Thirty seven years ago, on this day, July 3, 1986, there was a House of Lords debate on “the atmosphere and fuel use”
Lord Campbell of Croy was an interesting chap – “After being defeated by Winnie Ewing of the Scottish National Party at the February 1974 general election, Campbell was made a life peer as Baron Campbell of Croy, of Croy in the County of Nairn on 9 January 1975.[4] He became Chairman of the Scottish Board in 1976, and was Vice President of the Advisory Committee on Pollution at Sea from 1976 to 1984.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 350ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Villach conference in September 1985 had created a real sense of urgency among climate scientists, and in the US, a small number of senators were trying to get the issue higher up the agenda. In April 1986 the catastrophe at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine had put the question of transboundary pollution on the map, and put a question mark over nuclear….
What I think we can learn from this
Nuclear always causes a glow in a certain kind of heart…
What happened next
Two years later, everyone was talking about the greenhouse effect, even Thatcher.
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 this day in 1986 the Melbourne newspaper The Age ran a decent and entirely prescient spread about the coming crisis.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 346ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that after the pivotal Villach conference in September 1985, scientists were pulling every lever they could. They had cred and salience because of the Ozone Hole. The CSIRO (Australian Science Body) was, with the help of the Commission for the Future, getting its public-facing act together. More immediately, the Age had run a brief front page story on 19 June.
What we can learn
The predictions were right, give or take
What happened next
Opportunities to hold hands, proclaim our virtue and … emissions. Lots of emissions
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.
Thirty seven years ago, on this day, June 2, 1986, US Senators got going…
The year of 1986 was significant in terms of congressional interest. Influential congressional leaders asserted that the issue of greenhouse warming was no longer only a science issue; policy options had to be considered. 19 in Congress, the likes of Senators Chafee, Stafford, Bentsen, Durenberger, Mitchell, Baucus, Leahy and Gore, began to pressure the White House to take action on climate change.
These Senators signed a letter to Dr. Frank Press, President of NAS on June 2, 1986, requesting the NAS to review the scientific issues. These senators were ‘deeply disturbed’ by the implications of published reports on CO2 induced climate change.
(Hecht and Tirpak 1995)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 350ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that various US Senators had been getting well informed about the risks of climate change by various National Academy of Science reports. And scientists such as Jim Hansen, and David Burns, and so on. In October 1985, there had been a meeting at Villach in Austria, which had really concentrated everyone’s minds. Carl Sagan had given testimony to Seators in December of 1985. LINK
Joe Biden introduced a climate bill, in 1987, and this letter by various senators, is part of the run-up to that. And we should remember that Frank Press was previously Jimmy Carter’s Chief Scientific Adviser. And he would have been very well aware of the carbon dioxide issue, having been lobbied on it and having taken action on it before (and in April 1980 having pushed back against a report advocating a policy response).
What I think we can learn from this is that before the breakout in 1988, there were lots of people in the policy stream and politics stream and the problem stream to make stuff happen, and to couple the streams. There are always efforts to couple streams before they are successfully coupled.
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.
Thirty-seven years ago, on this day, January 27 1986, engineers at the company Morton-Thiokol were begging their own bosses, and NASA administrators, to delay the launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle. They feared it could explode on the launch pad, because seals keeping fuel away from air were not going to work because the rubber they were made of had lost its elasticity, thanks to unexpected sub-zero temperatures in Florida.
As per the Wikipedia entry about one of the engineers, Roger Boisjoly.
Following the announcement that the Challenger mission was confirmed for January 28, 1986, Boisjoly and his colleagues tried to stop the flight. Temperatures were due to fall to −1 °C (30 °F) overnight. Boisjoly felt that this would severely compromise the safety of the O-ring and potentially the flight.
The matter was discussed with Morton Thiokol managers, who agreed that the issue was serious enough to recommend delaying the flight. NASA protocols required all shuttle sub-contractors to sign off on each flight. During the go/no-go telephone conference with NASA management the night before the launch, Morton Thiokol notified NASA of their recommendation to postpone. NASA officials strongly questioned the recommendations, and asked (some say pressured) Morton Thiokol to reverse its decision.
The Morton Thiokol managers asked for a few minutes off the phone to discuss their final position again. The management team held a meeting from which the engineering team, including Boisjoly and others, were deliberately excluded. The Morton Thiokol managers advised NASA that their data was inconclusive. NASA asked if there were objections. Hearing none, NASA decided to launch the STS-51-LChallenger mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 348.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was NASA was under a lot of pressure to launch, because of previous delays and because there was a civilian – a teacher called Christa McAuliffe – on board.
What I think we can learn from this
Hierarchies are “reality distortion fields”. But reality – especially physics and chemistry – will impinge, sooner or later.
It’s probably a good idea to listen to scientists and engineers who say something is really unsafe.
There is such a thing as “organisational decay” – Organizational decay is a condition of generalized and systemic ineffectiveness. It develops when an organization shifts its activities from coping with reality to presenting a dramatization of its own ideal character. In the decadent organization, flawed decision making of the sort that leads to disaster is normal activity, not an aberration. Three aspects of the development of organizational decay are illustrated in the case of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They are (1) the institutionalization of the fiction, (2) personnel changes in parallel with the institutionalization of the fiction, and (3) the narcissistic loss of reality among management.
What happened next
In case you didn’t know, the Challenger was torn apart 73 seconds into its flight.
Boisjoly spent the rest of his life trying to get other people to learn from what had happened. By all accounts, a mensch.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
Schwartz, H. 1989. Organizational disaster and organisational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3, pp.319-334.
And a blog post of mine, inspired by reading Schwartz
