Thirty six years ago, on this day, September 25th, 1955,
70 years ago today, a General Electric scientist warned about carbon dioxide build-up
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 311ppm. As of 2026, 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 Gilbert Plass had made a splash in 1953 and The New York Times was picking up on something that other papers had already covered, John Hutton’s speech, which you can read more about here.
What I think we can learn from this is that the New York Times was hungry for content and would pick up on what other newspapers had been reporting.
What happened next the Times kept reporting in 1956 and then under Walter Sullivan all through into the 1980s. The Times editorialised about the greenhouse effect, as we then called it in 1981 ran op-eds, and then kept running stories from 1988 onwards. We really cannot say we were not warned.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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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:
September 25, 1980 -Reagan turns out to be an ignorant fool. Who knew?
September 25, 1991- European Commission proposes a carbon tax…
September 25, 1995 – Clean Coal. No, seriously.
September 25, 2003 – Bob Carr “strikes greenhouse deal” with European investors