Forty five years ago, on this day, August 24th, 1981,
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 340ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was UK newspapers had been reporting on climate change intermittently since really the late 1960s/early 70s, and the Telegraph, which leaned right, had even had done a puff piece with German meteorologist Herman Flohn around the First World Climate Conference. The Telegraph wasn’t completely batshit at this point.
The specific context was that a study had appeared in Science magazine by James Hansen et al about CO2 build up, and the Telegraph was diligently reporting it.
What I think we can learn from this is that we shouldn’t judge today’s terrible so-called newspapers, as the metric of what they always were. They have been hollowed out, they have been demented. They were, they were right wing, but serious. You could still learn something from them, I suppose. You still can at the margins if you try really hard. Who’s got the time, though?
What happened next is that Hansen was punished by the Reagan administration, which took away a grant that had already been disbursed, meaning people lost their jobs, people who had relocated to take jobs. Hansen persisted, of course, and famously gave his testimony in 1988 that it was “time to stop waffling and say that the greenhouse effect was here.” (Well, that wasn’t in his testimony, that was in his comments to journalists afterwards.) The Telegraph began a long, slow, painful slide into utter crass idiocy, not even a shadow of its former self.
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
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Also on this day:
August 24, 1981- “Overlapping effect of atmospheric water, carbon dioxide and ozone….”
August 24, 1989 – a Sydney council takes greenhouse suggestions on-board (or says it will).
August 24, 1992 – Bureaucrats kill greenie-business consensus on climate action
August 24, 1994 – first signs of a split in the anti-climate action business coalition…