Forty three years ago, on this day, August 29th, 1983, a gardening correspondent points to carbon dioxide build-up in his Daily Telegraph column…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 343ppm. 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 was that newspapers had been reporting on the potential danger of carbon dioxide build up for decades, by this point there was quite a lot of activity in the 1980s, before Hansen’s pivotal 1988 testimony.
The specific context: Here we see someone who is interested in gardening, and therefore the seasons, and when spring arrives, and how long summer is, and how hot it is, etc acknowledging the existence of the greenhouse effect and the potential dangers.
What I think we can learn from this is that by the early 1980s the greenhouse effect was being acknowledged broadly. It was not particularly controversial.
What happened next finally in 1988 the scientific problem became a political issue. However, we failed to act in a sane or self-preservation style, and have now condemned ourselves, future generations, and most of the other species on this planet to unimaginable pain and suffering. Homo “sapiens” my extraordinarily fat arse.
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.
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Also on this day:
August 29, 1981 – New York Times editorial “Heating up the Atmosphere”
August 29, 1990 – The Australian mining and forestry industries threaten to spit the dummy
August 29, 2005 – Hurricane Katrina
August 29, 2008 – business tells Labor to go softly (Labor then does, obvs).