Thirty six years ago, on this day, July 9, 1987, oceanographer and all-round smart guy Wally Broecker warned of “Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?” in the journal Nature.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 350.2ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
Context
Broecker wrote the first article (ish) – see also 1961 AMS/NYAS solar variation meeting to use the term “global warming”. He had been trying to educate politicians (including Paul Tsongas) for a long time.
What we learn
The 1988 ‘explosion’ of concern was preceded by lots of patient work.
What next
A year minus two days later, the editor of Nature, John Maddox, inadvertently revealed that he didn’t read what was published in his own journal. Or if he did, he was incapable of understanding it.
Columbia University geologist Wallace S. Broecker May 31 said increased reliance on coal for energy might over the next 50 years raise the average temperature on the earth by four degrees fahrenheit. Broecker’s prediction rested on the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: CO2 was transparent to incoming sunlight, “but somewhat opaque to outgoing earthlight” (sunlight reflected back out into space, where its heat would be dissipated). Carbon dioxide was produced by coal combustion; burning one ton of coal produced three tons of CO2.
“Coal impact on climate questioned” Facts on File World News Digest July 2, 1977
Four degrees Fahrenheit is just over two degrees Celsius. So, Broecker was wrong, but probably only by a couple of decades…
Broecker had been the first scientist to use the phrase “global warming” in the title of a scientific article. He raised the alarm, kept raising the alarm (see here for his 1980 letter to Democratic senator Paul Tsongas).
Why this matters.
Again, we knew, long before 1988. But it’s a far-off threat, of which we know little, so, you know, life goes on.
What happened next?
We kept on pretending there wasn’t really a problem – or rather, our lords and masters did. Some of us started panicking.
On this day in 1980, the climate scientist Wally Broecker, the father of oceanography wrote to Democratic senator and future presidential hopeful Senator Paul TsongasPaul Tsongas.
As historian Spencer Weart,( AIP.org:) “In 1980, the prominent geophysicist Wallace Broecker, who had spoken out repeatedly about the dangers of climate change, vented his frustration in a letter to a Senator. Declaring that ‘the CO2 problem is the single most important and the single most complex environmental issue facing the world,’ and that ‘the clock is ticking away,’ Broecker insisted that a better research program was needed. ‘Otherwise, another decade will slip by, and we will find that we can do little better than repeat the rather wishy washy image we now have as to what our planet will be like…'”
– Broecker to Sen. Paul Tsongas, 7 April 1980, “CO2 history” file, office files of Wallace Broecker, LDEO.
Why this matters.
Scientists have been trying to get policymakers concerned about climate change for a very long time. Broker, as we saw earlier, had also engaged with Exxon.
This sort of lobbying is part of the effort to get elite policymakers sensitised to what’s going on and this is part of what Hart and Victor write about in their wonderful 1993 article.
What happened next?
Broecker kept trying to warn humanity, which kept ignoring him. Tsongas stood for President in ’92, but lost the nomination to Bill Clinton and died not long after of cancer
On this day in 1979, a few weeks after the end of the First World Climate Conference, Wally Broecker, the oceanographer met with Exxon scientists who were studying climate change and fossil fuels.
Broecker, to his apparent dismay, had coined the had been the first to use the term global warming in an academic context. (According to Alice Bell’s book “Our Biggest Experiment”, he offered 200 bucks to anyone who could find an earlier example so he wouldn’t be lumbered with the unwanted title.
What’s Exxon in all this? Well, “Exxon knew”. Exxon was doing its own studies of the climate problem, the carbon dioxide problem in the late 70s, early 80s. And this involved talking to scientists who knew what they were talking about. And Broecker most certainly was one of the scientists who really knew what he was talking about
You can read more about this at the truly excellent “Inside Climate News”
We need to remember that Exxon knew, and that scientists, quite rightly will talk to different constituencies they are paid out of taxpayer funding, and they should talk to not just the grassroots groups, but the biggies. And we need to know that in 1979, there were people seriously worried about climate. And these weren’t just hippies living in communes. This was the elite and it would be another 9 or 10 years before the issue would successfully break through and the co2 concentration had gone up and more kit had been built, and more norms around production and consumption had been established. And yes, yes, the population had gone up too; we have two problems. The one that we in the West really need to do something about is overconsumption, exploitation, imperialism, hyper-extractivism, murder, you name it. And once we’ve done all of that, and paid reparations, then we can start to lecture other people about having too many babies.
