Fifty-five years ago, on this day, November 17th, 1968 Observer article by John Davy contains significant mention of carbon dioxide greenhouse
“By the end of this century, we may have released enough carbon dioxide to raise the atmospheric temperature by two degrees centigrade.” [to be clear – this was a big overestimate, at least in the short-term]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that various newspapers, especially the serious ones, were covering environmental issues with more enthusiasm. There had been the Torrey Canyon the year before. And in September, UNESCO had held a Man and the Biosphere conference in Paris. So smart people were beginning to scratch their heads about the consequences of modernity. We’d already had battles over pesticides and cars in cities and what they were doing towns, next up, the global issues…
What we learn is that carbon dioxide was popping up as an issue as early as 1968. Admittedly, as one that at this point was seen as if not speculative, then distant and if not distant, then entirely speculative.
What happened next carbon dioxide continued to be for most a minor item on the list. By late 1969 the Financial Times could call it one of the more “venerable doomonger prophecies.” In November December 1969 the Scottish biologist Frank Fraser Darling had given it a serious mention in his Reith lectures. Already we’ve had Richie Calder talking about on the radio, and a couple of weeks after this Observer profile he gave his presidential address “Hell on Earth” to the Conservation Society’s Annual General Meeting.
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 six years ago, on this day, September 1st, 1968, people talked eco, at a pivotal meeting.
The Bisophere Conference was held under the auspices of UNESCO in Paris from 1 September to 13 September 1968.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 420ishppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that people had been banging on about the biosphere for a while. You can take it back to Vladimir Vernadsky (see also Dinshaw 2013). And this had especially picked up pace with things like the International Biological Programme in the mid-60s and the US interest in it.
What we learn is that seemingly new ideas, new-ish ideas can have a very long history and that certain individuals like G. Evelyn Hutchinson (among many others) had to work crucial in translating these and saving these and popularising them.
What happened next? UNESCO’s Biosphere conference was a bit of a kickstart for concerns about what was happening and what was being done to “the natural world.” Concerns were well underway before, but this kind of crystallised them. And from it, the report in May of ‘69, about issues including carbon dioxide buildup that U Thant, then Secretary General of the United Nations, made was significant.
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 six years ago, on this day, July 22nd 1968, the New York TImes finally published the smuggled-out-of-the-Soviet-Union of nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov
At one point, Sakharov writes the following-
Pollution of Environment
We live in a swiftly changing world. Industrial and water-engineering projects, cutting of forests, plowing up of virgin lands, the use of poisonous chemicals—all such activity is changing the face of the earth, our “habitat.”
Scientific study of all the interrelationships in nature and the consequences of our interference clearly lags behind the changes. Large amounts of harmful wastes of industry and transport are being dumped into the air and water, including cancer-inducing substances. Will the safe limit be passed everywhere, as has already happened in a number of places?
Carbon dioxide from the burning of coal is altering the heat-reflecting qualities of the atmosphere. Sooner or later, this will reach a dangerous level. But we do not know when. Poisonous chemicals used in agriculture are penetrating the body of man and animal directly, and in more dangerous modified compounds are causing serious damage to the brain, the nervous system, blood-forming organs, the liver, and other organs. Here, too, the safe limit can be easily crossed, but the question has not been fully studied and it is difficult to control all these processes.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323 ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was the cold war was kinda sorta maybe thawing: the Czechs looked like they were gonna have more wiggle room than the Hungarians twelve years earlier (the tanks hadn’t rolled into Prague yet).
There’s this fascinating stuff about how it all came about…
Van het Reve, a professor of Slavic languages, had arrived in Moscow in 1967 for a two- year stint and was one of the most fearless correspondents in Moscow. While most stayed clear from the dissident movement, Van het Reve became friends with many of them and was not shy about reporting on them in his newspaper.
After he received a copy of Sakharov’s essay from Amalrik, Van het Reve immediately realized he had something unique in his hands. Here was a prominent nuclear physicist, a member of the upper nomenklatura, or Soviet elite, who openly criticized his government and carefully outlined his vision for the future. In order to maximize the chance of the text reaching the West, Van het Reve decided to give a copy to his colleague Ray Anderson of the New York Times. Both would try to get the text out, and then publish it in their respective newspapers.
Karel van het Reve translated the text into Dutch and turned the manuscript into a two-part publication. The first part he managed to send out with a person who was apparently able to pass customs without any checking. On July 6, 1968 the first half appeared in Het Parool. Realizing it was an international scoop, Het Parool’s editor in chief in Amsterdam was delighted, and immediately called Van het Reve to tell him he wanted his “sugar cake”, meaning the rest of the text. As they were in a hurry, they decided that Van het Reve would read the entire text over the telephone. Apparently, the KGB did not have a Dutch-speaking censor on hand, and thus in the course of several hours the whole text was read unobstructed, and subsequently the second part also appeared in Het Parool. 6 Ray Anderson was less fortunate. He managed to get the text out, but his editor in New York was very hesitant. He was convinced the text was a fake and refused to publish it in the New York Times. After long deliberations, he agreed that Ray Anderson could write an article in which he summarized Sakharov’s main message. The article was published on July 11, 1968. Gradually, the editor realized that the text was real, and that indeed this prominent physicist was the author, and ten days later, on July 21, 1968 the whole text was published in the New York Times.
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.
And, in the long list of more vivid and salient problems around water, oil, species loss etc etc, there was this –
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that various scientists had been getting worried about carbon dioxide build-up. There wasn’t really an “epistemic community” about it yet (though that would come, soon enough). But they were getting it onto the agendas, and into the reports of various three and four letter acronym bodies, both UN and ICSU. And, at that time, of course, the US of A, before it went apeshit on these isssues, from the early 1980s onwards.
What we learn
We knew enough to be worried, two generations ago.
What happened next:
In December 1968 the UN General Assembly agreed to Sweden’s proposal for a conference on the Human Environment. It was held in June 1972. It would take another 16 years for climate change to actually get the attention it deserved. All that wasted time, in which not only was more carbon dioxide poured into the sewer we call an atmosphere, but – crucially – infrastructure and momentum to suicide were built. And here we are.
Fifty five years ago, on this day, May 10th, 1968 Time magazine published an article on “The Age of Effluence.” It began thus –
WHAT ever happened to America the Beautiful? While quite a bit of it is still visible, the recurring question reflects rising and spreading frustration over the nation’s increasingly dirty air, filthy streets and malodorous rivers—the relentless degradations of a once virgin continent. This man-made pollution is bad enough in itself, but it reflects something even worse: a dangerous illusion that technological man can build bigger and bigger industrial societies with little regard for the iron laws of nature….
Under the sub-heading “The Systems Approach”
It seems undeniable that some disaster may be lurking in all this, but laymen hardly know which scientist to believe. As a result of fossil-fuel burning, for example, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen about 14% since 1860. According to Ecologist Lamont C. Cole, man is thus reducing the rate of oxygen regeneration, and Cole envisions a crisis in which the amount of oxygen on earth might disastrously decline. Other scientists fret that rising carbon dioxide will prevent heat from escaping into space. They foresee a hotter earth that could melt the polar icecaps, raise oceans as much as 400 ft., and drown many cities. Still other scientists forecast a colder earth (the recent trend) because man is blocking sunlight with ever more dust, smog and jet contrails. The cold promises more rain and hail, even a possible cut in world food. Whatever the theories may be, it is an established fact that three poisons now flood the landscapes: smog, pesticides, nuclear fallout.
There’s this too…
Man has tended to ignore the fact that he is utterly dependent on the biosphere: a vast web of interacting processes and organisms that form the rhythmic cycles and food chains in which one part of the living environment feeds on another. The biosphere is no immutable feature of the earth. Roughly 400 million years ago, terrestrial life consisted of some primitive organisms that consumed oxygen as fast as green plants manufactured it. Only by some primeval accident were the greedy organisms buried in sedimentary rock (as the source of crude oil, for example), thus permitting the atmosphere to become enriched to a life-sustaining mix of 20% oxygen, plus nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor. With miraculous precision, the mix was then maintained by plants, animals and bacteria, which used and returned the gases at equal rates. About 70% of the earth’s oxygen is thus produced by ocean phytoplankton: passively floating plants. All this modulated temperatures, curbed floods and nurtured man a mere 1,000,000 or so years ago.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone was worrying about air pollution, especially smog in cities, and water pollution and noise and so forth. And Time Magazine, as was its want ran articles like the age of effluence, which has a glancing mention of CO2 buildup, which had really come to some I wouldn’t call it prominence, then at least awareness in 1965 with Lyndon Johnson’s special message to Congress.
Since then, it had been popping up here and there, especially in science publications, but also, Roger Revelle had mentioned it in the Saturday Evening Post. Barry Commoner mentioned it in his 1966 book Science and Survival.
What we learn is that we learned nothing, to go full Hegel.
What happened next? The following year, the environment broke through in part because of the Santa Barbara oil spill as a focusing event. The time was right. The end of ‘69, you know, there was an Earth Day coming, lots of people talking about all these issues, and one of them was CO2 buildup.
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 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that, for any debate to get as far as a Senate hearing, and for the suggestion of setting up a select committee on air pollution, then some people must have been pushing hard, lobbying behind the scenes, making sure they had the numbers. And it’d be fascinating to try and figure out who initiated the debate and why.
It was most certainly not about climate change, per se. It will have been about the air quality in especially Sydney and Melbourne, but also the other population centres of Australia. The climate issue came along in the midst of the hearings.
What we learn is that issues or a body that is set up to investigate one thing can stumble across something else, and be consequential for that reason. This is surely quite unsurprising.
What happened next? By 1969 the committee was hearing from experts warning about carbon dioxide buildup…including a certain Professor in Tasmania…
The final report released in September of 1969 explicitly flags carbon dioxide buildup as something to watch. People knew. We knew.
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 six years ago, on this day, March 31st, 1968, the ecologist LaMont Cole pondered the Big Question…
Cole, L. 1968. Can the world be saved? New York TImes, March 31.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that people were beginning to freak out about not just the bomb, but also the Population Bomb, local air pollution, national air pollution a sense of fragility and weakness.
This might be tied to the in this instance of the Tet Offensive and the question of whether rich white people could continue to dominate.
LaMont Cole at this point was worried about the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere potentially dropping and causing us all to choke to death; that was revealed to be not something to worry about a couple of years later.
What we learned is that you know, people were reading this stuff and it was sensitising them. When things like the Santa Barbara oil spill came along, in late January of 1969, folks could join the dots and go, “oops.”
What happened next, the Santa Barbara oil spill. People joining the dots and going “oops.”
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.
“ an aircraft accident, sometimes known as the Thule affair or Thule accident (/ˈtuːli/; Danish: Thuleulykken), involving a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52 bomber occurred near Thule Air Base in the Danish territory of Greenland. The aircraft was carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs on a Cold War “Chrome Dome” alert mission over Baffin Bay when a cabin fire forced the crew to abandon the aircraft before they could carry out an emergency landing at Thule Air Base. Six crew members ejected safely, but one who did not have an ejection seat was killed while trying to bail out. The bomber crashed onto sea ice in North Star Bay,[a] Greenland, causing the conventional explosives aboard to detonate and the nuclear payload to rupture and disperse, resulting in radioactive contamination of the area.“
(Lind et al., 2015)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Americans were busy rattling their dicks and swinging their sabres and the world was consistently on a nuclear knife-edge, to use a cliche, and all across the world B52s with nukes were having near misses. And this was just another.
What we learn is that the waste remains, the waste spreads. We have poisoned this beautiful planet. “We” being sabre swingers and those who benefit from that sabre swinging and stay silent. And now everything has been ruined and you know the rest.
What happened next? We almost tried ourselves in 1983-4. Things got dialled back a bit. See also Barry Commoner on radiation building up in the system.
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
Lind, O. C., Salbu, B., Janssens, K., Proost, K., & Dahlgaard, H. (2005). Characterization of uranium and plutonium containing particles originating from the nuclear weapons accident in Thule, Greenland, 1968. Journal of environmental radioactivity, 81(1), 21-32
Fifty six years ago, on this day, January 8th, 1968,
According to a Newsweek report (8 January 1968), Professor L. C. Cole of Cornell University (in a paper delivered at the 134th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) asks whether man is not destroying the earth’s natural supply of oxygen. He points out (1) that the increasing combustion of fossil fuels has greatly accelerated the formation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and (2) that, in the United States alone, some one million acres of suburbanised forest and grassland each year lose their ability to regenerate the oxygen supply through photosynthesis.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there was concern among a few scientists that levels of oxygen would drop and that we would all ultimately suffocate. That was rendered null a year or two after this, but there was generalised concern about oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels, you name it. As the consequences of modernity, as we laughingly call it, were becoming apparent. Cynically, you could also say that people were so fed up with the Vietnam War, but there were costs attached to speaking out against that, that they found something else to be worried about….
What we can learn is that there have been scientists warning of trouble ahead. But those scientists may have sometimes understandably picked something to be concerned about that wasn’t actually there. That doesn’t mean that all warnings are bad warnings.
What happened next, as above, the oxygen depletion thing was put to bed in 1970 or so. Lamont Cole died in I think, 1979.
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
Cole, L. 1968. Can the World Be Saved? BioScience, Vol. 18, No. 7 pp. 679-684 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1294188 .https://doi.org/10.2307/1294188
Fifty five years ago, on this day, December 26, 1968, Fred Singer, who had been present for the foundation meeting of the International Geophysical Year, and would go on to be a weapons-grade asshole denialist, organised a symposium (it was part of his day job). That symposium was about the global effects of environmental pollution for the American Association for the Advancement of Science
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322ppm. As of 2023 it is 421ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the US Federal Government was making some of the right noises about climate change. It had just found out that there would indeed be a United Nations meeting in 1972. But this meeting will have been organised months and months in advance of that final decision.
What’s amusing about it is that Fred Singer became one of the leading the nihilists denialists.
What I think we can learn from this
We knew way back when. We knew.
What happened next
Caroll Wilson organised the 1970 Workshop in Williamstown about Man’s Impact on the environment. The following year there was Man’s Impact on Climate, organised by William Kellogg, in Stockholm.
This 5 years was the period where are the new institutions and collaborations got hashed out – GARP, then SCOPE and so on…
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.
