Forty four years ago, on this day, April 27, 1979, the “Green Party” (then known as the Ecology Party”) had its first TV broadcast ahead of 1979 General Election.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 338.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that we had just been through the “winter of discontent”, because Jim Callaghan had not called an election for December 1978, thinking that things would improve. They didn’t. Thatcher was going to win this election quite handily. The Ecology Party was new – it had been founded in 1973, first known as People.
The Green Party has a longer history than folks might think. It’s been trying to fight the good fight with limited success, thanks in part to the first-past-the-post system in the United Kingdom, they lack proportional representation as per Germany.
What happened next
The Ecology Party became the Green Party, the Green Party finally got an MP, the redoubtable Caroline Lucas.
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 four years ago, on this day, February 7 1979, the had of the Met Office John Mason, sent a deeply disingenuous letter to Kenneth Berrill, a senior civil servant who had been responsible for getting an interdepartmental committee formed to look at the possibility of climate change caused by carbon dioxide build-up, and what implications that would have for the UK.
And early in 1979, [Mason] wrote directly to Berrill, describing the carbon dioxide problem as of ‘‘immediate importance’’ and assuring Berrill that he was pouring resources into the problem. This engagement with CO2 climate change represented an about-turn in Mason’s position. (Martin-Nielsen, 2018)
CAB 164/1422 B. J. Mason to K. Berrill, re: ‘‘Economic Effects of Climatic Change,’’ 7 Feb 1979, KEW
This – February 1979 – was just as Mason was about to fly off to the First World Climate Conference in Geneva, where he would… make sure that carbon dioxide was not agreed as an immediate threat. Whether Berrill noticed, or cared, I don’t know…. You can read about Mason’s performance in Geneva in Stephen Schneider’s memoir “Science as a Contact Sport.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 336ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
John Mason, as head of the Meteorological Office had been dismissive of carbon dioxide build up as something to be concerned about for several years. The notion that this was a U-turn from Mason, is not necessarily accurate.. Another reading of the situation is that Mason was merely bending to reality because an Intergovernmental Committee on climate had already started meeting it in late 1978.
What I think we can learn from this
Behind any creation of a committee or a report, there is always politics that you don’t see usually at the time or even later – things that are either not leaked or kept secret or in fact, never actually written down, but said in passing and in corridors.
This creates problems for historians trying to recreate “what really happened.” Secondly, we learn that people are capable of pretending they’ve changed their mind, if it is politically expedient for them to do so.
What happened next
The Climatic Change report was subjected to attempts to suppress it, and was finally released in February 1980 as a “nothing to see here” document. You can read about this in four days on this website.
References
Martin-Nielson, J. 2018. Computing the Climate: When Models Became Political.Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2018) 48 (2): 223–245. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2018.48.2.223
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
On this day, October 9 in 1979, Hermann Flohn (major German scientist) gave a talk about “possible climatic consequences of a man-made global warming” at a conference in Dublin, Ireland.
Flohn H. 1980: Possible climatic consequences of a man-made global warming. In: R. Kavanagh (Ed.): Energy System Analysis. Proc. Intern. Conf. Dublin, 9-11 Oct. 1979, D. Reidel Publ. Comp., Dordrecht, 558-568. (1981: Life on a warmer Earth, Possible climatic consequences of man-made global warming. Executive Report 3, based on research by H. Flohn, Intern. Inst. for Applied System Analysis IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria, pp. 59.)
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 334.24ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – by the late 1970s, scientists who studied climate, energy systems etc had come to some conclusions
Carbon dioxide really was building up in the atmosphere
This would have real consequences
They tried to get politicians to pay attention. Oops
Why this matters.
By the late 1970s we knew enough (earlier than that, I think there was room for doubt)
What happened next?
Flohn kept trying. Others kept trying. Eventually, in 1988, the issue “broke through”.
