Sixty years ago, on this day, November 11, 1963, the magazine US News and World Report runs a story on weather and climate.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that through the 1950s concern about weather and weather change has grown. The US had started seriously spending money on weather modification experiments..
In 1963, in March in New York, the Conservation Foundation had held a one day meeting about carbon dioxide build up and its possible consequences. So the changes in the atmosphere, the weather, these were all grist for journalists ’mill. And you could quickly cobble together a new story based on old clippings, and maybe phoning up a couple of scientists who would be happy to be quoted, because as long as you’ve got the quote right, it would make them feel important. And keep their names in the papers. Universities would be mostly happy about this. And so the weekly ravening beast that was US News and World Report continued to be fed. Am I too cynical?
What I think we can learn from this
To really understand an individual document, you have to understand the social and political context of when it was written. This is a banal statement, but one that periodically needs repeating.
What happened next
The stories kept coming. By the late 60s carbon dioxide got named a lot more. But everything still got framed around. “We don’t know what will happen because maybe dust.” That didn’t begin to change until the late 1970s.
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.
