Tag: Frank Fraser Darling

Categories
International processes Sweden

June 10th (ish) -1972: Frank Fraser Darling says we’re all doomed.

On this day (give or take),54 years ago at the Big Save The World conference in Stockholm, illusions were being shed, by Scottish biologist and all-round smart guy Frank Fraser Darling.

“At the UN conference at Stockholm, ten years ago, I remember between two sessions seeing Sir Frank Fraser Darling sitting by himself on a chair in a corridor adjoining the conference hall. I remember too sitting down next to him and asking him what he thought of the proceedings. He shook his head and looked thoroughly miserable. “We are doomed” he said. At the time, I did not really believe him. Perhaps, I was still (relatively) young and naive. Today, after having attended these three meetings, I know that he was right.”

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 326ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 432ppm. 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 for this was that the costs of industrialisation and population growth could not easily be ignored anymore (though the blame could be -and was – consistently misplaced). The Swedes proposed an international conference on ‘the Human Environment’ in 1968, and hosted it.


Meanwhile, Frank Fraser Darling had been aware of the carbon dioxide issue since – at the absolute latest – 1963, when he attended the Conservation Foundation meeting.  He had devoted a portion of his 1969 Reith Lectures to the question of carbon dioxide build-up (name-checked in a 1969 editorial in The Economist).. 

The specific context was that it was clearly going about as well as the pessimists said, and FFD could not pretend to himself….

What I think we can learn is this: the  smart people, biologists more than climatologists, could tell where this was all headed.

What happened next:  Stockholm gave us UNEP. The carbon dioxide question grew through the 1970s. By the late 1970s plenty of scientists felt we had enough information to start acting. It took another ten years, until 1988, for the problem to properly become an issue. At which point, the games of kayfabe began.

On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays

Of Cliff Richard, a 60 year old #climate meeting and the grim meathook future…

March 12, 1963 – first scientific meeting about C02 build-up

I haven’t done a post about FFD’s Reith lectures yet?!!

References

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.

If you want to get involved, let me know.

If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).

Also on this day: 

June 10, 1961 – Nature report on “Solar Variations, Climatic Change and Related Geophysical Problems” – All Our Yesterdays

June 10, 1966 – Seaborg’s commencement address – All Our Yesterdays

June 10, 1986 – scientist tells US senators “global warming is inevitable. It is only a question of the magnitude and the timing.” – All Our Yesterdays

 June 10, 2015 – Abbott and Jones versus windfarms – All Our Yesterdays

June 10, 2019 – a booming market for hydrogen…. – All Our Yesterdays

Categories
United Kingdom

December 20, 1969 – The Economist editorialises on carbon dioxide build-up

Fifty-six years ago today, the heavy-weight magazine The Economist editorialises on environment, and CO2 build-up

“You might even say that something encouragingly like a constructive panic is on.”

But one is left with the fear that the massed ranks now setting out to do battle against the pale horsemen of this new apocalypse may end up trampling one another to death. Now that it is legitimate to be against motherhood “environment looks like becoming a battle-cry that will be both unchallengeable and universally fashionable.”

Mr Moynihan… has been leaning rather heavily on such suggestions as that, by the year 2000, the level of the oceans could rise by ten feet as a result of the increased carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. This content has, indeed, already been increased by 10 per cent by the use of coal and oil fuels (each transatlantic airliner puts a hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere); and the restoration of the balance by photosynthesis in plant life on land and in the sea may be increasingly jeopardised by human spoliation of the environment. But scientists have been unable to agree in predicting the long-term effects of a fouler atmosphere on the earth’s surface temperature, and hence on the sea level.

What is agreed is that we are destabilising the balance of nature in this and other ways, and that where remedies are available they will mostly require action on an international scale.

The mess we are making now could have catastrophic effects not upon a distant posterity – assuming that there is going to be any such thing – but within a few decades.

But even the foggiest words are a less alarming additive to the atmosphere than an excess of carbon dioxide. For one forceful exposition of what it is all about, those who did not hear Dr Fraser Darling’s lectures might well read them in the Listener or in book form; for another, they may be referred to a remarkable book which was originally published in Sweden three years ago and which is credited with having inspired the subsequent Swedish drive to bring the whole problem to the forefront of international discussion. Some day we may all have cause for gratitude to these prophets of avoidable doom. 

Anon, 1969. Of Muck and Men. The Economist, December 20, p.15

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 324ppm. As of 2025, 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 Guy Callendar, who had bravely done the work in the 1930s was sadly not around to see this – he had died five years earlier. But by then others had taken up the fight, and tv programmes (including a couple by the late great Roy Battersby) had introduced it to UK audiences.

The specific context was that by 1969, “everyone” was talkin’ pollution, and editors must have known that the Wilson government was about to set up a (standing) Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

What I think we can learn from this – the British elites (political, economic) knew what might be coming by 1969.

What happened next – the carbon dioxide fear got kicked by Frank Ireland, the Alkali Inspector, the following August.

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: 

December 20, 1961 – UNGA resolution on outer space and weather modification 

December 20, 1969 – AGU on climate change… –

December 20, 1983 – Documentary on “the Climate Crisis” shown

December 20, 2007 – UK opposition leader David Cameron gives clean coal speech in Beijing…

Categories
Science Scientists United States of America

March 12, 1963 – first scientific meeting about C02 build-up

On this day in 1963, the first ever policymaker meeting – in the West at least(1) – specifically around carbon dioxide bonding happened in New York under the auspices of Laurence Rockefeller’s organisation, the Conservation Foundation, (not to be confused with the Conservation Society launched in the UK three years later, and not funded by Rockefeller.)

The account of the meeting, which you can read here, had the snappy title “Implications of rising carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; a statement of trends and implications of carbon dioxide research reviewed at a conference of scientists.”

Present at the meeting were Roger Revelle, Gilbert Plasss, Charles Keeling, and an Englishman called Frank Fraser Darling – someone we will return to…

The context was that as of 1959, it has become clear that carbon dioxide was indeed building up in the atmosphere, and that eventually, this would lead to warming of the planet. And this would lead to ice caps melting in flooded cities, changing weather patterns, etc. 

But at this stage, in early 1963 the assumption was, this would be a problem in a couple of 100 years as per Svante Arrhenius

Why this matters. 

The Conservation Foundation report of this symposium was not a best-seller, but it DOES pop up in the reference list of various books and articles over the rest of the decade, before it starts to be supplanted by later events with more information.

What happened next?

Revelle worked on a report for Lyndon Johnson’s science subcommittee with Margaret Mead Frank Fraser Darling would talk about the build up of co2 as a problem and his reef lectures for the BBC in November of 1969

And the CO2 would continue to accumulate

For more about the Rockefellers role in postwar environmentalism this article “The Eco-Establishment “by Katherine Barkley and Steve WeissmanRamparts Magazine, May 1970, pp. 48-50

Footnotes

(1) “Fedorov and Budyko were both key instigators of a specially convened meeting on the transformation of climate which took place in Leningrad during April 1961.40 This meeting, together with a related workshop the following June, represented the first focussed Soviet discussions concerning anthropogenic climate change” (Oldfield, 2018: 45).

Oldfield, J. (2018) Imagining climates past, present and future: Soviet contributions to the science of anthropogenic climate change, 1953e1991. Journal of Historical Geography 60 41- 51.)