Sixty years ago, on this day, November 23rd 1965, American scientist Walter Orr Roberts gave a speech. In it, this –
“Perhaps, through this mechanism, we are already modifying the atmosphere, unknowingly and on a large scale, as we clearly are already doing on the city scale. Indeed, can we be sure that city-scale modification is simply city-scale? Or are the atmospheric solids and gases put in over the city bringing changes on a larger scale? The relative abundance of carbon dioxide is clearly rising in the atmosphere, almost certainly through man’s intervention. But no one seems at all secure about what this is doing to the climate.”
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 47, No. 3, March 1966 Based on an address delivered at the International Symposium on Electromagnetic Sensing of the Earth from Satellites, Miami, Fla., 23 November 1965.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 320ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it was 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was since the early 1950s the question of carbon dioxide build-up and its possible climatic consequences had been known. Not necessarily taken seriously, but by the mid-1960s, this was -just- beginning to shift.
The specific context was Roberts gave his speech in the aftermath of the release of the PSAC report on November 7th 1965.
What I think we can learn from this – it wasn’t secret or arcane information. I am not saying “everyone knew” but, well, a lot of people did.
What happened next – the emissions kept climbing. NCAR kept investigating.
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.
On November 11, 1965 America received the first hint of what was to become a reality. On that night, there was a power failure. As a result, the entire Eastern Seaboard became dramatically aware of how dependent it had become on electrical energy. Shortly afterward, smaller blackouts and brownouts began to occur frequently.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 320ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was grids are higgedy-piggedythings – kludges and palimpsests, and prone to overload…
The specific context was – accidents will happen…
What I think we can learn from this – sometimes a good blackout can concentrate people’s minds? Maybe… It can also stampede them back into outdated thinking and technologies…
What happened next – more blackouts at various points. And rising emissions, obvs.
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.
Sixty years ago today the first official government report to make significant mention of carbon dioxide build-up was released. Dr Marc Hudson of All Our Yesterdays investigates where the report came from, what it said, and what the consequences were.
The easy assumption of American superiority in science and technology was shattered on 4th October 1957, when the Soviet Union announced it had launched a satellite – Sputnik. As The Onion’s Our Dumb Century reported “American metal-bauble superiority was cast into grave doubt Thursday when the Russians launched a two-foot ball of tin into orbit around the Earth.”
In response to Sputnik, and its sequel a month later, the Americans threw money at the problem and also created the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). It was an expansion of an existing body that President Truman had created in 1951.
“Recalling the role the Soviet accomplishment had played in a lecture he gave at the MIT in 1962, Isidor Rabi, a physicist, chairman of the SAC and then a member of the PSAC for many years, remembered that “it was a serious matter that we could be beaten so badly, that we could so misunderstand the circumstances of the great development, that we should have lost out so completely.”
Isidor I. Rabi, “Science and Public Policy: Compton Lecture n° 2, MIT,” 8 March 1962, I. I. Rabi Papers, LOC, Box 11, “American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1941-1965,” 12.
(Loetscher, 2022, p.39)
PSAC produced worthy reports, some more influential than others. One of its first was on the parlous state of the US education system (For more about it, see Wang, 2008). By 1962, carbon dioxide build-up was on its agenda. PSAC had an international science panel, and a September 1962 paper “The Problem with Large-Scale Experimentation with Possible Environmental Effects” was produced. It warned that “alteration of our environment has reached the point of requiring intensive study and understanding on an urgent basis.”
Penned in unusual gravitas, the report stated that “never before has man had the power he now has to bring about changes, some of them irreversible, on a scale that can affect people in all parts of the world and that can cause major but indeterminate environmental changes.” The panel distinguished between two types of problematic large-scale experiments. The first related to actions that were individually small but whose compounded effects could be serious, and the continuous release of CO2 was cited as an example. The second category comprised nuclear tests, which were comparatively fewer, but had much larger consequences (or so it was thought at the time).
Loetscher, 2022 p.60-61
The climate issue
Carbon dioxide build-up as a potential problem was, by this time, hardly new. There’s a long pre-history, but for current purposes, we can begin 12 years before the PSAC report. In May 1953 Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass had warned that “The large increase in industrial activity during the present century is discharging so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the average temperature is rising at the rate of 1.5 degrees per century.”
The lack of accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was one barrier – it was not absolutely clear that carbon dioxide levels were indeed rising. It was only by the late 1950s, with funding from the US and as part of the International Geophysical Year that accurate measurements were taken. By 1959 any doubt that carbon dioxide levels were increasing was removed (though the significance of this remained a source of legitimate scientific debate).
“Man’s ability to change the environment has increased greatly over the last sixty years and is likely to continue to increase for some time to come. Even now it is almost impossible to predict all of the consequences of man’s activities. It is possible, however, to predict that there will be problems…”
Present were Roger Revelle, a giant of US oceanography, who had already in 1956 warned US Senators of the possibility of dramatic changes to the climate due to carbon dioxide build-up, and Charles “Dave” Keeling, whom Revelle had hired to measure carbon dioxide levels. Both these men served on the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide subcommittee of PSAC in 1965 (1).
Revelle had already raised the carbon dioxide issue in 1964 in a separate committee within Lyndon Johnson’s Domestic Council. PSAC was another such chance to flag the problem. According to Hart and Victor (1993)
“Nor did Revelle’s chapter spring from new scientific evidence – although it did refer to the ongoing research programmes…. Revelle simply seems to have taken an otherwise unrelated opportunity presented to him as a member of a PSAC panel to try to bring the science and policy streams together.”
(Hart and Victor 1993, p.657).
By 1965, as concern about pollution in all its forms grew, various Senate and House of Representatives sub-committees held hearings, and a handful of witnesses made mention of CO2. This is not entirely surprising – after all, in his February 1965 message to Congress, President Johnson (in words surely penned by Revelle) had stated
“Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials. Motor vehicles and home heating plants, municipal dumps and factories continually hurl pollutants into the air we breathe. Each day almost 50,000 tons of unpleasant, and sometimes poisonous, sulfur dioxide are added to the atmosphere, and our automobiles produce almost 300,000 tons of other pollutants.”
Meanwhile, PSAC was asked to create a report on “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment”.
“Restoring the Quality of the Environment”
The report, which you can read here begins, sensibly enough, with a definition.
“Environmental pollution is the unfavorable alteration of our surroundings, wholly or largely as a by-product of man’s actions, through direct or indirect effects of changes in energy patterns, radiation levels, chemical and physical constitution and abundances of organisms. These changes may affect man directly, or through his supplies of water and of agricultural and other biological products, his physical objects or possessions, or his opportunities for recreation and appreciation of nature.”
(PSAC 1965)
In a clear sentence that would not be published today without invocation of the magic properties of “technology,” the authors argue that “the production of pollutants and an increasing need for pollution management are an inevitable concomitant of a technological society with a high standard of living.”
The report covers – among other issues – soil contamination, sewage and agricultural waste.
On page 9 (and this is the complete quote) readers are told.
CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF POLLUTION
Carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at the rate of 6 billion tons a year. By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in our atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable though local or even national efforts, could occur. Possibilities of bringing about countervailing changes by deliberately modifying other processes that affect climate may then be very important.
That is it for the body of the report as far as carbon dioxide build-up is concerned.
Among the key recommendations that the report made was that taxes should be imposed on polluting activities.
However, there were a series of annexes. In the carbon dioxide one, authored in the main by Revelle, the problem is succinctly outlined.
“The carbon in every barrel of oil and every lump of coal, as well as in every block of limestone, was once present in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide…. Within a few short centuries, we are returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that was slowly extracted by plants and buried in the sediments during half a billion years.”
The report flags two questions of particular import –
(1) What will the total quantity of CO2 injected into the atmosphere (but only partly retained there) be at different future times?
(2) What would be the total amount of CO2 injected into the air if all recoverable reserves of fossil fuels were consumed? At present rates of expansion in fossil fuel consumption this condition could be approached within the next 150 years.”
Revelle and colleagues admit that the first question is hard to answer, given that assumptions must be made about the amount of fossil fuels that will be used. They show their working to arrive at a figure of somewhere between 14 and 30 percent.
After flagging research being conducted about what the implications of carbon dioxide might be for the Earth’s temperature by Manabe and Weatherald (their pivotal paper would not appear until 1967) the report turns to possible impacts.
They flag
the “Melting of the Antarctic ice cap” (something well underway)
Rise of sea level.-”The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by 400 feet. If 1,000 years were required to melt the ice cap, the sea level would rise about 4 feet every 10 years, 40 feet per century. This is a hundred times greater than present worldwide rates of sea level change.”
Warming of sea water.
Increased acidity of fresh waters.
Increase in photosynthesis.
Revelle was not above echoing his earlier paper with Hans Seuss in 1957, in which they had suggested that mankind was engaged in an unwitting vast experiment.
“Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there. The estimated recoverable reserves of fossil fuels are sufficient to produce nearly a 200% increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.”
Perhaps the most startling element of the annex is an early proposal of solar radiation management. Revelle and his co-panellists noted that a
“change in the radiation balance in the opposite direction to that which might result from the increase of atmospheric CO2 could be produced by raising the albedo, or reflectivity, of the earth. Such a change in albedo could be brought about, for example by spreading very small reflecting particles over large oceanic areas. The particles should be sufficiently buoyant so that they will remain close to the sea surface and they should have a high reflectivity, so that even a partial covering of the surface would be adequate to produce a marked change in the amount of reflected sunlight. Rough estimates indicate that enough particles partially to cover a square mile could be produced for perhaps one hundred dollars. Thus a 1 % change in reflectivity might be brought about for about 500 million dollars a year, particularly if the reflecting particles were spread in low latitudes, where the incoming radiation is concentrated. Considering the extraordinary economic and human importance of climate, costs of this magnitude do not seem excessive.”
How was it reported and what were its consequences
Short term
There are two immediate consequences, around newspaper coverage and also industry awareness.
Newspaper coverage was extensive. The Forum (of Fargo, North Dakota) ran a front page story on Sunday November 7, with the headline “LBJ Panel urges Tax on Pollution and Junked Autos”. The Washington Post editorialised in a similar fashion.
On November 12, The Press Tribune or Roseville California ran an editorial under the unambiguous title “Utter Disaster Near at Hand?” It began
“Very recently, we’ve driven on the freeway systems in both Los Angeles and San Francisco and we wonder if the day of utter disaster isn’t near at hand….”
Then, to nail home the sense of foreboding
“Meanwhile, it’s not just the city dwellers who need to worry about what’s happening to our air. Some scientists fear that nothing really effective about pollution control will be done until it’s too late and that the human race will be doomed to die of poisoning. Other scientists fear that the amount of carbon dioxide and other combustion products going into the air is enough to create a hot-house effect holding the sun’s heat next to the earth, raising the average temperature and causing the polar ice caps to melt. This could raise the level of the sea, flood our coastal cities….”
The following week, under the title “Air Pollution is Menacing Earth’s Climate” a journalist called Philip Meyer reported thus
“Man may be changing earth’s climate. If he doesn’t stop: Our children could choke in a world of stifling heat and violent storms.
Polar ice could melt and the oceans rise to swallow up our coastal cities. The cause? Our own acts of air pollution.
This is not idle speculation or science fiction. Warnings have been sounded by responsible scientists in and out of government.
It is a simple projection of two undisputed facts: We are adding fantastic amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; carbon dioxide acts as a heat trap.
(Meyer, P. 1965. Air Pollution is Menacing Earth’s Climate.” The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey), November 17, p.52).
Many other regional papers covered it, at the time, and it had an afterlife.
It served as a “hook” for prominent science writers such as Irving Bengelsdorf of the Los Angeles Times (“Carbon Dioxide Enrichment – A Lot of Contemporary Sun” July 28 1966). P33.
As late as September 1966 it was still being invoked (see for example the Arizona Republic, September 29, “Cars blamed mostly for smog” p1 and 14).
Meanwhile Frank N. Ikard, who had been a Democratic congressman for Texas for ten years, before becoming the President of the American Petroleum Institute, gave a speech at the API’s annual meeting, held just after the release of the PSAC report. The relevant portion of this speech “Meeting the Challenges of 1966” is below.
Longer-term
As Spencer Weart acidly noted in his excellent book “The Discovery of Global Warming” the PSAC report
“put the issue on the official agenda at the highest level – although only as one item on a long list of environmental problems, many of which seemed more pressing. The next step in such matters was typically to ask the National Academy of Sciences to form a committee and issue an authoritative report. In 1966, the Academy duly pronounced on how human activity could influence climate. The experts sedately said there was no cause for dire warnings, but they did believe the CO2 buildup should be watched closely.”
(Weart, 2003, page 44).
The 1966 NAS Weather Modification report also stated that ‘the atmosphere is not a dump of unlimited capacity.’
According to Hart and Victor the PSAC report “seems to have made little substantive impression on policymakers, although NSF Director Leland Haworth did mention the concern in Congressional testimony, and in the introduction to the 1966 NSF annual report.” (Hart and Victor 1993, p.657).
Longer term influence through 1960s
The PSAC report was regularly cited – the CO2 increase of “25 per cent by the year 2000” figure pops up in various newspaper and magazine articles and books. By 1967 there are editorials in journals such as science and when magazines such as Time and Newsweek ran articles about air pollution, carbon dioxide build-up got a mention.
Roger Revelle was teaching at Harvard, and one of the students whom he explained the carbon dioxide issue to was the young Al Gore.
Further scientific work took place, and by the early 1970s the PSAC report was supplanted by publications such as Man’s Impact on Climate.
PSAC was abolished by Richard Nixon in 1973 – he was unhappy that it wasn’t cheerleading his agenda, and upset that a PSAC member spoke publicly against supersonic transport research.
In 1988 the carbon dioxide issue finally “broke through”, and politicians were forced to acknowledge its existence. Smears and anti-science propaganda campaigns, funded by fossil fuel companies, began. In 1992 the US administration of George HW Bush was successful in stripping out targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich countries from the climate treaty about to be agreed at the Rio Earth Summit. Since then there has been three decades of meetings, while billions upon billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are poured into the atmosphere (roughly 70% per annum more than in 1990).
Finally, the penny has dropped for many – that pledges and blandishments about the efficiency of markets are no match for physics.
The carbon dioxide levels in 1965 were approximately 320ppm. Today they stand at 425ppm, and are climbing at 2 to 3ppm each year.
We are in very very deep trouble. The FAFOcene has begun.
Footnotes
The other members of the subcommittee were Wally Broecker – who ten years later would publish the first academic paper to use the term ‘global warming’, Joseph Smagorinsky of the US Weather Bureau and Harmon Craig).
Further Reading
Hart, D. and Victor, D. 1993. Scientific Elites and the Making of US Policy for Climate Change Research, 1957-74. Social Studies of Science, Volume 23, Issue 4
Loetscher Audrey, 2022.0, A History of Unsustainability: The U.S. Government, the Fossil Fuel Industry, and Climate Change ( 1957 -1992)
Wang, Z. 2008. In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America.. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Pp. xix+454. $49.95.
Soon after I arrived on 1st October, I became impressed that the experimental forecasts for aircraft crossing the Atlantic were systematically more accurate than traditional forecasts based on extrapolation of time sequences of hand-drawn charts. Accordingly I decided, against the advice of some senior colleagues, who favoured a longer trial period that the numerical forecasts would be issued routinely twice a day from Monday, 2nd November 1965. The Press and TV were invited to witness this landmark in the history of the Met Office and gave it wide coverage. Fortunately the first forecast was excellent and ushered in a new era in which weather forecasts were to become objective exercises in mathematical physics replacing the empirical methods that, for more than a century, had depended on the skill and experience of the individual human forecaster.
Mason memoir
and
By carefully stage-managing the public performance of a new, computer-driven meteorology, new claims of objectivity could be made, with public credibility and social authority at stake.37 Thus, on the same day as the inauguration of numerical forecasts, Mason presided over the Office’s first-ever press conference, where he proclaimed a new dawn in weather forecasting – a move which his deputy, A.C. Best, thought to be a “great risk” for the office’s reputation.38 While much of the credibility economy which Shapin describes concerns scientific claims where virtual witnesses have no direct access themselves to the phenomena in question, the success and credibility of weather forecasting is easily adjudicated on by anybody who cares to look out of the window. Standing before more than 100 journalists and cameramen from the BBC, national newspapers and the technical press, Mason marked the introduction of numerical weather forecasting in the UK with great confidence: “Today is a landmark in the history of forecasting in the Office”, he declared, “because this afternoon you will see the production of our first routine numerical weather forecast by the computer”.39 Britain, he continued in his first push to build social authority in the Meteorological Office, could now look forward to increasingly accurate weather forecasts underpinned by modern, objective technologies. As the press gallery watched the Meteorological Office’s line printer slowly produce the UK’s first routine numerical forecasting chart, Mason patiently answered questions for nearly an hour and then distributed souvenir copies of the chart to all attendees. The formalities over, the press gallery toured the Central Forecasting Office at Bracknell and chatted over coffee with senior members of Mason’s staff.
2017 Maartin-Nielsen –
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 320ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was the Met Office had not delivered warnings about a particular cold winter in 1962, and had copped some flak for that, because US meteorologists had warned about it.
The specific context was that new boss, John Mason wanted to move things along, and take advantage of new computers etc.
What I think we can learn from this – the forecasts we now accept as normal required a hell of a lot of work, and some institutional risk-taking.
What happened next
Mason was keen to move things along (the man was dynamic but backed the wrong horse on carbon dioxide and never changed course). He was a major block on “early” action (e.g. at the First World Climate Conference).
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.
Sixty years ago, on this day, November 1st, 1965, Fortune magazine flags climate change in an article called “We can afford clean air” by Edmund K. Faltemeyer.
“The tremendous rise in worldwide use of fossil fuels, some authorities say, is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than plants and ocean can absorb it.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 320ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that “isn’t the weather odd?” which has been a favourite newspaper and magazine article since, well, newspapers and magazines became a thing. But from the early 1950s, there was a subset that tried to take a longer perspective than just the weather. Thanks to Gilbert Plass (and others – see for example John G. Hutton of General Electric) – carbon dioxide build-up was identified as a possible problem.
The specific context was that 1965 had seen various carbon dioxide stories already: President Lyndon Johnson in February, the publication of Donald E Carr’s “The Breathe of Life” in May, alongside Lewis Herber (aka Murray Bookchin) Cities in Crisis. Then – and Faltemeyer almost certainly did not know about this – in August Carl Borgmann had given a commencement address at University of Tennessee.
What I think we can learn from this – business types were made aware of carbon dioxide build-up earlier than they might have wanted everyone to know.
What happened next – Faltermeyer returned to the carbon dioxide theme in his 1968 book “Redoing America.”
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.
Sixty years ago today, on Thursday August 26th 1965, Carl W. Borgmann stood in front of hundreds of young Americans in Knoxville. Borgmann, who was the director of the Ford Foundation’s Science and Engineering programme, was there to deliver the commencement address for the University of Tennessee. He probably gave it little thought, but he was doing something unprecedented – he was using a commencement address to warn young people about the threat of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.
[Update 31/8/2025 – a comprehensive Wikipedia page has been created about Borgmann, in response to this article. It’s really good]
His speech was given the unwieldy title “A Conversation Ethic. Man’s Use of Science: Some Deferred Costs “ when it appeared the following year in the Massachusetts Audubon Society magazine. He began by explaining what he would not talk about.
“I would rather not deal today with new discoveries in science – not because they are not exciting, for they are, nor because I don’t feel quite comfortable with some of them, which is certainly true, but because another topic seems more urgent to me. Even as I contemplate what man may know through science, I am impelled to ask what he will do with this knowledge – not only with his new scientific discoveries, but with his older ones too, and his ingenious technologies.”
Borgmann laid out many of the challenges – physical, social and moral – facing the United States and the world. Then, two thirds of the way through the speech he said the following startlingly prescient phrases.
“Now consider the burning of fossil fuels. If everyone does it at the average we now have achieved, there will be whole new sets of problems; in fact, many American communities face them presently. What shall we do with the inevitable wastes of our energy-producing processes, with our ash heaps, with the smog of Los Angeles, with the unnatural warming of our rivers?”
Borgmann asks the students to imagine that technology will burn fuels more cleanly, before presenting them with the central dilemma.
“But even if we could afford devices which allowed for our fuels to be completely burned to water and carbon dioxide, another change in our environment is likely. Carbon dioxide, as it becomes a greater proportion of the atmosphere, behaves somewhat like the glass of a greenhouse. It traps heat from the sun, and climatic change results – not overnight, but slowly and surely. This process appears to be already under way, in fact.”
Carl Borgmann
Borgman followed this with a critique of nuclear power – “The preparation of the fuel and the handling and storage of the radioactive waste ash are not without dangers to man and his future.”
Borgmann was sixty at this point. Born in Missouri he had graduated from the University of Colorado in 1927 before working on the technical staff of the Bell Telephones Laboratories and gaining a master’s degree in chemical engineering and a PhD from Cambridge University. He had worked at the universities of North Carolina, Colorado and Nebraska before becoming President of University of Vermont in 1952.
In 1958, Borgmann had started working for the Ford Foundation. His job basically involved handing out money in the form of grants in the resource and environment field.
Borgmann was therefore extremely well equipped to understand the carbon dioxide problem.
Where did he get his information? While carbon dioxide build-up had been covered in both the scientific press, and even by President Lyndon Johnson a few months earlier, by far the most likely source of inspiration for Borgmann’s comments lie with a group that the Ford Foundation helped to fund – the Conservation Foundation.
Established in 1948 the Conservation Foundation had organised some of the pivotal meetings of US academics and policymakers in the 1950s and early sixties around environmental problems.
As Rebecca John reported a year ago, the Conservation Foundation’s March 1963 workshop was pivotal in raising awareness within governmental circles.
“The present liberation of such large amounts of fossil carbon in such a short time is unique in the history of the earth,” the report stated, “and there is no guarantee that past buffering mechanisms are really adequate.”
This rise in atmospheric CO2 was “worldwide,” the summary reported, and, while it did not present an immediate threat, would be significant “to the generations to follow.” The document went on to say, “The consumption of fossil fuels has increased to such a pitch within the last half century, that the total atmospheric consequences are matters of concern for the planet as a whole.” Relief was likely “only through the development of some new source of power.”
Given the Ford Foundation’s ties with the networks of corporate philanthropy and policy-shaping institutions such as the Conservation Foundation, it seems highly likely that a copy of the report landed on his desk.
In all probability, however, this was not the only source Borgmann had. Through the 1950s, and especially around the time of the 1957-8 “International Geophysical Year,” the possibility of modifying the weather and the climate had been much discussed. Carbon dioxide build-up had appeared in cartoons, public education films and on television programmes. The previous year, in August 1964, Popular Mechanics had run a story about the changing air.
Screengrab Popular Mechanics August 1964
A large portion of Borgmann’s speech appeared the following spring, in the magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. From there, it was approvingly cited in an article entitled “The Future Role of the Biologist in Protecting our Natural Resources“ by the biologist Richard Goodwin in the journal Biological Conservation.
In a February 1968 luncheon speech at the New York Waldorf Astoria called “A Challenging Future”, delivered to extractive metallurgists, Borgmann covered similar ground, trying to explain that there were limits to both resources and the planet’s capacity to cope with the consequences of human ingenuity.
Meanwhile, other, more senior figures were beginning to use commencement addresses to warn students of threats in their future. On June 10, 1966 Glenn Seaborg, head of the Atomic Energy Commission warned students at UC San Diego that “at the rate we are currently adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere (six billion tonnes a year) within the next few decades the heat balance of that atmosphere could be altered enough to produce marked changes in the climate – changes we might have no means of controlling.” Seaborg continued, saying “I, for one, would prefer to continue to travel toward the equator for my warmer weather than run the risk of melting the polar ice and having some of our coastal areas disappear beneath a rising ocean.”
By 1969 students at commencement addresses were proclaiming that “the future is a cruel hoax”
Borgmann was not, of course, responsible for this upsurge in awareness. What is remarkable though, is that the young people to whom he spoke in 1965 would have very little inkling of global atmospheric threats besides the possibility of nuclear war. Four years later, such threats were far more commonplace.
Borgmann closed his 1965 commencement address by invoking the words of Adlai Stevenson, twice Democratic presidential candidate and ambassador to the United Nations, who had died the previous month.
“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”
Borgmann lived a long life. He died in 1998. Three years earlier 1995 the IPCC’s Secod Assessment Report had declared that human impact on the atmosphere was already “discernible.” The year before he died, the Kyoto Protocol was agreed (though the US Senate had already signalled its unwillingness to be part of any global deal).
The warnings of carbon dioxide build-up he had given in 1965, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at only 320 parts per million (it is now 430ppm) had come to pass.
Sixty years ago, on this day, June 16th, 1965, a senior science civil servant writes to James Lovelock, telling him to get ready to do some work on atmospheric pollution.
This request can be dated more precisely to a letter from Rothschild to Lovelock in which the former writes: “there are many problems cooking in Shell about which we shall need your help” (Victor Rothschild, letter to Lovelock, 16 June 1965, box 76, part 3, Archive Collection of Professor James Lovelock, Science Museum Library and Archives, Science Museum at Wroughton).
5. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York, 1979), p. 8.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly xxxppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Shell had been aware of the possibility of carbon dioxide heating the planet at the ABSOLUTE latest by 1958 – see their article in New Scientist (realistically, they must have known about it from 1953 – Gilbert Plass’s announcement at the AGU in May 1953 can not have gone unnoticed).
The specific context was in the United States, research was gathering pace. In 1963 there had been the one day meeting of the Conservation Foundation, and in February 1965 newly-elected President Lyndon Johnson had sent a special message to Congress about “Natural Beauty” that name-checked carbon dioxide build-up.
What I think we can learn from this
As human beings – sixty years ago ‘responsible’ people were beginning to think “himmm”.
As “active citizens” – responsible people will be the death of us.
What happened next Lovelock produced reports (see here). Rothschild wanted one kept on the down low.
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.
You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 320ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that US scientists, including Roger Revelle and Charles Dave Keeling had been measuring and pondering. A couple of years before this memo, in March 1963 the Rockefeller-funded Conservation Foundation had held a meeting on carbon dioxide build-up. The following year Revelle had chaired a group looking at environmental problems (the group included Margaret Mead!).
What I think we can learn from this is that the information was getting to the very top quite quickly.
Two years to the day later an editorial appeared in Science pointing to … carbon dioxide as a problem
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 nine years ago, on this day, April 22nd, 1965, the Manchester Evening News ran another article warning about carbon dioxide build up,
22 April 1965 Article about C02 and global warming in Manchester Evening News
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 320ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that a couple of months earlier, Lyndon Johnson, as President of the United States, had made a special address to Congress, which mentioned CO2 buildup, and other scientists were sniffing around the issue. The Evening News has talked about carbon dioxide buildup before but this was a pretty clear case.
What we learn is that if you were a tolerably intelligent person with a tolerably decent memory, and I don’t know, O-level chemistry and physics, you’d have understood the climate issue from them a lot earlier than I thought even a couple of years ago.
What happened next Manchester Evening News very periodically covered the issue. So did everyone. But it wasn’t really until ‘69 – 70 that it got any traction, and then it went away again until 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.
Forty nine years ago, on this day, April 15, 1965, Murray Bookchin’s second book “Crisis in Our Cities” becomes one of the first to contain a warning about the long-term build up of carbon dioxide.
On page 187 we have this –
And this – “Meteorologists believe that the immediate effect of increased heat leads to violent air circulation and increasingly destructive storms…. theoretically, after several centuries of fossil-fuel combustion, the increased heat of the atmosphere could even melt the polar ice caps of the earth and lead to the inundation of the continents with sea water.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
Herber (real name Murray Bookchin) had written about “Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, ahead of the publication of Rachel Carson’s far more influential “Silent Spring.”
This, his second book, mentioned the danger of climate change. I will try to dig into it more, but I strongly suspect Bookchin will have read the Conservation Foundation’s report on its March 1963 meeting about the C02 problem, held in New York.
The timing was good too – just two months earlier, in his special address to Congress, President Lyndon Johnson had name-checked carbon dioxide build-up.
What I think we can learn from this
Educated people have known for yonks. Bookchin had to operate under a pseudonym because he was (checks notes) … an anarchist…
What happened next
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.
