Sixty nine years ago, on this day, April 23, 1954, the Irish Times ran a brief article about climate change and carbon dioxide. Yes, 1954.
It came from a journalist/scientist, Gerald Wendt, who had been writing for the UNESCO Courier.
23 April 1954 Irish Times article
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
In May 1953 Gilbert Plass had said to the American Geophysical Union meeting, in essence – “you know, that Brit, Guy Callendar who said, before the war, that carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere was leading to warming?? “ell, he’s right.”
What I think we can learn from this
The idea that carbon dioxide build up could be a problem was in the air (sorry, not sorry) for a long time.
What happened next
Wendt’s writing got syndicated/serialised elsewhere, including in the colonies.
By 1956 Plass had published on the subject. Others were doing likewise.
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.
On May 5 1953, yes, 1953, The West Australian newspaper had a short piece with Gilbert Plass, warning the American Geophysical Union about the build-up of. carbon dioxide…
Plass was a geochemist who had read Guy Callendar and understood what he was talking about.
Why this matters
Let’s not pretend that 1988 was the first time anyone heard about climate change. That said, this sort of “we were warned” thing can be a little bit unfair. Because there are all sorts of potential threats, potential problems in the world. And if we responded to all of them, instantly with alarm, we’d never get anything done.
But certainly, I think by the late 60s, early 70s, we did know enough to be concerned. And we didn’t act in accordance with that concern. And here we are.
What happened next?
Plass kept on for a little while, and even attended the 1963 Conservation Foundation meeting in New York. But he didn’t do further climate work. There’s a good account of him in Alice Bell’s “Our Greatest Experiment,” btw.
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.)
