slightly more equivocal report had been produced by an ‘ad hoc panel’…
What I think we can learn from this. is that chief scientific advisors are human beings with their own biases and blind spots and while there was a much bigger scientific awareness in the States than in the UK, there was still the roadblock of politics. I’m not saying that Frank Press was anywhere near as bad as the Met Office’s John Mason…
What happened next. Well, Carter lost the 1980 election, the Council on Environmental Quality released a report in the interim period before Reagan took office. Reagan was a catastrophe on so many levels, and it would be 1988 before policy making around climate change was even spoken of.
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.
Boston Globe, May 10 1989.
