One hundred and eighty years ago, on this day, August 23, 1853, scientists from around the world got together in Belgium to hash out some standardised approaches to measuring things.
Enduring cooperation began with the First International Meteorological Conference, held on 23 August 1853 in Brussels. This conference standardised meteorological observations to be taken from ships, by establishing a set of instructions for how to take measurements, and a standard form for recording them. It was organised at the initiative of a naval officer, Lieutenant MF Maury of the United States Navy.
Paterson, M (1996) page 18
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fontaine_Maury
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly xxxppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was with the coming of the telegraph, and thus international communication and collaboration in collecting measurements became much easier in real time. But then this raises the question of who is using which measures at which time so that you can have a decent database of comparable/accurate info.
What I think we can learn from this is that the nitty gritty work of doing science of measuring things and thinking about causal relations requires good data which requires cooperation and we’ve been doing that successfully for a long time 170 years.
What happened next
The 19th century saw the ongoing assault on nature, the colonisation of Africa (“colonisation” is one nice word – attack, hyper-extraction would do), the development of new Industries (especially chemistry), the coming of electricity, the industrialisation of Europe, and chunks of of the United States. that’s quite some century and in the short-term, on climate science, a few years later you’ve got Eunice Foote and a few years after that John Tyndall…
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.
References