27 March 1995, to another Australian audience – “On the greenhouse effect, Sir John suggested that the onus of proof had shifted towards those who denied it”. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-253921166/view?sectionId=nla.obj-259513073&partId=nla.obj-253927437#
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the first IPCC report had come out, and the second was near completion. John Maddox, finally, 25 years after his first attacks on carbon dioxide concerns, was conceding that those worried had been right and he’d been wrong. Not that he put it in those words of course.
The older context was that in 1971 Maddox on a visit to Australia had rubbished worries about carbon dioxide….
What I think we can learn from this is it takes old white men a very long time to change their tune. It’s not clear to me that the former Met Office supremo, John Mason, for example, ever did.
What happened next
The second IPCC report came out saying that there was a discernible influence of human activity. And this word got monstered. The denialists knew enough not to go for Bert Bolin, so they went for Ben Santer instead.
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.
Fifty four years ago, on this day, March 27th, 1971,
In 1971, in Norway’s largest tabloid newspaper, a journalist reported [on March 27] that global warming “may cause the polar ice to melt, that the ocean will rise above its shores, that cities and large territories of land will be under water, [and] that humans will be displaced to mountain regions” (Anonymous 1971). This alarming news story, possibly the first reference to the issue of global warming in Norwegian press, was buried in a host of similar stories of doom and gloom. Since Earth Day a year before, readers had become used to hearing about a fast approaching environmental Ragnarök. This was alarming news to Norwegians who would typically spend their vacations enjoying the country’s beautiful fjords and mountains.
Anonymous (1971) Og havet vil stige, VG March 27
Source: Anker, 2018
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 326ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the previous year, in February, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands had mentioned CO2 build up. There were probably other mentions in the press, but crucially, this is apparently the first one in the Norwegian press, alongside a general sense of ecological problems, there was also a very specific climatological issue.
What I think we can learn from this
Climate change was among the other late 1960s-early 197s eco-concerns…
What happened next
Well, nine years later, the Minister for Statoil said it was a long way off. [see March 21, 1980]
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.
Fifteen years ago, on this day, March 26th, 2010, the Labor government was forced to give details of the size of the (large) Australian delegation to COP-15 in Copenhagen.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 390ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Copenhagen hadn’t just been Kevin Rudd tearing up the speech that had been written for him, rewriting it and delivering it to a total lack of applause. No, Copenhagen had been 70 or 75 officials and experts and so forth, all flying halfway around the world to save the world. And the Liberals were wanting to punch the bruise, and so requested the information in order to have the ammo that to run a one day wonder, “waste of money, pointy headed bureaucrats with their snouts in the trough style” article. And so it came to pass.
What I think we can learn from this
that any international negotiation is going to involve sherpas at the summit and all sorts of other malarkey. And for those who are opposed to the agenda of whatever the summit is, it’s a very easy writes-itself kind of critique. And that’s what happened.
What happened next
A couple months after this Rudd was gone. The climate issue, however, was not…
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.
Dave Vetter writes extremely well about climate change and the messiness of it all. He has a very much worth-your-time set of essays about climate disinformation, a judiciously active social media presence (first on the site that Shall Not Be Named) and latterly on Bluesky. He kindly agreed to an interview…
Who are you – i.e. roughly when were you born, where did you grow up, what did you do after leaving school?
I was born in Edinburgh at some point in the (cough) 1970s, but grew up in Cardiff, where it rained so hard for so long that I ran away to East Asia. I spent a few years as a teacher in Hong Kong, until I realised I couldn’t have a job that didn’t revolve around writing. At that point I returned to the UK and took up an MA in international journalism. Since then I’ve had just about every print media role you can think of, and the entire time print media has been in its death throes. That’s quite a concerning correlation, when I think about it.
When and how did you first hear about climate change – do you remember what you thought?
I first heard about climate change in the 1980s, when I was in primary school. Our teachers did a good job of scaring us into being little activists. That’s never really gone away. I also understood from a young age that climate change is indivisible from human injustice, probably thanks to my dad [the epidemiologist Norman J. Vetter]. I get annoyed when people talk about “saving the planet”. We’re saving ourselves! Shoutout to Dana Fisher, there.
You write for Forbes – how did that gig come about?
I began writing for Forbes when I returned to the UK in 2019. I’d been in media and publishing for about 12 years by that point, but wanted to focus solely on climate. At that point I had the means, motive and opportunity to completely reconfigure my career in a media industry that I felt was becoming increasingly frivolous – so I went for it.
You’re pretty prolific on social media – what do you get out of it (positive and negative) and what would you like to see “climate people” doing more of – or less of – on Bluesky etc?
Yes, I post too much. It’s probably a net harm to me in all sorts of ways, but I generally try to highlight issues that I feel need attention, and I try to do so in a responsible way without being boring about it. I’m perpetually conflicted about how useful any of this is; I, like many of us, am just figuring it out as we go along.
What other projects are you involved in?
I’m trying to juggle a dozen projects while treading water. My approach is far too headless chicken. And to pay the bills I ghostwrite and do copyediting.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is everything is gonna be peachy keen through to 10 is “Mad Max scenarios look like The Sound of Music before the Nazis turn up”, where do you think we will be in 2050? From a self-centred, short-termist, northern European perspective, I’m hopeful that European agriculture doesn’t collapse. There are indications that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation might be more robust than we thought, which might be a reprieve, though we absolutely shouldn’t be banking on this.
The one thing we can be sure of is we’re heading into a less safe, less stable future. I’m sorry to say that that means most of us are going to be struggling a lot more, while a few very wealthy fraudsters will continue to grab what they can. To sustain ourselves I think we’re going to need to rediscover the meaning of community, and what’s actually important, rather than what we’ve been inculcated to believe is important.
Bonus – anything else you’d like to say.
Something I really appreciate about All Our Yesterdays is that, via history, it emphasises aspects of the climate crisis that are overlooked – namely the cultural and the social aspects, which is where I believe all the most important fights are being fought. People always claim the biggest hurdle to climate action is politics, but they’re wrong: it’s culture. Andrew Breitbart, the most appalling figure, was right when he said politics is downstream from culture. Liberal politicians almost universally do not understand this, which is a big reason why we’re facing the crises we’re facing.
Thirty years ago, on this day, March 26th, 1995, red and green try to mix, with limited success.
Bad blood flows between the green movement and the union movement. The controversy over logging recently has led to ugly incidents between timber workers and conservationists. Ms George said she had agreed to speak at a conference on women and the environment this weekend to try to ease some of the hostility between the two groups…. The Australian Conservation Foundation’s executive director, Ms Tricia Caswell, said the ACF, Greenpeace and women’s groups had decided to host the conference at the World Congress Centre because women were often the backbone of community environment groups and were the main environmental educators to children but received little recognition.
Milburn, C. 1995. ACTU’s George Plays Peacemaker To Greens, Unions. The Age, March 24
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Australia is a patriarchal settler colony with horrendous attitudes on sex, race, nature, and there are ongoing cultural, ideological, political, physical battles around this. When ACF set this conference up, they were probably hoping that they could bask in the glory of a carbon tax, but it was not to be.
crucially,Can we find someone who was there that would be interesting, a woman who was there in Melbourne, 30 years ago. So for an interview, Article doesn’t have to be specifically about that conference and whether it meant anything, because, frankly, maybe it didn’t. It can be more broad than that. Okay, send out the request.
What I think we can learn from this
We fail. And we keep failing.
What happened next
We failed some more.
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.
Forty three years ago, on this day, March 25th, 1982,
The CBS Evening News for March 25, 1982 included a two minute and 50 second story by David Culhane on the greenhouse effect. Chemist Melvin Calvin raised the threat of global warming, Representative Al Gore called for further research, and James Kane of the Energy Department said there was no need for haste. (Sachsman, 2000)
Carbon Dioxide and Climate : The Greenhouse Effect hearings of the House Committee on Science and Technology, 97th Congress, March 25 1982 https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002758682
See the detailed account in Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth
(also in C02 Newsletter Vol 3 No 3, March-April 1982)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 341ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
that the CO2 issue was something journalists had been particularly interested in since maybe the late 1970s and although Reagan and Republicans were in the ascendant, that didn’t mean that Congress had stopped chipping away. And I think in ‘82 was the first time Al Gore had held hearings
Congressional hearings are a nice hook – the experts are in town, so you can grab them for an interview. And you can get two or three minutes of quality journalism relatively cheaply and predictably.
What I think we can learn from this that Americans were being tolerably well-informed about future threats. 43 years ago. It was on the television for Christ’s sake – national news.
What happened next
CO2 kept bubbling away in the American news, famously in ‘83 with the EPA report “can we delay a greenhouse warming?” (no), and on and on at a relatively low level until it properly exploded in the summer of 1988.
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.
Thirty five years ago, on this day, March 24th, 1990, on the night of the Federal election, a retiring Labor Minister got stuck in to environmentalists.
“The backlash against environmentalists began very publicly on election night. Peter Walsh launched a bitter attack on them from the tally room, attempting to deny any influence they might have had on the outcome. He was joined in later weeks and months by a number of Cabinet ministers, largely but not exclusively from the economic portfolios, but careful evaluation of that election result makes Walsh’s assertion untenable.
Malcolm Mackerras (The Australian, March 1, 1993) summarises the result well: on the primaries, the Coalition had 43.5 per cent to Labor’s 39.4 per cent, the Democrats 11.3 and others 5.8 per cent.
However, Labor’s environment second-preference strategy was so successful that the two-way party preferred vote became 50.1 per cent for the Coalition and 49.9 per cent for Labor (which just fell over the line to win in seats).”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was the Australian Federal election, where the ALP gets a fourth term very narrowly, and crucially, thanks to small g green voters, though Peter Walsh, who was stepping down, didn’t like to be beholden to people he despised (people who believed in, you know, beauty and post-material values and all the rest of it.) Walsh was an old-fashioned Labor right, disdained these people, and must have hated that his party could only get back into power with their help. Thus, of course, vociferous denial and denunciation.
What I think we can learn from this is that people like Walsh, and there are lots of them around, cannot abide fragility, especially their own.
What happened next
Walsh acted out his fury and hate and presumably self-loathing in both his newspaper columns. See here LINK and here, LINK for example, and also as part of the Lavoisier Group. If ever you needed an Australian poster poster boy for anti-reflexivity, (link to video about this here) it’s Peter Walsh
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 roughly 324ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
the second part of a “what are we doing to the earth?” CBS show. The context was that throughout the 1960s concern about growing air pollution, water pollution, litter, ugliness, deforestation, and general angst about the consequences of modernity had been building. One obvious marker of this was Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring.
Anyway, things really kicked off in ‘69 because of the Santa Barbara oil spill and Nixon wanting to get ahead of the environment issue. But of course, the documentary was two part
Oh, sidebar, that 15th of July report, that’s probably the memo from Kennet, explicitly mentions Barry Commoner.
What I think we can learn from this is that there has been hand wringing and pearl-clutching and worry about environmental issues long before Earth Day in April 1970.
What happened next
Six months later, Senator Gaylor Nelson decided that there should be an Earth Day, and he deliberately chose Vladimir Lenin’s birthday as a secret signal to his fellow crypto-Marxists… I’m just kidding. And his intern, Dennis Hayes, did a good job of coordinating. And then on April 22 1970 everyone was out proclaiming their Love of Mother Nature.
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.
Eighteen years ago, on this day, March 22nd, 2007, Fairfax Media tells its employees to virtue-signal
From: Staff Notices To: All_Fairfax_Staff
Sent: Thursday, 22 March 2007 9:06 AM
Subject: EARTH HOUR – A MESSAGE TO ALL STAFF
When the lights of Sydney are turned off for one hour at 7:30pm on Saturday, March 31, we should take a moment to reflect, with pride, on the role Fairfax Media has played in Earth Hour.
For the past eight months, the Earth Hour working group has been meeting every Tuesday on Level 19 at Darling Park to plan this bold event.
Every strand of our business – management, editorial, online, commercial, marketing and production – has been involved in the planning process.
(From Ray Evans, 27 April 2007 rant…)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that approximately six months previously, climate change had burst back into Australian public consciousness, via the Millennium Drought, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, things like the Stern Review and perhaps even the UK Camp for Climate Action.
Kevin Rudd as first ALP shadow foreign secretary and then leader had by this time, already called climate change “the great moral challenge of our generation” (he was using the issue as a stick with which to beat the incumbent Prime Minister, John Howard). And everyone wants to feel they’re doing their bit without being at all really inconvenienced, or to turn that “inconvenience” into a display of virtue.
What I think we can learn from this is that there might be a so-called Earth Hour, but the other 23 days of that day, and all the other days of the year where there isn’t an Earth Hour is what – Anti Earth Hour? or Kill the Earth Hour? Go figure.
What happened next
Some people switched some lights off. And patted themselves heartily on the back. We’ll come back to this on the day itself, March 31.
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.
Forty five years ago, on this day, March 21st, 1980, the oil companies CLEARLY knew what was coming. And not just those Evil American ones – also the nice cuddly progressive [Er, is this right? Ed] European ones….
One example of this was a talk given in 1980 [on March 21] by Finn Lied, the chair of the Statoil board, at a seminar about Norway’s energy supply towards the year 2000. Lied, who had also been the minister of industry during the establishment of Statoil in 1971–72, stressed the ‘social cost’ of the ‘CO2 problem’. His main concern, however, was not the effects that increasing carbon dioxide levels would have on nature and human life but what it meant for the oil industry’s future prospects. ‘Luckily’, Lied concluded, the emissions problem was ‘a very long-term problem that no one really dared to begin think about’.11
Nissen, A. 2021. A greener shade of black? Statoil, the Norwegian government and climate change,1990—2005. Scandinavian Journal of History, Volume 46, 2021 – Issue 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2021.1876757
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 338ppm. As of 2025 it is 429ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the First World Climate Conference had happened in Geneva in February 1979. In the U the Charney report had happened. There were other reports coming out saying, “hey, carbon dioxide build up is going to be a real problem.” If your day job was energy provision, you knew.
What I think we can learn from this is that people who knew about the problem and knew that their industry, their country, was helping to cause it, were, in 1980, sanguine, saying that proof was a long way off and they could simply kick the can down the road.
But eventually you run out of road, and the can gets bigger and you start to break your toe. That metaphor could be overused. Anyhoo.
What happened next
Ten years later, Norway introduced a carbon tax, and Statoil started work on its tax dodge of Sleipner Field.
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.
