Tag: Carl Sagan

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United States of America

October 30, 1983 – Carl Sagan hosts ‘nuking ourselves would be bad’ conference.

On this day, forty years ago, American scientists and science communicator Carl Sagan hosted a conference on the consequences of nuclear war…

Sagan and his colleagues orchestrated the “Conference on Long-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War,” held in Washington DC to garner as much public and political attention as possible. The steering committee scheduled the two-day event to begin on Halloween. On October 30, 1983, Sagan published an expose on nuclear winter in Parade Magazine, a popular Sunday newspaper supplement with more than twenty million readers. Chaired by George Woodwell and kicked off by Stanford University’s eloquent president, Donald Kennedy, the conference itself was less a scientific meeting than an extended, staged press release. A satellite link – relatively new technology in 1983 – connected an audience of several hundred scientists, journalists, and politicians to members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

(Howe, 2014:139)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 343ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

Context

With the coming of the second Cold War (with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, sharpening with the arrival of Reagan and his lunatic friends), scientists started thinking about what would happen if a nuclear war happened. Even a “small one”, some thought, would burn forests, releasing huge clouds of dust that would blot out the sun, creating a “nuclear winter.”

What we can learn

Climate change from carbon dioxide has been tied up with other global atmospheric threats (real and perceived – oxygen depletion, ozone depletion, acid rain, nuclear war). There is no “clear” narrative that ignores those…

 
What happened next

There were claims and counter-claims about this, and some scientists disagreed with Sagan (notably Steve Schneider). By 1986, with the coming of Gorbachev (in 1985) and the Chernobyl disaster, it seemed less likely that a war would happen. Meanwhile, along came the Ozone hole, and then the climate stuff kicked in, post-Villach…

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United States of America

December 10, 1985 – Carl Sagan testified to US Senators on #climate danger

On this day, December 10 1985, scientist Carl Sagan testified in front of a US senate hearing. He explained the basic physics of carbon dioxide build up and its consequences

“I’d like to stress that the greenhouse effect makes life on Earth possible. If there were not a greenhouse effect, the temperature would, as I say, be 30 centigrade degrees or so colder. And that’s well below the freezing point of water everywhere on the planet. The oceans would be solid after a while.

“A little greenhouse effect is a good thing, but there is a delicate balance of these invisible gases, and too much or too little greenhouse effect can mean too high or too low a temperature. And here we are pouring enormous quantities of CO2 and these other gasses into the atmosphere every year, with hardly any concern about its long-term and global consequences.”

Handy transcript here – https://theanalysis.news/carl-sagan-testifying-before-congress-in-1985-on-climate-change/

“In the fall of 1985, the Senate held several hearings on the topic of global warming and climate change in response to the report of an international scientific conference held in Villach, Austria. These were the first hearings on climate change in the Senate since 1979. The House had held hearings on rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide under the guidance of Representative Albert Gore in 1981, 1982, and 1984. Senator David Durenberger observed presciently, in his opening statement to the December 1985 hearings on global warming, that `grappling with this problem [of climate change] is going to be just about as easy as nailing jello to the wall’ (SCEPW,1986a, p. 1).

(Pielke, 2000)

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 346ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

The context was this – 

From the mid-1970s, scientists had been getting more certain of – and worried about – the impacts of dumping extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They had turned up in Villach, Austria, in September of 1985, for a meeting organised by WMO and UNEP. (see here – October 15, 1985 – Villach meeting supercharges greenhouse concerns…

https://allouryesterdays.info/2022/10/14/october-15-1985-villach-meeting-supercharges-greenhouse-concerns/)
They crunched numbers, thought about the non-C02 gases and gone “ooops” and started getting sympathetic politicians (and at this point, the Republicans had not yet gone totally insane).

.

Why this matters. 

Forty years we’ve known, really. Those that knew were outspent, outgunned, outmanoeuvred by frightened and frightening goons for the status quo. The\ goons have been the death of us.

What happened next?

The Reagan Administration did everything it could to stop being bounced into a carbon dioxide treaty the way it had been (in its perception) on ozone. With a great deal of very consequential success. We’re so doomed, I cannot begin to tell you.