The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 320ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that US scientists, including Roger Revelle and Charles Dave Keeling had been measuring and pondering. A couple of years before this memo, in March 1963 the Rockefeller-funded Conservation Foundation had held a meeting on carbon dioxide build-up. The following year Revelle had chaired a group looking at environmental problems (the group included Margaret Mead!).
What I think we can learn from this is that the information was getting to the very top quite quickly.
Two years to the day later an editorial appeared in Science pointing to … carbon dioxide as a problem
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.
Fifty eight years ago, on this day, June 1st, 1966, the pivotal book about the environment, which included a section on carbon dioxide build-up, was released.
“Fire, an ancient friend, has become a man-made threat to the environment through the sheer quantity of the waste it produces. Each ton of wood, coal, petroleum, or natural gas burned contributes several tons of carbon dioxide to the earth’s atmosphere. Between 1860 and 1960 the combustion of fuels added nearly 14 percent to the carbon-dioxide content of the air, which had until then remained constant for many centuries. Carbon dioxide plays an important role in regulating the temperature of the earth because of the ‘greenhouse effect.’ Both glass and carbon dioxide tend to pass visible light but absorb infrared rays. This explains why the sun so easily warms a greenhouse on a winter day. Light from the sun enters through the greenhouse glass. Within, it is absorbed by soil and plants and converted to infrared heat energy which remains trapped inside the greenhouse because it cannot pass out again through glass. Carbon dioxide makes a huge greenhouse of the earth allowing sunlight to reach the earth’s surface but limiting reradiation of the resulting heat into space. The temperature of the earth — which profoundly affects the suitability of the environment for life — is therefore certain to rise as the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increases.
“A report by the President’s Science Advisory Committee finds that the extra heat due to fuel-produced carbon dioxide accumulated in the air by the year 2000 might be sufficient to melt the Antarctic ice cap — in 4000 years according to one computation, or in 400 years according to another. And the report states: ‘The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by 400 feet. If 1,000 years were required to melt the ice cap, the sea level would rise about 4 feet every 10 years, 40 feet per century.’ This would result in catastrophe for much of the world’s inhabited land and many of its major cities.”
page 10-11 CO2 and greenhouse explained
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 321ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Barry Commoner had been campaigning on biological pollution from atmospheric nuclear testing, strontium 90, etcetera. He’d obviously been influenced by Rachel Carson. It turns out, to quote a book from 25 years later, there are consequences of modernity.
What we learn is that this book was a really important influence for a lot of people, although it is somewhat overshadowed by Commoner’s later efforts, The Closing Circle.
What happened next well, somebody lobbed a copy onto the desk of Roy Battersby, and this led him to take a completely different view with the TV programme Challenge that appeared on Fifth of January 1967. There was also a huge influence on Richard Broad, who made Report: And On The Eighth Day. The book was approvingly reviewed in The Guardian Telegraph, both of which made mention of the CO2 buildup possibility and as well in the Canberra Times, in early 1967; the reviewer then also made mention of CO2 buildup. So really, you could argue, I think strongly that Barry Commoner’s first book Science and Survival was a crucial node for climate change awareness among English speaking publics; I don’t know what influence it had in New Zealand, or Canada, or, for that matter, the US that would be interesting to find out.
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.
Sixty years ago, on this day, April 4th, 1964, a working group of the President’s Scientific Advisory Council got looking at climate change…
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) [Mead and 1975 conference, with Stephen Schnenider)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Roger Revelle, Conservation Foundation people, Charles Keeling, etc were looking at the carbon dioxide numbers and thinking, “you know, this is one to keep an eye on” as per the 1963 meeting.
And so on to Johnson. Within the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, which had been set up in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, the climate issue was just one of those things that people thought about. (I’m not sure how Margaret Mead came to be involved, but I’m glad she was!)
The thing that we learned is that there they are within the policy subsystems beavering away, trying to get people to take this stuff seriously.
In November 1965 there was a long report, led by John Tukey, that kinda-sorta emerged from this PSAC group, but went much broader.
How did Margaret Mead get involved? She and then-husband Gregory Bateson will already have known about the issue via G. Evelyn Hutchinson, I’m sure.
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.
