On this day, November 23, 1968 Lord Ritchie Calder gave a presidential address to the Conservation Society (a British NGO from the mid 60s to the late 1980s). Its cheerful title? Hell Upon Earth.
And among the litany of dangers ahead, this on climate change….
“It has been estimated that, at the present rate of increase (6,000 million tonnes a year) mean annual temperature all over the world might increase by 3.6 degrees centigrade in the next forty to fifty years, The experts may argue about the time factor and even about the effects but certain things are apparent, not only in the industrialised northern hemisphere but in the southern hemisphere. The north-polar ice-cap is thinning and shrinking. The seas with their blanket of carbon dioxide are changing their temperature with the result that marine plant life is increasing and is transpiring more carbon dioxide. With this combination fish are migrating, changing even their latitudes. On land the snow line is retreating and glaciers are melting.”
Calder’s speech wsa reported in the New York Times on the 24th
“Hell on Earth” NYT article – LONDON, Nov. 23 — Lord Ritchie-Calder, president of the Conservation Society, painted a gloomy picture today of the future of the world because too many “ignorant men are pretending to be knowledgeable.”
And in the Observer by John Davy
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 323ppm. At time of writing it was 417ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
Why this matters.
I used to think that unless you were particularly switched on, then climate change wasn’t really on your radar until 1988. Then I pushed that back to the late 1970s… then…
What happened next?
Calder kept at it – see his widely-syndicated “Selling off the Old Homestead”, originally in Foreign Affairs, in January 1970
