Seventy years ago today, on Thursday September 22nd 1955, a scientist employed by General Electric stood in front of an audience of engineers and told them that the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “may be having a greenhouse effect on our climate” because mankind was “contaminating the earth’s atmosphere faster than nature can clean it.”
The audience was a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, hosted by the Cleveland Engineering Society. The scientist giving the after-dinner speech, titled “Fact and Fantasy” was John G. Hutton, originally English, who had gained a PhD in electrical engineering at Yale.
The following day the newspaper the Plain-Dealer carried the story under the headline “Clears H-Bomb as Weather Climate.” From there the story got picked up by UP (United Press) which quoted Hutton – having explained that trees and plant life absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen – as saying
“However… when people chop down trees, bulldoze once-rural land for suburbs, and build factories on former open fields, they lessen the amount of carbon dioxide nature is cleaning from our air.”
Hutton also referred to the Los Angeles smog problem (see Rebecca John’s investigation for DeSmog on how fossil fuel companies warped the scientific research effort around this, burying the carbon dioxide aspect).
Hutton had been born in 1916, Sunderland, England. Having failed his exam to enter secondary school, he worked in manual labour and went to night school in order to be accepted to Durham University. From there he was awarded a fellowship to attend Yale, where he got his Masters and Doctorate. After brief stints in Canada and teaching at Cornell, he started working for General Electric in 1943 as an electrical engineer.
Hutton’s inspirations
Hutton already was an experienced after-dinner speaker by this time, and it is not clear why he chose to talk about climate change.
Two years previously Gilbert Plass, drawing on the work of Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius, and the more recent work of English Steam Engineer Guy Callendar, had pointed to the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a long-term threat. Also in 1953 economist Willam J. Baxter, author of the very popular “Today’s Revolution in Weather” had touched on the theory. When Hutton spoke, Plass’s first academic paper on CO2 build-up had been submitted but not published, and Roger Revelle, the famous scientist and administrator, had not yet begun to use carbon dioxide build-up as one part of his (successful) campaign to convince US federal politicians to fund expensive science.
It may simply have been that the International Geophysical Year – a world-wide collaboration of data gathering – was coming soon (1957-1958) and he thought it worth talking about; he told his Cleveland audience that carbon dioxide build-up would be investigated during the IGY.
Two other possible sources of inspiration deserve a mention. In June 1955, Fortune magazine had published an article by the extremely well-known and respected Jonny von Neumann. In “Can we survive technology?” the Hungarian genius noted that
“[t]he carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry’s burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere’s composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.”
The second source is internal to GE. Another – far more prominent – General Electric scientist was already making waves on the question of carbon dioxide and the atmosphere, albeit from another perspective.
From the late 1940s, pursuing work he and others had conducted during the second world war, Irving Langmuir advocated using frozen carbon dioxide (“dry ice”) to see clouds.
As Thia Griffin-Elliot notes
On the afternoon of October 13, 1947, an Air Force B-17 aircraft penetrated a hurricane 415 miles (667 km) east of Jacksonville and dumped several pounds of crushed dry ice into the storm, just to see what would happen. This was the first attempt to modify a tropical cyclone by seeding it with freezing nuclei.
Regardless of Hutton’s specific impetus, the idea that man might modify the weather and climate – either deliberately (as a weapon of war, or to improve crop growth) or accidentally was “in the air.” In June 1953 tornados had occurred in places that had rarely had them before, and there was a great deal of speculation and anxiety around the possibility that H-bomb tests had caused them (for a great summary of this see McBrien, 2019).
What happened next
There was immediate newspaper coverage around the United States in local papers. Usually this was buried in later pages, but on several occasions it was front page news. (e.g. “Engineer lays hotter weather on growing industrialization” The Buffalo News, September 23, page 1) and “Auto Exhaust May Change Climate More Than A-Bomb” Omaha World-Herald, November 18, page 1)
Four days after Hutton’s speech New York Times ran a short column “Why Earth Warms; Scientist Blames Man-Made Changes on Earth’s Surface”.
In October the American Society of Planning Officials released a report “Air Pollution – A Growing Urban Problem” which cited Hutton’s speech.
Over the following months, the story was syndicated elsewhere, often with the “no, it’s not H-bombs” angle emphasised.
In February 1956 the science correspondent for the Washington Evening Star (then a far more important paper than the Washington Post) covered Hutton’s speech.
Other publications, including Journal of the Franklin Institute, “Management” and “Power Plant Engineering” also ran articles covering his speech.
Most intriguingly, in 1956 the long-running radio program sponsored by GE, “Excursions in Science,” covered the question of carbon dioxide build-up. Hutton’s speech was not mentioned – the episode was based on Gilbert Plass’s paper which had just come out. You can listen to it here: Climate Change and Industrial Activity – Excursions in Science Radio Program from 1950s
What we learn and what happened next
The value of this is that it builds a picture of carbon dioxide build-up as a persistent (albeit minor) factor in US print media coverage of what would later be called “pollution” narratives. The carbon dioxide theory had received a boost thanks to Gilbert Plass’s May 1953 presentation to the American Geophysical Union. Hutton’s speech, the first I have found, came before Revelle, Teller and others, before we even had “the Keeling Curve”
Hutton seems not to have repeated his warning. He spent 39 years working for GE, retiring in 1981. He died in 1995 after an extended illness, just after the first “COP” meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and a few months before the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report stated that human activities were already having a “discernible” impact on the world’s climate.
When Hutton made his speech in Cleveland, the atmospheric concentration of C02 was 313ppm and annual human emissions were 7.4bn tonnes.
When he died they were at 360ppm, with emissions at 23.27bn tonnes.
Today they stand at 424ppm, with emissions at 37bn tonnes.
There is a very great deal of trouble ahead. Some of it has arrived, but much much more is on its way. We can’t say we were not warned.
Further reading
Fleming, James. 2012. Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control | Columbia University Press
McBrien, Justin. 2019. “‘The Tornado Was Not the A-Bomb’s Child’: The Politics of Extreme Weather in the Age of Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Autumn 2019), no. 40. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8814.