In January 2025 I stumbled on a single issue of a “CO2 Newsletter”, from 1981, at the National Archives. My first reaction, which I remember well, was of bafflement and amazement. How could such an extraordinary publication exist, and how could it have been so unjustly forgotten by History?
From 1979 an American geologist, William N. Barbat, had poured his heart, soul and considerable intelligence into trying to galavanise politicians, bureaucrats, energy companies, campaigning groups etc into taking carbon dioxide build-up seriously.
He clearly was across the then latest science, could join the dots and – above all – could do the very hard work of synthesising and communicating what he was learning. I am still, a year and a half later, in awe, because I am old enough to remember the pre-internet (indeed, pre-personal computer) world, and just how much hard work was involved.
A friend who works on climate history (whom I’ve never met and probably never well) was equally enthused. We plotted to get more issues via official sources. Fortunately, I was, via a kind journalist, able to contact Barbat’s daughter. Within a few weeks I had a complete set of the 18 newsletters in my possession, and, crucially, permission to digitise and put online.
I had by this time been doing “All Our Yesterdays” for almost four years, and was getting both discouraged and bored. The Newsletters gave me a reason – and a ‘structure’ (or at least a rhythm and a timetable!) to keep going.
I would, I thought, upload and publicise an issue of the Newsletter every three weeks or so through 2026. Then I realised it would be even better if I could get people to write commentaries to accompany these releases. I wanted the list of commentators to be gender balanced, and if at all possible, not entirely white. I am fantastically grateful to each and every person who has written a commentary [links here]. They are all excellent.
The Newsletters have now reached a wide audience – each issue gets well-received on Bluesky (I abandoned Twitter a while back, obviously), and given me renewed enthusiasm for All Our Yesterdays.
Now, I am asking people who have “enjoyed” (well, appreciated!) the Newsletters – what more can be done to get them the audience they deserve? How can their existence – and content – help more people?
I am keen to hear your ideas…
What I have got so far
Academically
Write at least two articles about Barbat and the Newsletters
Social media
Short videos to accompany each release
A longer (10m?) video about the context and scope of Barbat’s work).
Professor Paul Edwards (author of “A Vast Machine” – full bio at end) writes about Vol.2 no. 6 of William Barbat’s CO2 Newsletter
Professor Paul Edwards
William Barbat devoted half or more of each CO2 Newsletter to his own, greatly abridged versions of recent scientific articles, reports, and journalism. This format used to be called a “digest.” Younger folks coming up in the age of instant, effortless AI summaries will be unaware just how much digests could matter in the now-vanished world of paper publications. In that world, finding, obtaining, and understanding scientific work was harder than today. Digests like Barbat’s played a key role, especially in interdisciplinary fields such as climate science. I wish I had found it while writing my book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).
The September-October issue of CO2 Newsletter (Vol. 2 No. 6) appeared in the fall of 1981, just as I was starting graduate school. President Reagan was hitting the stride of his first term, backed by a Republican Senate majority – the party’s first in either house of Congress since 1953. Reagan’s anti-environmental positions were hardening into policies and rollbacks. His nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch (mother of present-day Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch), had been confirmed in May. She cut the agency’s budget by 22 percent and severely reduced regulation of polluters and pollutants. Reagan famously stripped the White House roof of the demonstration solar panels recently installed there by his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. His first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, loosened strip-mining rules and quintupled the amount of land leased to coal-mining companies, “at a loss of $100 million according to the General Accounting office” (Time, “The Legacy of James Watt,” 1983).
Meanwhile, however, worries about the “carbon dioxide problem” had taken firm root among environmental activists and within Congressionally mandated government scientific advisory bodies. These included the White House Council on Environmental Quality (established in 1969 as part of the law creating the EPA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, created in 1976. The Department of Energy housed a CO2 Climate Effects Research and Assessment Program (discussed by Barbat in Vol. 2 No. 5). Journalists, led by the great New York Times science reporter Walter Sullivan, seemed to have finally zeroed in on the fundamental concern. As Barbat wrote in this issue,
“Newspapers and magazines are now publishing articles on the CO2 problem with greater frequency and with deeper understanding. Not long ago, editors seemed to print at least one article predicting the rapid return of an ice age climate for every article predicting CO2 greenhouse warming, and the CO2 articles often received less prominence. The public was confused about climate trends, the news media were confused, and the scientific community also gave the impression of being confused.”
Environmental activists, too, had begun to take the issue on board. Despite some quirks, Nathaniel Rich’s article and book Losing Earth covers the 1979-89 politics of climate reasonably well.
Even this meager amount of context greatly enriches a reading of this issue of the CO2 Newsletter. Barbat devotes most of it to two events whose groundbreaking quality is evident only in retrospect. First, he digests testimony from subcommittee hearings held in the House of Representatives on July 31, 1981. Titled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Greenhouse Effect,” those hearings were co-led by a young Al Gore, then in his third term representing Tennessee. Barbat summarizes testimony by Joe Smagorinsky, head of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory: “despite the admitted existence of numerous uncertainties, the consensus on the nature and magnitude of the [CO2] problem has remained remarkably constant throughout this long worldwide process of study and deliberation.” Arguably the world’s most important organizer of climate science in the 1960s and 1970s, Smagorinsky was largely responsible for the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) and the First GARP Global Experiment (discussed at length in A Vast Machine.)
My own mentor, colleague, and friend Stephen Schneider’s testimony also comes up for review: “perhaps the most dramatic, even if far off, potential event would be the breaking of part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, possibly resulting in a five- or so meter sea level rise….” Today, 45 years later, the grounding line of the Thwaites “doomsday glacier” – part of that very West Antarctic ice sheet – is being undermined from below by warming seawater. Barbat also quotes Schneider saying “… if we wait ten or twenty years before proceeding with… actions, then we will have to adapt to a larger amount of CO2 and its consequences than if actions were taken now to either increase our options to deal with CO2 in the future, or to eliminate CO2 emissions….” Among the saddest facts of our time is that despite remarkable progress toward increased efficiency, electrification, and renewable energy, annual global CO2 emissions have risen every year since then, with only two exceptions: 2009, following the 2008 recession, and 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic.
As Barbat notes, the House subcommittees that took in Smagorinsky’s and Schneider’s testimony expressed skeptical views. Barbat: “The overall results of government-sponsored programs had to be defended vigorously, and the new administration wants assurance that sociological and political implications of the CO2 greenhouse problem were not derived ideologically. However, the net effect on future CO2 research may be very beneficial.” That assessment proved prophetic. Unable to completely suppress the climate issue, the Reagan administration found it most convenient to chant the mantra “more research is needed,” thus helping to create the seemingly endless cycle of ever more potent climate reports and assessments followed by little policy action.
Schneider would go on to found the interdisciplinary journal Climatic Change, co-found the IPCC, and win a MacArthur award. Al Gore relied on him as a key science informant, and the two became friends. By the 1990s, Gore was the most prominent American politician to take a strong stance on climate policy. Had he become president in the 2000 election, the world might have moved more swiftly toward decarbonization. Long after his stint as Vice President (1993-2000), Gore was still presenting his slide show to anyone who would hear it. He wrote two climate books, starred in a documentary about his work, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and played a key behind-the-scenes role in the 2015 landmark Paris Agreement.
The second major “event” discussed in Vol. 2 No. 6 is an article in Science, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” Its lead author: James Hansen, whose 1988 Congressional testimony would become one of the most iconic moments in climate politics. Barbat had already presented that article’s abstract in issue No. 5. By the time of No. 6, he would certainly have seen Walter Sullivan’s front-page article about it in the New York Times (August 22, 1981). At nearly 2400 words, Barbat’s digest version occupies most of two newsletter pages (out of eight); the full article in Science is just 8.5 pages, including numerous figures and charts.
By omitting its citations and nearly all of its math, Barbat brings out the article’s major findings for a more general audience. One is the equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3°C for doubled CO2 , a figure that has stood the test of time; the IPCC Sixth Assessment (Working Group I, 2021) narrowed the range of that value to 2.5-4°C. Second, and more significant for climate politics, Hansen and his co-authors projected warming of 3-4.5°C under a “fast growth” scenario, or 2.5°C under “slow growth” by 2100 – entirely in line with most present-day assessments. Finally, they predicted that “CO2 warming should rise above the noise level of natural climate variability” in the 1990s. And indeed, the CO2 “fingerprint” was detected in the early 1990s, underpinning the famous “balance of evidence” statement in the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report.
As a final, unrelated comment, I note that this period of time – not long after the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown in 1979 – was the high-water mark of the anti-nuclear movement, especially in Germany, the UK, and the United States. In the “Feedback” section of this newsletter, a very annoyed Amory Lovins responds to Barbat’s article in the previous issue regarding his “Energy Strategy for Low Climatic Risks” (Report for the German Federal Environmental Agency, June 1981, co-authored with Hunter L. Lovins, Florentin Krause, and Wilfrid Bach). By then Lovins was already famous for his early book Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (1977), which dismissed nuclear power as not only too risky but also too expensive. He and his eventual Rocky Mountain Institute focused instead on reducing energy consumption through efficiency, passive heating/cooling, and other techniques, while rejecting fossil fuels in favor of solar and wind energy.
Barbat, by contrast, was strongly pro-nuclear – a position that remains quite common among geologists (Barbat’s own discipline) and climate scientists of my acquaintance. Probably no issue related to energy and environment has ever inspired stronger commitments pro and con. In his account of Lovins’ report, Barbat could not refuse himself a dig: “Thus when Amory Lovins states, ‘It is the empirical verdict of the capital marketplace…that has rightly sealed the fate of nuclear power,’ the only debatable point is his choice of the word ‘rightly’.” Lovins’ response was livid: your comments “added things that weren’t there, lifted concepts out of context…, and used our work as a vehicle for your own pro-nuclear polemics.” Barbat’s response was conciliatory, encouraging readers to read the Lovins report and “pursue a constructive course faithfully.”
William Barbat’s CO2 Newsletters are remarkable documents, capturing a crucial moment in the history of climate science and politics. As I’ve discussed, they’re most meaningful when placed in context, which can take a bit of effort. Highly recommended reading, especially for historians!
Paul N. Edwards Collaborateur, Laboratoire de Population, Environnement, et Développement, Aix kMarseille Université, Marseille, France
Director (Emeritus), Program in Science, Technology & Society, Stanford University Professor of History and Information (Emeritus), University of Michigan
The twelfth edition of the CO2 Newsletter, (Vol. 2, no. 6) published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982 is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
In this issue Barbat publishes a spiky (and will get spikier) correspondence with Amory Lovins, the “soft-energy paths” advocate. (Barbat was an “all in on nuclear or we are toast” guy). There are also extensive excerpts of the pivotal 1981 paper by Hansen et al., and much much more.
Forty four years ago, on this day, July 11st, 1982,
July 23 1982 High Country News – about Barbat and his C02 newsletter – https://www.hcn.org/wp-content/uploads/1982/07/1982_07_23.pdf
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 340ppm. 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 that Barbat had been switched on to carbon dioxide build-up in the late 1960s. He was finally provoked to set up the CO2 Newsletter when the Carter era Energy Department was clearly dragging its heels on the carbon dioxide build-up issue.
The first issue appeared in September 1979.
The specific context was that by this time Barbat had learned some hard lessons about institutional inertia and the priorities of campaigning groups.
What I think we can learn from this – we aren’t going to change. If we were going to, it was going to be in the 1970s and – at a push – in the 1980s. We are in the Fafocene now, and it’s only going to get worse.
What happened next
The last issue of the CO2 Newsletter appeared in late 1982 – it was simply too costly for Barbat to run. In a sane world it would have continued because institutional power would have sustained it.. We do not live in a sane world.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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References
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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.
If you want to get involved, let me know.
If you want to invite me on your podcast, that would boost my ego and probably improve the currently pitiful hit-rate on this site (the two are not-unrelated).
The tenth edition of the CO2 Newsletter, (Vol. 2, no. 4) published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982 is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
The eight page issue has a front page story that really pushes Barbat’s favoured solution to carbon dioxide build-up – the massive roll out of nuclear power across the world.
Rather than an editorial, Barbat replies to recent correspondence. He characterises the Newsletter’s stance in this manner-
Scientific opinion seems to agree that a continued CO2 buildup poses a serious threat to coastal habitations through polar icemelt and to the world’s food productivity, at least temporarily if not permanently. However, opinion seems to be sharply divided between complacency and alarmism over timing. Our studied view is alarmist, and we advocate corrective actions which do not in themselves create worse social and economic problems.
There is an article on Fourier, and the usual mix of “excerpts from recent reports” including one from the British journal Nature
‘Greenhouse Effect – Act now, not later’. by Wendy Barnaby, NATURE 19 February 1981:
Here is the editorial geologist William Barbat wrote to accompany the first issue of Volume 2 of his CO2 Newsletter.
Whether the divisiveness of the previous decade will end with the November 4 elections in the US. remains to be seen. Some express hope the ‘me’ decade is ending and the ‘we’ decade is beginning, which would help greatly is combating the CO2 problem.
Potential impacts of the CO2 buildup appear to represent by far the largest, most serious, man caused environmental problem that the world will face in the not-too-distant future. Because the threat of famines from climate change and of mass migrations due both to hunger and the potential sea level rise will impact almost everybody, the CO2 problem should be expected to bring together opposing factions on environmental and energy problems. Any delay in closing ranks to halt the CO2 buildup is seen by some knowledgeable workers as leading to more human grief.
With the population of developing countries doubling every 20 years and with the world’s food reserves actually shrinking at a disturbing rate, the threat to agricultural productivity posed by a continuing CO2 buildup translates into potential large scale, long term famine. Some climatologists have speculated that food productivity may actually increase in Russia, China and Canada with global warming. Warming would lengthen the growing season at high latitudes and possibly increase monsoonal and sub Arctic rainfall, but the continental interior portions of these countries may simultaneously dry up. Moreover, the decline in world grain production just in the last year (due in large part to the heat wave in the US) is equivalent to the entire wheat production of two Canadas, as an article in the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out. If the political leaders of any nation choose to ignore the CO2 buildup because they perceive benefits accruing to them from global warming, a distressing surprise may await their people
What factors allowed the CO2 problem to be ignored over the last decade when most other environmental problems received much attention and massive funding? And what factors led to the present de facto moratorium on nuclear reactor orders in the US. when this appears to be the only feasible large-scale substitute for fossil energy available for some time? Some answers might be:
Firstly, the earth was then experiencing a cooling trend that began in the 1940s. Also, quantification of the CO2 greenhouse effect and the effect of dust and smoke were being contested, and some workers strongly asserted that deforestation was possibly as great a villain as fossil-fuel combustion, which would imply that a CO2 perturbation would not be expected to last long after the CO2 outpourings ended.
Secondly, the environmental ‘crusade’ was largely directed against the business community, which had embraced nuclear fission for its perceived economic and environmental benefits. Environmental discussions often became sociopolitical monologues. Formal scientific training and disciplined scientific investigation were not always regarded as necessary basis for technical expertise. Environmental priorities tended to be ranked more by immediate visibility, symbolism, or emotional response rather than measurable impacts on people’s lives. Anti-civil acts were supposed to represent the suppressed will of the public, even if the acts were contrary to the public’s will as expressed by election results.
Most indicators now show that the post-1940 cooling trend was a cyclical swing which ended on schedule and that this bottoming out occurred about 0.2°C higher than the last such bottoming out of global temperatures in 1880-90.
The general consensus now seems to be that deforestation is nowhere near as great a source of CO2 as fossil fuel combustion at present, if it is a net source at all. The general expectation, then, is for a CO2 perturbation to last for many centuries.
From more than a decade of intensive studies and model analyses, the thermal sensitivity of the earth to CO2 doubling had been narrowed generally to about 2 to 3 warming. In recent months, new participants in the debates proposed a sensitivity of about one tenth that. It is difficult to imagine how 19th century scientists as Fourier, Tyndall, Ångström, and Arrhenius could have been so cognizant of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect if a CO2 doubling would cause only 0.26°C average global surface warming. Even if true, such warming would reproduce temperatures of the 1930s, a warmth level which is credited with causing widespread drought in the U.S. and southern Eurasia. To halt the CO2 buildup before such a doubling occurs is seen as requiring a very rapid conversion to non fossil energy sources starting now. The current debate over the 0.26 figure might be resolved if the heretofore unpublished supporting material would be published for all to see.
Possibly a different choice of descriptive terms in many cases would help unify the scientific community and permit clearer communications with the public. If atmospheric heat absorption would be referred to as the ‘hothouse’ effect, as Fourier introduced it, rather than ‘greenhouse’ effect, any misunderstandings about impacts on agricultural productivity might be avoided.
‘Adapting’ to a highly different climate may be inappropriate to apply to future victims of malnutrition or storm-driven high tides of an elevated ocean. ‘Sacrificed’ may be appropriate if immediate counter measures to the CO2 buildup could actually prevent such problems.
The cost of instituting countermeasures may not refer to excess overall expenditures but to initial investments. In some cases, merely terminating subsidies and eliminating income tax credits, tax exempt bonds, and energy-investment tax credits for CO2 producing systems and reducing the regulatory cost and punitive restraints on nuclear energy would produce savings to the public while allowing fossil energy to be phased out as a natural industrial phenomenon, just as wood energy was supplanted by fossil fuels.
A bright side of the scientific political scene is provided by the newly started evaluation of the policy-related issues of the CO2 problem under the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), as organized by William Nierenberg, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. At long last, a systematic analysis of the policy options and tradeoffs has been started, including the options of deferral and inaction. Ironically, the birth of this study derives from the Synfuels Act, which also provides massive subsidies for the most CO2 productive energy system available.
What is still lacking is a specific plan to show how the energy substitution scenarios of F. Niehaus and David Rose could be translated into reality in order to halt the CO2 buildup at optional ceiling values. These are the only CO2 limiting scenarios advanced so far which do not call for a virtual cessation of energy use worldwide. It would be beneficial to have for comparison specific scenarios which call for large-scale reduction of energy use, showing who is expected to give up what. Also, a specific scenario of the supplanting of fossil fuels with energy sources other than nuclear (wind, solar, hydroelectric) would be helpful to the public. People could see just what substitutions and cutbacks would be required to them specifically. The people of the world should then be allowed to select the preferred course of action or adaption without intimidation, coercion, or obfuscation.
With a more unified scientific effort, with CO2 limiting scenarios clearly set out in comparison with any other possible courses, and with better means of passing this knowledge to the public, we might soon progress toward practical solutions.
Citation Barbat, W. (1980) Editorial. CO2 Newsletter, Vol. 2, no.1, p.2
The seventh edition of the CO2 Newsletter, (Vol. 2, no. 1) published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982 is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
The eight page issue has a front page story pointing out that “Hottest summers result in lowest summer rainfall in the five ‘Wheat Belt’ states” Barbat does a good job (as ever) in being fair and balanced. At one point he notes
Projections of cyclic global temperatures with an added CO2 greenhouse effect (at 2 to 3° C global temperature rise for a CO2 doubling) give an expectation of global temperatures warmer than the dustbowl era before 2000 (e). Good analogies are not available to predict what climatic effect a continued CO2 increase and further global warming might produce eventually, other than past global warmings have generally been accompanied by a widening and slight poleward shift of the semi- tropical arid belts.
There’s also an editorial, feedback from readers, excerpts from recent reports and a concluding article “A need for rational answers about energy.”
It remains heart-breaking, of course. Barbat’s editorial begins
Whether the divisiveness of the previous decade will end with the November 4 elections in the US. remains to be seen. Some express hope the ‘me’ decade is ending and the ‘we’ decade is beginning, which would help greatly is combating the CO2 problem.
Potential impacts of the CO2 buildup appear to represent by far the largest, most serious, man caused environmental problem that the world will face in the not-too-distant future. Because the threat of famines from climate change and of mass migrations due both to hunger and the potential sea level rise will impact almost everybody, the CO2 problem should be expected to bring together opposing factions on environmental and energy problems. Any delay in closing ranks to halt the CO2 buildup is seen by some knowledgeable workers as leading to more human grief.
Here’s the front page story on the CO2 Newsletter for June-July 1980. You can find out more about the newsletter here.
We knew. We knew. Brave diligent people like William Barbat tried to amplify the science, connect the dots, connect the policymakers, the publics and the evidence.
A sense of urgency was introduced to the CO2-greenhouse problem July 30, 1979, when Wallace Broecker (Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory) explained to the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, “We have good evidence that during the peak of the last interglacial period, the sea level did indeed stand 6 meters (20 feet) higher than it does now, and we don’t think the temperature of the globe was any more than 1 degree Celsius warmer than now.”
A 1 degree C warming is generally expected to be reached shortly after the turn of the century if the CO2 buildup continues as in the past, The energy scenario of F. Niehaus (International Atomic Energy Agency) which might halt a CO2-induced global warming just short of 1 degree C, as shown in the inset, would call for a rapid phase-out of fossil mostly by nuclear, This scenario was presented at the same Senate hearing.
Broecker’s 6 meter rise (point ‘a’) does not appear unreasonable on a plot of temperatures vs. sea elevations ranging from ice ages to no-icecap conditions. Global average temperatures of 4 degrees to 5 degrees C cooler than now are shown for the ice ages, as used by Svante Arrhenius in his CO2 greenhouse model of 1896. Corresponding to these periods of maximum glacial advance are vestiges of shorelines 85 to 130 meters lower than now as shown by bar +b’. (Lag in destruction of the Laurentide ice sheet precludes
other equilibrium values for conditions cooler than now.)
An approximation of the pre-glacial global temperature as shown here 5. degrees C greater than now (point ‘c’) is derived from Eocene and early Oligocene subtropical and tropical sea-surface temperatures in the literature. These sea temperatures were based on oxygen isotope measurements made on shells of pelagic foraminifera which grew at that time,
Arrhenius had also judged that the average Arctic temperatures prior to the existence of ice sheets in that hemisphere were about 8 to 9 degrees C warmer than modern temperatures, based on observations of vegetation and animal life. Allowing for 3X to 4X polar amplification, this would correspond to an average global temperature 2 degrees to 3 degrees C warmer than now, which essentially matches the consensus of estimates for global warming which may accompany a CO2 doubling, Such a doubling is expected to be reached about 2025-2050 if growth of CO2 production continues its historical rise.
Because the West Antarctic icecap is believed by John Mercer (Institute of Polar Studies, Ohio State) to have formed at cooler temperatures than the Greenland icecap, the potential sea elevation corresponding to the absence of the Greenland ice is shown here as the sum of the rise if both icecaps were absent, that is, 12 meters higher than present. This 12 meter height – if valid can be considered to be a minimum value, for it is likely that the East Antarctic ice cap was smaller than its present size when global temperature was 2 degrees to 3 degrees C warmer.
No estimates have been published yet for how fast the Greenland ice sheet might disappear with a CO2 -induced warming, and much controversy still surrounds estimates of how fast the West Antarctic ice sheet may disappear due to a lack of precedents. If the CO2 buildup continues unabated, the expected warming over the next half century may take place in about one-tenth the time that a similar temperature rise occurred about 10,3000 degrees before present, during which time sea level was about 0.2 to 0.3 meters per decade according to the compilations of Rhodes Fairbridge.
To illustrate the seriousness of a potential equilibrium with the warmness of a CO2 doubling, the Jefferson Memorial is depicted on the same elevation scale. For other comparisons, the absence of icecaps would correspond to sea level at the clock face of London’s Big Ben and up to the roadway of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
The fifth issue of the CO2 Newsletter, published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982, is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
The eight page issue has a front page story on testimony by Wally Broecker (famous oceanographer) in July 1979.
A sense of urgency was introduced to the CO2-greenhouse problem July 30, 1979, when Wallace Broecker (Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory) explained to the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, “We have good evidence that during the peak of the last interglacial period, the sea level did indeed stand 6 meters (20 feet) higher than it does now, and we don’t think the temperature of the globe was any more than 1 degree Celsius warmer than now.”
There’s also an editorial, feedback from readers (including people at the UK Climatic Research Unit), excerpts from recent reports and a concluding article “Some Functions and Merits of Energy.”
The third edition of the CO2 Newsletter, published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982 is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
The eight page issue has a front page story on the Greenland ice sheet and sea level rise (and a full page analysis on page 3 “Glacial icemelt? How soon? How Fast?”
There’s also an editorial, feedback from readers, excerpts from recent reports and a concluding article “the cost of halting the CO2 buildup.”
It remains heart-breaking, of course. Barbat’s editorial begins
“The new decade begins on an optimistic note as the CO2 greenhouse problem is beginning to receive deserved attention in scientific, political, and economic institutions. Also this particular environmental issue may unite former adversaries in a common effort. “
Barbat had switched on to environmental problems over a decade earlier, including carbon dioxide build-up. In 1979 he started the Newsletter. It was intended to fill a
“communications gap by capsulizing both the published and unpublished reports on the CO2 problem which are deemed important. This newsletter will also publish original material. invited articles. and letters of inquiry, fact and opinion.”
Each 8 page Newsletter had a lead story, an editorial, excerpts of recent documents (reports, newspaper articles, scientific abstracts, testimony by scientists to Congressional hearings) and deeply researched and argued articles by Barbat about a range of issues. Most issues had feedback from readers.
