Eighty-two years ago, on this day, May 14th, 1932, The New York Times ran an article about a giant flood, with the ice-caps melting and all the rest of it.
“… there will be another deluge. Salt water will sweep over the continents, leaving only the higher land dry. Holland will be inundated. Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, for most of England will lie beneath the waves. The Desert of Sahara will be a great inland see. What is now New York will be marked by the upper stories and towers of the taller skysrapers as they jut out of the water.”
And when can we expect this? “[W]ithin 30,000 or 40,000 years”…
NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents
https://www.nytimes.com/1932/05/15/archives/next-great-deluge-forecast-by-science-melting-polar-ice-caps-to.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 308ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was similar as a few days ago (May 10) with the Daily Oregonian, the world seemed to be warming. Guy Callendar was aware of this. Other people were aware of this. The Arctic seemed to be possibly melting.
For journalists, it didn’t matter – even if it wasn’t really happening, it was a news story that filled some column inches, “all the adverts fit to print all the news printed to fit.”
What we learn is that the idea of warming was not particularly controversial, and was picked up after the war in 1950.
What happened next? The New York Times kept reporting on this stuff. And in May of 1953 science correspondent Walter Kaempffert, wrote an article based on Gilbert Plass’s speech at the American Geophysical Union…
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.
Also on this day:
May 15, 2006 – Australian Prime Minister John Howard spouting “nuclear to fix climate” nonsense