Fifty-six years ago today, the heavy-weight magazine The Economist editorialises on environment, and CO2 build-up
“You might even say that something encouragingly like a constructive panic is on.”
But one is left with the fear that the massed ranks now setting out to do battle against the pale horsemen of this new apocalypse may end up trampling one another to death. Now that it is legitimate to be against motherhood “environment looks like becoming a battle-cry that will be both unchallengeable and universally fashionable.”
Mr Moynihan… has been leaning rather heavily on such suggestions as that, by the year 2000, the level of the oceans could rise by ten feet as a result of the increased carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. This content has, indeed, already been increased by 10 per cent by the use of coal and oil fuels (each transatlantic airliner puts a hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere); and the restoration of the balance by photosynthesis in plant life on land and in the sea may be increasingly jeopardised by human spoliation of the environment. But scientists have been unable to agree in predicting the long-term effects of a fouler atmosphere on the earth’s surface temperature, and hence on the sea level.
What is agreed is that we are destabilising the balance of nature in this and other ways, and that where remedies are available they will mostly require action on an international scale.
The mess we are making now could have catastrophic effects not upon a distant posterity – assuming that there is going to be any such thing – but within a few decades.
But even the foggiest words are a less alarming additive to the atmosphere than an excess of carbon dioxide. For one forceful exposition of what it is all about, those who did not hear Dr Fraser Darling’s lectures might well read them in the Listener or in book form; for another, they may be referred to a remarkable book which was originally published in Sweden three years ago and which is credited with having inspired the subsequent Swedish drive to bring the whole problem to the forefront of international discussion. Some day we may all have cause for gratitude to these prophets of avoidable doom.
Anon, 1969. Of Muck and Men. The Economist, December 20, p.15
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 324ppm. As of 2025, 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 Guy Callendar, who had bravely done the work in the 1930s was sadly not around to see this – he had died five years earlier. But by then others had taken up the fight, and tv programmes (including a couple by the late great Roy Battersby) had introduced it to UK audiences.
The specific context was that by 1969, “everyone” was talkin’ pollution, and editors must have known that the Wilson government was about to set up a (standing) Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
What I think we can learn from this – the British elites (political, economic) knew what might be coming by 1969.
What happened next – the carbon dioxide fear got kicked by Frank Ireland, the Alkali Inspector, the following August.
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.
Also on this day:
December 20, 1961 – UNGA resolution on outer space and weather modification
December 20, 1969 – AGU on climate change… –
December 20, 1983 – Documentary on “the Climate Crisis” shown
December 20, 2007 – UK opposition leader David Cameron gives clean coal speech in Beijing…