Tag: Lyndon Baines Johnson

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United States of America

April 4, 1964 –  President Johnson’s Domestic Council on climate…

On this day, April 4, 1964, 

“Revelle had painted a similar picture of the CO2 problem before President Johnson’s Domestic Council a year earlier, and in 1964 he called for similarly bold action. “With the advance of science and technology,” he wrote, “our power to change nature has grown enormously both for good and for ill. …by gaining greater understanding, we will be able to make conscious changes—to bring more water to deserts, to bring cooler summers and warmer winters to the Middle West and the Northeast. In thinking about how we can make our country a better place in which to live by changing our environment, we must not be afraid of big things that can be done only on a national or international scale. We must be sure to make more than little plans.”

Joseph Fisher, Paul Freund, Margaret Mead, and Roger Revelle, “Notes Prepared by Working Group Five, White House Group on Domestic Affairs,” April 4, 1964, President’s Committee [White House Group on Domestic Affairs], File 42, Box 20, Roger Revelle Collection MC 6, Scripps Institute of Oceanography Archives, La Jolla, California. 

Howe, J. 2010  MAKING GLOBAL WARMING GREEN: CLIMATE CHANGE AND AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM, 1957-1992

and

“PSAC was the second presidential task force to whom Revelle had introduced the issue of CO2. The first was a subgroup of President Johnson’s Domestic Council, which released a report in 1964. Joseph Fisher, Paul Freund, Margaret Mead and Roger Revelle., “Notes Prepared by Working Group Five, White House Group on Domestic Affairs,” April 4 1964.

(Howe, 2014:219)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Revelle had been aware of the potential problem of carbon dioxide build-up for almost a decade, and Dave Keeling had been taking accurate measurements at Mauna Loa for 6 years by now, with a steady increase…

What we can learn

Revelle was there, inside the bureaucracy, keeping the (potential) issue on the agenda… 

What happened next

In 1965 Lyndon Johnson mentioned carbon dioxide build-up in his address to congress. The National Science Foundation kept doing work on weather modification and climate.  Gordon Macdonald and Margaret Mead kept going on the topic…

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Ignored Warnings United States of America

Feb 8, 1965- All the way with LBJ – first President to say “carbon dioxide is building up”

On this day in 1965 President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave a “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty.” 

He said

“Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials. Motor vehicles and home heating plants, municipal dumps and factories continually hurl pollutants into the air we breathe. Each day almost 50,000 tons of unpleasant, and sometimes poisonous, sulfur dioxide are added to the atmosphere, and our automobiles produce almost 300,000 tons of other pollutants.”

Those words were written by – or at the very least based on the research of – Roger Revelle. Exactly 9 years earlier, on 8 February 1956  Revelle had given “Testimony before the House Committee on Appropriations.” And he’d told the Congressmen present

“There is still one more aspect of the oceanographic program which I thought you gentlemen would be interested in. This is a combination of meteorology and oceanography. Right now and during the past 50 years, we are burning, as you know, quite a bit of coal and oil and natural gas. The rate at which we are burning this is increasing very rapidly. This burning of these fuels which were accumulated in the earth over hundreds of millions of years, and which we are burning up in a few generations, is producing tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide in the air. Based on figures given out by the United Nations, I would estimate that by the year 2010, we will have added something like 70 percent of the present atmospheric carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is an enormous quantity. It is like 1,700 billion tons. Now, nobody knows what this will do. Lots of people have supposed that it might actually cause a warming up of the atmospheric temperature and it may, in fact, cause a remarkable change in climate. . . .”

And here we are.

Sources- 

REVELLE, ROGER, and PAUL S. SUTTER. “TESTIMONY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, FEBRUARY 8, 1956.” Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past, edited by JOSHUA P. HOWE, University of Washington Press, 2017, pp. 60–63, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnkd5.13.

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Ignored Warnings United States of America Weather modification

1958, Jan 8: “The masters of infinity… could control the world’s weather”, says LBJ

On this day in 1958 future President Lyndon Baines Johnson was speaking at the Democratic Caucus

“From space,” declared Johnson at the Democratic Caucus in January of 1958, warning of the technologically and scientifically superior Russians, “the masters of infinity could have the power to control the earth’s weather, to case drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream, and change temperate climates to frigid” (Howe, 2014:27).

Why this matters – this sense of paranoia and fear, that matters might be beyond our control, and that we must redouble our efforts to be In Charge –  is, I fear, what is behind the coming push for geoengineering “solutions” as a kind of last throw of the dice. It’s good to remember that weather modification predates concerns about atmospheric build up of C02, and that the same types of people have been advocating both (this is not to say that there aren’t well-intentioned ‘progressive’ types who want a better world and don’t see a way out of the mess that doesn’t involve more god-technology japes).

What happened next?

As president, Lyndon Johnson gave a “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty“ which included the prescient lines

“Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places”. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials.”

This was in February 1965  though, while LBJ was tag-teaming the USA into the thousand year long invasion of Vietnam, so the sentences possibly didn’t get the attention future generations might have hoped they would.


See also

Jan 1st: blog post – Control the weather before the Commies do…

Further reading

Monbiot,, G. (2006) No Quick Fix on Paul Cruzen

Wasser, A. (2005) LBJ’s space race: what we didn’t know then. The Space Review, June 20.