Fifty seven years ago, on this day, January 29th, 1968,
Far from deploring the possible damage to people and property, the President of the United States, on January 29, 1968, proposed the spending of $351 million for the development of a supersonic liner in fiscal 1969; this represented $223 million in new appropriation. l8 318 feet long, is designed to carry 300 passengers at 1800 miles per hour. It was estimated by Senator Clifford P. Case of New Jersey that the U. S. 19 supersonic transport fleet may eventually number from 200 to 1200 planes.
Concerned physicists have supplied us with information about the generation of a boom that is unavoidable for any object which travels in the air at a speed exceeding that of sound. The sonic boom produced by a supersonic transport plane accompanies the plane throughout its supersonic flight path; thus, a single flight across the U. S. would affect 10 to 40 million people.
The specific context was Lyndon Johnson was on his way out. It was an election year, and there had been a growing “Dump Johnson” movement in the Democrats. There was also the small matter of the war in Vietnam, which wasn’t going so well…
What I think we can learn from this is that there was huge opposition to supersonic travel (sonic booms etc etc) and concerns about ozone depletion and climatic impacts were a part of all that.
What happened next Johnson had to declare he wouldn’t contest the 1968 election. In 1970 Congress basically killed supersonic transport, de facto if not de jure. This led, amusingly, to the creation of the Heritage Foundation…
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, November 29th, 1968,
Arnold Marsh, secretary of the UK National Clean Air Society, namechecks the problem at a speech at the House of Lords.
“A long-term outstanding problem, in the view of serious American scientific opinion, is the effect of the gradual but steady increase in the carbon dioxide content of the air as a result of the prodigious consumption, which is still going up, of the fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide, the product of all combustion processes – including our own internal processes – is not usually regarded as an air pollutant, and most of it is absorbed by growing plants. But the amount remaining in the atmosphere is creeping up, and in due course, it is suggested, the fact that it absorbs and retains more solar heat than the air itself, will mean a rise in the mean temperature of the atmosphere. This would lead to a melting of the polar ice-caps so that the level of the sea would rise and cover all low-lying land. It is not something that could happen in our lifetimes, but, if the arguments are correct, it could become catastrophic at some future date.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 323ppm. 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 from about 1967, more and more British people were realising that carbon dioxide might be a serious problem.
The specific context was that the impetus for this from Marsh MIGHT have been Ritchie-Calder’s speech to the Conservation Society a few days earlier (i.e. Marsh may have been in touch with Ritchie-Calder about this earlier.).
What I think we can learn from this – we knew plenty.
What happened next – the general “eco” wave began properly the next year, and lasted through until 1972 or 3 or so…
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-seven years ago, on this day, November 1st, 1968, Ida Hoos laid it out.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 323ppm. 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 scientists and technologists had, since The Bomb, engaged in all sorts of hand-wringing about the broader questions of morality and the responsibility of scientists/technology types.
The specific context was – questions about technology and morals were kinda hot, given the atrocities the American war machine was perpetrating in South East Asia, with lots of science and technology types contributing to that.
What I think we can learn from this is that knowledge of the build-up of carbon dioxide was, by 1968, very wide-spread in scientific circles. The build-up itself was not controversial, and the possible consequences were understood as well. But the evidence in people’s “lived experience” was not there (but then again, that’s what we have science for, isn’t it?).
What happened next
Hoos lived to 2007, time enough to see which of the possible futures she had skilfully outlined came to pass.
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 seven years ago, on this day, October 28th, 1968
“Both the United States and the Soviet Union have privately expressed a strong interest in the project.
Foell, E. 1968. Sweden to Ask U.N. for World Pollution Talks: Parley in 1972 Urged . Los Angeles Times; October 28, pg. 28.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 323ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 425ppm. 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 Sweden had had its “environmental turn” in late 1967, and some Swedish diplomats had begun to push for the UN to hold a conference on the environment.
The specific context was that after lots of fancy footwork, and ultimate buy-in from the US and USSR (though they would later boycott it), the conference was about to get the go ahead.
What I think we can learn from this – Sweden punched above its weight for a while there.
What happened next – the conference took place in June 1972. Very few world leaders attended and the only really substantive thing to come out of it, afaik, was the creation of the United Nations Environment Program. UNEP and WMO co-sponsored, along with ICSU, various scientific meetings about the atmosphere and pollution, including the pivotal one in Villach, Austria in October 1985.
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 seven years ago, on this day, July 17th, 1968, a Democratic Senator with Presidential ambitions organises a chat-fest.
on July 17, 1968, Jackson organized a Joint House-Senate colloquium in order to hash out the environmental challenges facing the country. Although it was ignored completely by the press, it was an influential event on Capitol Hill. Half of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s cabinet members attended.
“Out of that colloquium grew Jackson’s idea for a National Environmental Policy Act — a sweeping idea that, when it was enacted into law 18 months later, forced the federal government to examine the environmental consequences of almost every one of its actions, whether it was to build a supersonic transport or to carve a barge canal,” said William W. Prochnau and Richard W. Larsen in a biography of Jackson published four years later (Prochnau and Larsen, p. 68-69). https://www.historylink.org/File/9903
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 323ppm. 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 environmental concerns had been growing over the 1950s and 1960s getting a significant boost with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.
The specific context was that there had been repeated efforts by Democrats – especially Gaylord Nelson and Jackson – to get environmental legislation through, against the usual opposition. But pressures were slowly growing, and colloquia like this was part of that slow boring of hard boards (as per Max Weber).
What I think we can learn from this is that they sentence you to at LEAST twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. Twenty should be considered a very light sentence…
What happened next – after the Santa Barbara Oil Spill of January 1969, things got a bit “easier” – Nelson suggested and got his “Earth Day”. Scoop Jackson, the Senator for Boeing, never got to be president…
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 seven years ago, on this day, January 23rd, 1968, a US federal government bureaucrat, Roy F Bessey, flags the possible long-term problem of carbon dioxide build up.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that more and more people were switching on to the possibility of global, rather than local, impacts of “the Great Acceleration”. President Lyndon Johnson had namechecked carbon dioxide build-up in a February 1965 address, and in January 1967, the editor of Science had led an editorial about the atmosphere with C02 build-up…
What I think we can learn from this is that by 1968 it is not terribly surprising to see experts saying that there might be trouble ahead.
What happened next
That trouble ahead? It’s arrived, hasn’t it?
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, November 25th, 1968, some carbon dioxide samples got collected…
INADVERTENT MODIFICATION OF WEATHER AND CLIMATE BY ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTANTS E.W. Barrett , R.F. Pueschel , H.K. Weickmann , and P.M. Kuhn, in this
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 scientists were beginning to start to measure CO2 locally along with other pollutants because by 1968 some people were starting to get a little bit worried about all this. This is a really minor event. I’m not pretending that it deserves much of a place, I only include it because we need to know that people were looking at this stuff. It was part of the mix.
What we learn: The concerns go back to the sixties…
What happened next Earl Barrett was in Melbourne in 1970 to present some of this work, and then had a letter in science in I want to say September of 1971.
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-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.
