Sixty six years ago, on this day, January 26th, 1958,
At the same time NAS was channelling Revelle, Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and an avid advocate for building hundreds of nuclear power plants, warned at the December 1957 meeting of the American Chemical Society that increasing CO2 might someday melt the polar icecaps and flood the world’s coastal regions.
Teller’s remarks and Revelle’s testimony to a congressional committee sparked a Washington Sunday Star article by Phil Yeager and John Stark in January 1958: “Mystery of the Warming World.” It was published on page 26 and included the prediction that CO2 warming of the climate might generate” a type of control regulation, law, interstate compact, and international agreement which could scarcely help clashing with some of our cherished notions of free enterprise. Industry, which might blossom in some directions … would be hamstrung in others. … Further, in view of the global nature of the problem, ordinary international agreements might prove inadequate for effective regulation.” International controls backed up by penalties, the prescient pair wrote, would be “sure to foster great heat and controversy.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/01/14/436446/-Blast-from-the-Past-8211-James-Hansen-1988
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 315ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context is that people had been talking about the greenhouse issue. And including Edward Teller. And two journalists had used it as the opening topic in a series of science articles.
What we learn – we knew. We really knew.
What happened next The issue kind of went away in 1959-60, and only started to seriously come back in the late 1960s. And I think it’s just too big for people to understand. And it’s still too big for them to understand the idea that we could have a global impact. I mean, it’s just bizarre.
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.
Also on this day:
January 26, 1970 – US science bureaucrat writes “what’s going on?” memo about #climate
January 26, 1978: “West Antarctic ice sheet and C02 greenhouse effect: a threat of disaster” article in Nature…
