On this day, July 28 1970 “[Journalist Claire] Sterling began an article in the Washington Post with an air of crisis, reporting breathlessly prior to the Stockholm meeting:
“Scientists still aren’t sure how much carbon dioxide we can inject into the atmosphere before heating it up enough to melt the polar icecaps, how much smog can cut off the sun’s rays without bringing a new Ice Age upon us, how many germs per cubic centimetre of water we can swallow and live, how much better or worse off the human race would actually be for using or banning DDT.”
Sterling, C. 1970. The UN and World Pollution, Washington Post, Times Herald, 28 July
.
I found this quote on page 200 of a rather excellent book called “Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism” by Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Why this matters.
Yes. 1970.
What happened next?
The 1972 Stockholm Conference did less than it might have for climate science, but the scientists kept going.
Sterling wrote a totally beserk book called “The Real Terror Network”, which influenced the senile Ronald Reagan and the professional paranoids around him –
As per Wikipedia
“The book was read and appreciated by Alexander Haig and William Casey, but its arguments were dismissed by the CIA’s Soviet analysts; Lincoln Gordon, one of three members of a senior review panel at the CIA charged, at Casey’s request, with bringing non-intelligence professional and academic review to the agency, discovered comparing CIA intelligence reports and the book that at least some of Sterling’s claims had come from stories that the CIA itself had planted in the Italian press.”