“carbon dioxide and climate, the greenhouse effect:” hearing before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources, Agriculture Research, and Environment and the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, first session, July 31, 1981.
Here’s who was there. By now you probably recognise Roger Revelle and Stephen Schneider….
You have to wonder what they were thinking/hoping, given the wrecking ball that was the Reagan Administration. But, then, what else were they supposed to do?
Though few people other than Rafe Pomerance seemed to have noticed amid Reagan’s environmental blitzkrieg, another hearing on the greenhouse effect was held several weeks earlier, on July 31, 1981. It was led by Representative James Scheuer, a New York Democrat — who lived at sea level on the Rockaway Peninsula, in a neighborhood no more than four blocks wide, sandwiched between two beaches — and a canny, 33-year-old congressman named Albert Gore Jr….
The Revelle hearing went as [Gore’s fixer] Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.” That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.
On this day, July 18, in 1979, Senator Abraham Ribicoff asked for some advice about “synfuels.”
The context was, the Carter Administration, desperate to reduce US dependency on problematic Middle Eastern Oil (not the dictatorships – that’s fine – it’s the interruptions to supply that’s the problem) was proposing an expensive crash program to develop synthetic fuels (synfuels). These would be incredibly energy intensive to produce… Not everyone was convinced this was a good idea…
“In 1979 [Gordon] MacDonald wrote an article for the Washington Post arguing that subsidizing synthetic fuels, as proposed by the Carter administration, would be a mistake. He pointed out that synthetic fuels would produce even more CO2 than the current U.S. mix of fossil fuels. The article drew the attention of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), who had recently been warned about the issue by West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt” (Nierenberg et al. 2010: 324)
“Although many complex factors affect the climate, it is generally thought that the result of continued carbon dioxide production will be a warming of the atmosphere “that will probably be conspicuous within the next 20 years,” the report said. “If the trend is allowed to continue, climatic zones will shift and agriculture will be displaced.”
Gordon J. MacDonald, environmental studies professor ad Dartmouth College, who is one of the authors said in an interview that large-scale use of synthetic fuels — made from coal or oil shale — could cut the time involved by half.
“We should start seeing the effect in 1990 without synthetic fuels. . . . but if you use them, the effect would be much more pronounced by 1990,” he said.
Actually, unless I am missing something, Nierenberg et al. have got this wrong – and they don’t actually cite the “article in the Washington Post,” which is pretty poor form.
What Ribicoff appears to be responding to are articles in the Post and the Times about an actual report. This was to the Council on Environmental Quality. And it isn’t just Macdonald – “ the other authors of the report were George M. Woodwell, director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory; Roger Revelle, a member of the National Academy of Sciences; and Charles David Keeling, professor of Oceanography of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography” (Shabecoff, 1979).
ANYWAY, that was the 11th, and this blog post is about the 18th. And here we are –
“One incident provides a small example of the work that the Academy does outside the formal structure of reports and out of public view. On July 18, 1979, even as the Charney panel was gathering at Woods Hole, the Academy’s president, Philip Handler, got a call from Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The Senator was cosponsoring a bill on synfuels, and he wanted to know the implications of greenhouse warming. Handler went to the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, and the very next day, it produced a statement on carbon dioxide and energy policy. The statement confirmed that global warming could be a problem. The statement told Senator Ribicoff that the massive expenditures required to create a national synthetic fuels capability should not commit the nation to large-scale dependence on coal for the indefinite future. This is the first time that an Academy group issued a specific policy recommendation, ambiguous although it may be, related to global warming. Olson 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4077050/
Why this matters.
We. Knew. Never forget, we knew.
What happened next?
Synfuels got killed off by Reagan, along with a lot of good stuff. And we had to wait until 1988 to wake up. A decade lost (but then, we would have pissed it against the wall, I guess).
References:
Nierenberg, N. Tshinkel, W. and Tshinkel, V. (2010) Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 3, pps. 318–349. [online here]
Olson, S. (2014) The National Academy of Sciences at 150. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24; 111(Suppl 2): 9327–9364.
On this day, 28 May 1956, Time magazine ran an article with the following text:
“Since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, etc.) and adding its carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate… “Dr. Revelle has not reached the stage of warning against this catastrophe, but he and other geophysicists intend to keep watching and recording. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), teams of scientists will take inventory of the earth’s CO2 and observe how it shifts between air and sea. They will try to find out whether the CO2 blanket has been growing thicker, and what the effect has been. When all their data have been studied, they may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.” –
“One Big Greenhouse,” Time magazine, May 28, 1956.
Why this matters
It’s nice context for the “puzzle” Roger Revelle asked Charles Keeling to look at.
What happened next?
Revelle hired Keeling (check out Joshua Wienberg’s “The next 100 years” for more about this.
On May 7 1966, Roger Revelle the noted American scientist had a story in the popular news magazine Saturday Review on carbon dioxide and the oceans.
In it Revelle wrote
“Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment which, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate. We must not forget, however, that even a relatively small rise in the average annual temperature of the atmosphere might be accompanied by other more serious changes, for example, shifts in the position or the width of belts of low rainfall.”
To be clear – he was not yet saying “watch out”, as others soon would be. Just before this quote he wrote
“In general, our attitude toward the changing content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is being brought about by our own actions should probably contain more curiosity than apprehension.”
Why this matters
We need to remember that people have been warning about the build-up of carbon dioxide for an extremely long time as a potential problem.
Revelle, we should say was one of the founders of the climate issue having written with Hans Seuss about the way in which the oceans might not be soaking up as much co2 as the dogma suggested, and having hired Charles David Keelng whom he found very irritating. (see, Joshua Weiner’s book)
What happened next
Revelle kept researching and writing. Other people kept researching and writing. The climate issues slowly, painfully, worked its way up the policy agenda, but didn’t really get down until 1988.
On this day, April 2 1979. Yes, the same year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science started a four day workshop in Anaheim, Maryland.
The following from the rather good recent Verso book “The Great Adaptation” helps set the scene
“The US Department of Energy was no longer willing to overlook the climate question. In collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAA) the leading US scientific body and publisher of the journal Science, it financed a research programme on the social and economic impacts of climate change. Roger Revelle and Stephen Schneider were each involved in organising the programme, which in 1979 resulted in the first international conference dedicated to the social sciences of global warming. This seminar, held in Annapolis, Maryland, sought to bring together speialisgts in economic history, anthropology, economics and political science to think through the consequences of global warming and the responses it demanded: Schneider, Revelle, Kellogg, Orr Roberts, Kenneth Hare and Crispin Tickell all took part…”
(Felli, 2015/2021: p44)
Why this matters.
Again? I keep banging on about the late 1970s. There’s a method to my madness, which you’ll hopefully read about in a gasp yes, book at some point.
What happened next?
More studies, but then basically, with the coming of the Reagan administration in 1981, the funding dried up, and Reagan appointees tried, for a few years, at least, to silence the climate scientists. See, for example, what happened to James Hansen in 1981 after his front page story in the New York Times. By the mid-80s, this became much harder, and eventually they had to move to plan B…
On this day in 1963, the first ever policymaker meeting – in the West at least(1) – specifically around carbon dioxide bonding happened in New York under the auspices of Laurence Rockefeller’s organisation, the Conservation Foundation, (not to be confused with the Conservation Society launched in the UK three years later, and not funded by Rockefeller.)
The account of the meeting, which you can read here, had the snappy title “Implications of rising carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; a statement of trends and implications of carbon dioxide research reviewed at a conference of scientists.”
Present at the meeting were Roger Revelle, Gilbert Plasss, Charles Keeling, and an Englishman called Frank Fraser Darling – someone we will return to…
The context was that as of 1959, it has become clear that carbon dioxide was indeed building up in the atmosphere, and that eventually, this would lead to warming of the planet. And this would lead to ice caps melting in flooded cities, changing weather patterns, etc.
But at this stage, in early 1963 the assumption was, this would be a problem in a couple of 100 years as per Svante Arrhenius
Why this matters.
The Conservation Foundation report of this symposium was not a best-seller, but it DOES pop up in the reference list of various books and articles over the rest of the decade, before it starts to be supplanted by later events with more information.
What happened next?
Revelle worked on a report for Lyndon Johnson’s science subcommittee with Margaret Mead Frank Fraser Darling would talk about the build up of co2 as a problem and his reef lectures for the BBC in November of 1969
And the CO2 would continue to accumulate
For more about the Rockefellers role in postwar environmentalism this article “The Eco-Establishment “by Katherine Barkley and Steve WeissmanRamparts Magazine, May 1970, pp. 48-50
Footnotes
(1) “Fedorov and Budyko were both key instigators of a specially convened meeting on the transformation of climate which took place in Leningrad during April 1961.40 This meeting, together with a related workshop the following June, represented the first focussed Soviet discussions concerning anthropogenic climate change” (Oldfield, 2018: 45).
Oldfield, J. (2018) Imagining climates past, present and future: Soviet contributions to the science of anthropogenic climate change, 1953e1991. Journal of Historical Geography 60 41- 51.)
“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.
