Tag: 1954

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Nuclear Power

September 17, 1954 – nuclear electricity will be too cheap to meter

Seventy years ago, on this day, September 17th, 1954 the head of the Atomic Energy Commission proclaimed that there would come a time when nuclear power would provide electricity too cheap to meter.

Transmutation of the elements, — unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered, — these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter — will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history,— will travel effort­lessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, — and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

Lewis Strauss speech on electrical energy being “too cheap to meter” – http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2009/09/too-cheap-to-meter-nuclear-quote-debate.html

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that nuclear energy was going to provide a useful adjunct to nuclear weapons. And one way that you get people enthused despite their fears of shit blowing up is by promising them that the electricity produced will be too cheap to meter. And so it came to pass…

What we learn – in the upswing of the hype cycle, statements that look absurd in retrospect get made.

What happened next it turns out nuclear power was never too cheap to metre. There were the inevitable cost overruns. There was the fight back by the coal industry. There was Three Mile Island which was not actually the thing that killed the nuclear power industry. The order book was pretty empty before then. I should probably watch Silkwood again.

What do we learn? Yeah, that hype happens. 

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: 

September 17, 1969 – trying to spin Vietnam, Moynihan starts warning about #climate change

September 17, 1987 – report on “The Greenhouse Project” launch

September 17, 2002 – UK Government announces feasibility study into Carbon Capture and Storage

Categories
United Kingdom

June 21, 1954 – Manchester Evening News explains climate change

Seventy years ago, on this day, June 21st, 1954, the Manchester Evening News runs a story on carbon dioxide build-up. Yes, seventy years ago.

Cook, J.G. 1954. That smoking chimney warms up the world. Manchester Evening News, June 21, p.4

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the year before Gilbert Plass had made his attention-grabbing speech at the American Geophysical Union. And in early 1954, Gerald Wendt had published a piece in the UNESCO Courier. 

Alongside this other newspapers, notably the Mews Chronicle, had run pieces by Ritchie Calder. And so on. Yes, the Manchester Evening News was a regional paper that was bigger and better back then. (Manchester hadn’t really felt in a big way, the decline that was to take hold in the late 50s and 60s)

What we learn is that carbon dioxide buildup was not controversial. It was at this point speculative; there weren’t firm numbers just merely a guesstimate that the CO2 levels had increased by 10% and could reasonably be expected to increase further and that this could/should have implications. But that’s as far as it went. 

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: 

June 21, 1958 – Washington Post reports ‘world turning into a ‘greenhouse’

June 21, 2007 – ABC unleashes “Carbon Cops” on the world. ACAB – All Climate Activists Barf…

Categories
United Kingdom

March 2, 1954 – UK newspaper readers get Greenhouse lesson from Ritchie-Calder

Seventy years ago, on this day, March 2nd, 1954, Peter Ritchie Calder, the Scottish public intellectual, wrote about carbon dioxide build-up for a popular audience, in a major British newspaper.

It is happening: but authorities are not agreed why.

One popular theory is carbon dioxide in the air.

Normally  air contains only 0.03 per cent of this gas, which acts  like greenhouse glass.  It lets the sun’s rays through to  heat the ground and then traps this radiant heat, which remains to warm air and ground.

Experiments indicate there  is a tenth more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than 50 years ago. This could account for that 2 deg. F.  rise.

But why has it increased?  Is it man-made? It is estimated that each year 6,000 million tons of carbon dioxide pour into the atmosphere from burning coal.

Ritchie-Calder, P. (1954) Who Said it’s getting colder! News Chronicle, 2 March, p.4.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that in May 1953, Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass had made an announcement at the American Geophysical Union meeting about the consequences of CO2 buildup, although it got no attention in the quality British dailies. Someone like Peter Richie Calder, who was extremely scientifically literate and hooked into UNESCO would have known about it. The timing indicates that this might come from an early read of a UNESCO Courier article by Gerald Wendt. 

What I think we can learn from this is that readers of a newspaper like the News Chronicle, which was left-wing-ish were introduced to the idea of carbon dioxide buildup as early as 1954, 70 years ago.

What happened next

Richie-Calder kept being a public intellectual and kept warning about climate change. Three examples will suffice in 1963. He talked to the Town and Country Planning Association in 1968. He had carbon dioxide buildup as one of the possible mechanisms for how on earth his presidential address to the Conservation Society in November 1958. And then, very shortly after that, he had an interview with a BBC researcher for Horizon ”Muck Today, Poison tomorrow”, where he also raised the co2 issue. 

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: 

March 2nd, 1997- RIP Judi Bari

March 2, 2009 –  Washington DC coal plant gets blockaded

Categories
United States of America Weather modification

May 28, 1954 – Will we control the weather?!

Sixty nine years ago, on this day, May 28, 1954 Colliers” Magazine had a cover story about “Weather made to order?”

(See fascinating article on this image here – https://picturingmeteorology.com/home/2017/1/6/weather-made-to-order-1954)

The article itself begins thus- 

A WEATHER station in southeast Texas spots a threatening cloud formation moving toward Waco on its radar screen; the shape of the cloud indicates a tornado may be building up. An urgent warning is sent to Weather Control Headquarters. Back comes an order for aircraft to dissipate the cloud. And less than an hour after the incipient tornado was first sighted, the aircraft radios back: Mission accomplished. The storm was broken up; there was no loss of life, no property damage. This hypothetical destruction of a tornado in its infancy may sound fantastic today, but it could well become a reality within 40 years. In this age of the H-bomb and supersonic flight, it is quite possible that science will find ways not only to dissipate incipient tornadoes and hurricanes, but to influence all our weather to a degree that staggers the imagination

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that in the 1950s the species – especially the American wing of it – was rolling drunk on Hubris.

What I think we can learn from this

If you were at all switched on in the 1950s, you knew about weather modification, both inadvertent and inadvertent.  But you probably assumed either a nuclear war would mean you had nothing to worry about, or there would be some technological fix…

What happened next

Through the mid 50s, a bunch of these sorts of articles – others that explicitly talked about carbon dioxide build-up [something Orville would do a few years later] got published. They must have been read, both by policymakers and ordinary people. But the signal really wasn’t emerging from the noise. And of course, the planet was not getting warmer the way that it is now 60 or 70 years later. And we have to try to remember that these people simply didn’t know what we know now. 

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.

Categories
Ireland

April 23, 1954 – Irish Times runs carbon dioxide/climate story. Yes, 1954.

Sixty nine years ago, on this day, April 23, 1954, the Irish Times ran a brief article about climate change and carbon dioxide. Yes, 1954. 

It came from a journalist/scientist, Gerald Wendt, who had been writing for the UNESCO Courier.

23 April 1954 Irish Times article

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

In May 1953 Gilbert Plass had said to the American Geophysical Union meeting, in essence – “you know, that Brit, Guy Callendar who said, before the war, that carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere was leading to warming?? “ell, he’s right.”

What I think we can learn from this

The idea that carbon dioxide build up could be a problem was in the air (sorry, not sorry) for a long time.

What happened next

Wendt’s writing got syndicated/serialised elsewhere, including in the colonies.

By 1956 Plass had published on the subject. Others were doing likewise.

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.

Categories
Japan

 March 1, 1954 – Lucky Dragon incident gives the world the word “fall out”

Sixty nine years ago, on this day, March 1, 1954, some folks got unlucky on the “Lucky Dragon”.

Aside from ratcheting up anxieties about the Cold War, peacetime tests of hydrogen bombs changed the way scientists around the world thought about the earth itself. It began when radioactive ash from a 1954 American nuclear test fell out of the sky and blanketed a Japanese fishing vessel, the Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon). The crew was hospitalised, one man died, the fish market collapsed – and the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, unwisely blamed the Japanese for having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The international incident introduced a new word to people around the world: fallout.

(Hamblin, 2013: 94-5)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the Americans and the Russians were, for separate reasons, blowing up atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere; for the lulz, and the military posturing, and the priesthood of defence intellectuals, etc. The Pacific is big, but not so big that some Japanese fishing boats didn’t wander into a fallout cloud as we would now call it.

What I think we can learn from this

It’s how the world got the word fallout, both as a literal and metaphorical device. It made people aware that the radiation could get everywhere. It probably was in the back of Neville Shute’s mind as part of the inspiration for On The Beach. And of course, once strontium 90 started accumulating in mother’s milk and baby’s teeth, everyone got the idea that technology could now have an influence, not just on a local, but on a global scale. (check out Project Sunshine)

What happened next

In the short-term, this was one more thing that was nudging Roger Revelle towards looking at carbon dioxide-

“Moreover, in 1954 fallout from an American thermonuclear test injured the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel and the entire Japanese nation became panicky about the safety of eating fish. Besieged by public anxieties, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) stepped up its program of research on where fallout ends up in the environment.69 Revelle became involved in the problem as chair of a National Academy of Sciences committee assigned to study the effects of radioactive material on fisheries. Revelle himself was interested chiefly in the disposal of wastes. But he was also in touch with Libby, now at the AEC and heading its study of fallout, in connection with the contamination of surface waters by isotopes from bomb tests. Research on ocean mixing had become a topic of international importance “

Weart, 1997:343

In 1963, there was a test ban treaty. And so the boys with their toys started to do it underground. 

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..

References

Hamblin, J. Arming Mother Nature

Weart, S. 1977