Fifty years ago today, on August 28th 1976, someone writes some sense in the (pre-Murdoch) Times.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 331ppm. 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 that the Times had been reporting on carbon dioxide build up. The first big example I’ve been able to find is around the 1957 IUGG conference. They published a letter the following year from someone called Peter Ball. And The Times had, like all the other newspapers in the late 60s, early 70s, run series on various forms of pollution.
The specific context was that there was a drought going on in the UK, and a heat wave. The Times had already reported on an earlier World Meteorological Organisation statement about carbon dioxide in the world getting hotter. And here we see the fact, the intriguing fact that Crispin Tickell’s document that he’d written while at Harvard on a sabbatical was circulating in Whitehall, and there was some effort – ultimately unsuccessful – to get policy makers interested in climate.
What I think we can learn from this is that 50 years ago the British state was beginning to think about this stuff. See also John Agar’s paper.
What happened next there was a push to get carbon dioxide discussed. That push was led by people like John Ashton, the chief scientific advisor, who was working within the CPRS. And this led to the climatic change report of 1980 or published in early 1980 but Thatcher and her fellow numbskulls decided that they were not interested, and so the whole issue kind of went back into the undergrowth and it was only revived after much more work by Tickle and other nations getting into it.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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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 28, 1971 – snarky opinion piece in New York Times. Stephen Schneider rebuts days later
August 28, 1977 – First Australian“Greenpeace” action, against whaling
August 28, 2003 – EPA says Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant