Twenty-nine years ago, on this day, April 8th, 1995, Fred Pearce of the New Scientist points out that there is a gamble going on (as did Australian climate scientist Graeme Pearman three years earlier).
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the first COP had just finished. Rich nations had been resisting emissions cuts using scientific uncertainty as their final excuse. But Swedish scientist Bert Bolin, who had been banging on about climate change, and carbon dioxide build up since 1958, at the latest, was telling them that the IPCC Second Assessment Report would be out later this year and that they shouldn’t expect to be able to use the uncertainty card for very much longer, more or less.
What I think we can learn from this is that the really sharp battles at the end of 1995, were all about that. I hadn’t quite grokked that before.
What happened next
Well, there were really sharp battles at the end of ‘95. From the middle of ‘95 efforts by denialists to smear individual scientists (the “Serengeti Strategy”) and the process in order to slow progress towards a serious protocol.
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.
Sixty four years ago, on this day, April 1st, 1960, a weather satellite started being like the wheels on the bus (i.e. going round and round).
On 1 April 1960, the USA launched its first meteorological satellite, TIROS 1. It was a remarkable experience for people to be able to view the earth and its atmosphere from the outside. The bluish colour of our planet fascinated observers and a number of well-known features of the circulation of the atmosphere became visible through the cloud formations that they create.
(Bolin, 2007) Page 19
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 316.9ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that we’d been talking about putting satellites into space for 100 years. And that had finally happened in September 1957 with Sputnik. The Americans had some failures but were now on the path
Tiros 1 was a weather satellite. And how sad that Johnny von Neumann wasn’t alive to see it. A shame.
What we learn from this is being able to really see and measure the world from above had an enormous impact on not just weather forecasting, but also just thinking about how the systems worked. (See Paul Edwards’ A Vast Machine).
What happened next? A lot more satellites, a lot bigger computers, a lot better picture and precisely zero meaningful action. On the problem we identified.
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.
December 30, 2007 – Bert Bolin dies. He was a Swedish scientist, did more than anyone else (I would argue) from the 1950s to the 1980s to get carbon dioxide build-up on the political agenda (he was most certainly not alone in doing this – proper group effort). Find posts about him on this site here.
Bolin’s death was exquisitely well-timed. He had been the first chair of the IPCC, and that organisation had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of weeks earlier. The COP meeting of the UNFCCC in Bali had agreed – over US objections – a two year plan of negotiations for a big important/solve the post-Kyoto problem meeting to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009.
Bolin, I hope, died believing that, finally, at last, possibly too late, the rich nations were being successfully corralled into doing something serious on the issue he had been so responsible for.
Bolin’s book – A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – is fairly dry, but great if you’re a geek like me
Btw, at that time atmospheric CO2 was 384ppm. It’s roughly 418 now
On this day in 1980 an international gathering of scientists took place in Villlach, Austria.
“The first major initiative to result from the establishment of the WCP was an international conference on climate change, held in Villach, Austria, from 17 to 22 November 1980. Under the chairmanship of Professor Bert Bolin of the University of Stockholm, the delegates issued a warning that the accumulation of greenhouse gases posed a great risk to the earth’s natural equilibria; they declared that the issue consequently had to be addressed with some urgency. Although their pronouncement drew some attention, its political impact was negligible.”
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 338.7ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
Why this matters
This is part of the long slow growth of awareness and concern
What happened next. One of the attendees was Australian scientist Graeme Pearman. Later that year, in September 1980, the Australian Academy of Science held a symposium about carbon dioxide build-up in Canberra.
In 1985 another Villach meeting set the international ball properly rolling, thanks to US Senators paying close attention…
And the emissions? Oh, they kept climbing. Of course they did. I mean, we didn’t stop burning the fossil fuels, did we?
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 315ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
Through the 1950s, American and Swedish scientists (and others) were looking at carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and saying to themselves “now that’s interesting.”
Why this matters.
We knew
What happened next?
Bolin? It became Bolin’s life work. He shepherded the climate science agenda forward with skill and patience for decades. He was a key player all through the 1970s and 1980s. First chair of the IPCC. Thank goodness for him he died when he did, before the farce of Copenhagen and so on.
On this day, October 15 in 1985, scientists from around the world began a meeting that would lead to the final arrival of the climate “issue” on the international agenda. Here is the beginning of an article by prominent science writer Fred Pearce, writing in 2005…
“The week the climate changed; Villach, a sleepy spa town in southern Austria, is not an obvious place from which to change the world. But 20 years ago this week, a conference there became the spark that lit today’s burning concern about global warming. Before Villach, the greenhouse effect was a subject for specialised physicists – a possible problem for future generations and nothing more. After Villach, global warming swiftly became the world’s top environmental story. The conference, say the people who were there, was the catalyst for the formation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the gatekeeper for the science of climate change – and led to the Kyoto protocol. So what happened? Was it atmospheric chemistry or personal chemistry?
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 343.35ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – since the early 1970s there had been international meetings of scientists to look at Man’s Impact on the Climate/Environment, in various places (Williamstown, Wijk, Norwich, Villach). From 1972 some of these meetings had been co-sponsored by the UN Environment Program, alongside the World Meteorological Organisation. The models got better, the scientists got surer of what was happening, what might happen…
The Villach 1985 meeting is the one at which the non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gases got properly added up, and they realised trouble was afoot, less hypothetically and sooner than they’d been thinking…
Why this matters.
History is good, isn’t it? If you didn’t think that, you’d not be reading this site.
What happened next?
American senators got the message – in December we’ll talk about Carl Sagan’s testimony in December 1985. The US Department of State, nervous about being bounced into binding international action on carbon dioxide the way they had been about ozone, decided to slow the whole thing down and make sure governments got to vet scientific statements…
On this day, July 29 1974 a World Meteorological Organisation conference on climate modelling began, running until 10 August.
As Bert Bolin (one of THE key figures) wrote in the foreword-
At the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in June 1972, it was emphasized that the earth’s climate is of basic importance to man and his well-being. Climatic variability and possible change are still essentially unpredictable although they are significant factors in the continued development of both industrialized and developing countries. Some of the most important problems that confront us were very well summarized in the SMIC report “Study of Man’s Impact on Climate”, (1) which was available at the UN conference and served as an important reference document. In recommendation 79d of the conference, it was recommended that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in co-operation with the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) “continue to carry out the GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Programme) to better understand the general circulation of the atmosphere, the causes of climatic change and whether these causes are natural or the result of man’s activities”.
At its eighth session in London in March 1973, the JOC considered in detail the role of GARP for studies of climate and its fluctuations. It was proposed that the next step towards an active programme would be the organization of an International Study Conference on the Physical Basis of Climate and Climate Modelling….
The conference was held at Wijk outside Stockholm during the period 29 July to 10 August 1974 with a total attendance of about 70 scientists from different parts of the world. Their devoted work during two weeks has resulted in the present report.
These were the building blocks – between 1970 and 1975 – when climate scientists patiently assembled the evidence, debated, refined. By about 1976/7 it was pretty clear what was coming, just a question of when (how fast, in what order). They did try to warn the politicians. And some of the politicians kinda sorta listened a bit.
What happened next?
The scientists kept at it. (Impact) Science is very very cool.. Some joined the dots, understood the implications, quicker than others. By 1979 the smarter ones were getting quite nervous….
Below is a brilliant guest post, by Swedish historian Kristoffer Ekberg. If there are other folks out there who want to write guest posts – please do get in touch! drmarchudson@gmail.com
14 June 1979 and the messy inclusion of climate change in energy politics
Kristoffer Ekberg
On this date, 14 June 1979, the Swedish government gave the state-owned utility Statens Vattenfallsverk AB or short Vattenfall (meaning water fall) the task of undertaking a large scale investigation into ways of introducing more coal into the energy mix without harming the environment or the health of the population, Kol-Hälsa-Miljö (Coal-Health-Environment).
The aim was to increase the use of coal. The task might not seem strange given the fear of volatile oil prices during the 1970s and the fact that in the beginning of the 1970s up to 75% of Sweden’s energy consumption came from imported oil. Transitioning to a source of energy that was seen as more secure due to the possibility to source it from the proximity in northern Germany seems like a rational choice when only looking at this development.
But understanding this as a strategic move based on solely energy security shows only part of the picture and obscures the dubious enterprise, given the already-existing knowledge of climate change present among the political elites.
Famously hosting the first UN meeting on the human environment in 1972 the issue of climate change was already present among the leadership of the Social democratic party and Swedish political leadership. Bert Bolin (who would later become the first chairman of IPCC), had the year before also convened with the world’s leading climate scientists in Sweden.
In 1974 the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme publicly stated that climate change was one of the most pressing issues in the period up to the year 2000. In 1975 climate change was mentioned in the energy plan that would guide Sweden’s actions the coming years, clearly influenced by Bolin’s work. Climate change science was not unanimous but the Swedish leadership nonetheless engaged with the threat.
Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister (source: Wikipedia)
In these years, climate change became a useful argument for a Social Democratic leadership wanting to push for nuclear power. As opposition to nuclear grew larger and more forceful every year, partly resulting in the loss in the election of 1976 ending a 40 year period in power, nuclear became a problem but so was oil.
In governmental reports in 1978, climate change, which had initially been framed as a concern in relation to national energy production and consumption became associated solely with future threats on a global scale.
Even though the coal investigation was tasked with incorporating all available knowledge, the issue of climate change and CO2 was in most parts excluded, despite the previous reports from Bolin and others. Further, during the investigation the issue of CO2 came to the fore through trips to – for example – the Department on Energy, in the US but was deemed a problem not for Sweden but for high emitters like USA, Soviet Union and China.
When finished in 1983, the report mentioned climate change but these formulations were critiqued by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) arguing that the investigation had failed to account for the impact on CO2 emissions from introducing more coal.
Why this matters
The episode told here speaks to the messy ways in which climate change entered discussions and speaks to the different strategies that have been used to keep climate change of the table in periods when energy issues are highly debated. The construction of delaying arguments is not new in contemporary society but is something that has happened constantly since climate change entered on the political arena.
Kristoffer Ekberg is an historian working at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research focuses on the political history of climate change and the environment, corporate anti-environmentalism as well as social movements and utopian thought.
