“Time for politicians to act”, said the scientists more than four decades ago. However the politicians at the time didn’t think it was time. As this blogpost documents, through more than half a century, we – humanity, but in particular: our elected leaders and business leaders – have knowingly chosen to ignore the warnings from the scientists about global warming and its catastrophic impact on the planet’s climate.
Already in 1912, a New Zealand newspaper warned that our air pollution from burning coal would turn our climate into a ticking time bomb.
Back then everyone – including the scientists – thought that we still had plenty of time to figure out a solution. And, hey! We did. But as history shows, unfortunately we didn’t make much use of it.
It is striking how many times over the last 150 years we have been warned by scientists to get our act together.
On this page, I have compiled a list of examples that I’ve stumbled over – and though the list is long, the list is in no way complete. These are just sporadic examples.
Content on this page
1. In our life time: going half a century back
1965: Scientists warn the American president
1966: Mining industry journal: “The situation is urgen”
1967: Meteorologists’ climate model
1968: Warning from Stanford’s researchers
1969: Memorandum from President Nixon’s adviser
1973: Australian senator puts a case for solar energy
1973: John Bockris saw the future of Australia’s climate crisis
1975: Wallace Broecker: ‘Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?’
1977: ‘Catastrophic climate change’ memorandum to the American president
1978: Global sea levels to rise five metres, warns scientist
1979: The first World Climate Conference
1979: Three key pieces of climate science
1981: American oil company Exxon predicts ‘catastrophic’ warming
1981: “Warming warning”
1983: Exxon Mobile predicts temperature increase
1985: Carl Sagan testifies before US Congress
1987: Australian conference about greenhouse gases
1988: “Time for politicians to act”
1988: CSIRO climate conferences and emissions reductions goals
1988: The “White House effect”: Promise to act on climate
1988: NASA’s James E. Hansen testifies to US Congress
1988: Shell report: ‘The Greenhouse Effect’
1988: American senators’ letter to Secretary of State
1989: Turning point: Coalition to cast doubt on climate science
1989: Bernie Sanders: Media does not cover climate crisis enough
1989: James Burke: ‘After the warming’
1989: Associated Press: ‘U.N. Predicts Disaster If Global Warming Not Checked’
1991: Shell educates about the threat of climate change
1991: Australian Geographic: “We must alter our lifestyles”
1992: Appeal for sustainability and scientific ecology
1992: ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’
1995: Global Climate Coalition: ‘Climate Change Science Primer’
2007: David Attenborough: ‘Climate Change – Britain under threat’
2008: James Hansen shows true gravity of the situation
2. Going two centuries back
1827: Discovery of the greenhouse effect
1856: Laboratory measurements of C02’s enhanced absorption of sunlight
1859-1861: Description of the greenhouse effect
1896: Predictions about global temperature rise
1904: “Artificial oxidation of coal”
1912: “Burning coal affects climate”
1917: “Coal and oil a finite resource”
1917: “Put the sun’s energy in storage”
1938: “10% more CO2 = 0.25 global temperature rise”
1954: Earliest sponsorship of climate science by fossil industry
1956: New York Times writes about global warming
1956: America’s biggest automakers knew
1957: The Guardian: ‘Threat to ports of the world’
1958: Bell Science Hour discusses weather, CO2 emissions and climate change
1959: Speaker at energy symposium warns the oil industry
1962: Energy resources report: “Dangers of atmospheric contamination”
1963: Conference puts CO2 and climate change in the spotlight
3. The most recent decade
2009: Appeal to world leaders’ ethics and morals
2013: Message to world leaders from 520 scientists
2016: Open letter to Australian Prime Minister from 5,154 scientists
2017: World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: “A Second Notice”
2018: 301 Danish scientists: “Politicians are gambling with our future”
Scientists made an effort to warn politicians, but were not listened to. Media did report on the science, occasionally, however also failed: through the decades, no mainstream media took any interest in investigating and disclosing why politicians would ignore these serious warnings – why they would allow the procrastination to continue. What happened?
In the light of today’s political landscape, where climate ‘contrarians’ and representatives from the fossil fuel industry more or less run our parliaments and write our laws – with hundreds of individuals having moved between leading positions in the fossil fuel industry and senior positions in government, or vice versa, as it has happened consistently over the past decade in Australia, and in the American Congress and White House, where the state capture is even more blatant – it is striking to discover that initially, the fossil fuel industry was actually fully on board with the science, promoting and acknowledging the scientifically based warning that we need to stop polluting the atmosphere.
In the late 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, real concern about the carbon threat was beginning to heat up, even within the fossil fuel industry. However then something happened in the early 1990s. No one seems to know exactly who said what and to who – and whether large sums of money changed hands under the table and via offshore accounts – but some key players have been named. And in those years, those key players managed to make literally all the fossil fuel companies do a strategic u-turn, after which they dropped all concerns and instead started funding unscientific and fabricated reports instead of the genuine science.
Ever since, these forces of fossil darkness have run a sneaky tobacco-style campaign to spread vast amounts of lies and fake news while establishing vast numbers of ‘echo chambers’ and social media bots and trolls circulating climate contrarian nonsens. This misinforamtion campaign has had one single purpose: to cause so much confusion about whether the warnings from the scientific community could be trusted that it would extend the period of procrastination and inaction on what otherwise inevitably would be executed by law: the legislative closing down of the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry.
The consusion strategy worked. For decades.
As the first country in the world, Ireland decided to stop investing in fossil fuels – in 2017! Considering that in 2017 we had had UN Climate Summits on the devastating consequences of our inaction for more than 20 years – why would it have to take that long before the first national government passed legislation in favour of divesting from coal, oil and gas?
A sad story
This blogpost sums up that sad story. 4,000 scientists noted in a joint statement in 1992: “We must reject decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data,” because they understood already back then which impact it would have.
This is also the sad story of how our scientists have been speaking up in vain about the global warming problem through one generation after the next.
It is urgent now that this story of deception becomes more broadly understood and known. So far even the normally trusted public broadcasters have failed to inform and educate their users about it.
Climate scientists themselves are painfully aware that time to act really is running out. To get the media’s and politicians’ attention, on Earth Day 22 April 2017, scientists came out of their laboratories and universities and took to the streets in big numbers in cities around the world. “We live in a critical period of human history where it is time to stand up and be counted,” they say – and that was what the March for Science in 2017 was about.
“The [fossil fuel] industry thinks we are all fools, so all I can say is dig deep, find the facts, knowledge is power.”
~ Damian Marchant from Frack Free Moriac
[CLIMATIC ROOT TREATMENT] is a series of climatesafety blogposts seeking to uncover and understand the deeper roots of society’s problems with taking appropriate action on the climate emergency, and to explore the advantages we could see once the action sets in.
“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through (…) a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
~ Lyndon B. Johnson, US President, in a special message to Congress on the Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty on 8 February 1965
We can’t say we haven’t been warned
We must stop burning of coal, oil and gas, or we will be in trouble, scientists warned the American president. That was in 1965. The people who heard the president’s response to the scientific warning looked at each other, some with surprise, others with concern, and then they did… – nothing!
20 years passed with more and more talk. Scientific studies, meteorological measurements. Not much else.
In 1988, the magazine New Scientist published an article stating directly that it is ‘Time for politicians to act’. With our unregulated air pollution we are creating an ever-growing climatic monster, and it is up to our politicians to ensure we get this growth under control, or else… things could get dramatically out of hand for us. Our entire civilisation could get wiped out. The scientists didn’t phrase it exactly like that, of course – but this was the message they delivered.
Some politicians at the time would have read that article in New Scientist. But again, they did… nothing.
The 1988-report ‘The Greenhouse Effect: Issues for policy makers’ stressed that “although the developed countries consume four-fifths of the fossil fuels burnt each year, less-developed contries will be most vulnerable to the ill effects of global warming, such as rising sea levels.”
→ Source: www.books.google.com.au | on Facebook
In his U.S. presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush announced that same year of 1988 that, if he was elected, “We will talk about global warming… and we will act.”
The politicians who were listening to Bush at that time must have looked at each other and thought, wow! – but then, again, eventually they did – nothing.
And Bush didn’t keep his election promise either.
1990s: ‘The Lying Game’ kicks in
In 1991, the Dutch oil company Shell published a 28-minute film, ‘Climate of Concern’, about the problem with our CO2 emissions, and then… did nothing to follow it up.
Not surprisingly, they quickly got the geni back in the bottle, shelved the film, and instead began funding university scholars who would claim that the burning of coal, oil and gas was not at all something we should be concerned about. Other major oil companies started doing the same.
Enter The Lying Game – today also known as the Fake News syndrome.
American president Donald Trump gave it renewed fame, (at the time we had not been used to seeing presidents outright lie in public). However the concept of Fake News was not invented by Trump – it had long been a global phenomena, in these days driven on social media. In fact it was closely related to the well-known and old-fashioned concept of propaganda, only now it had now been disguised and fine-tuned thanks to the new pier-to-pier communication technologies.
The Lying Game was invented and financed to cover up the underlying, immoral act of profiting from knowingly wrecking our climate – the most widespread Greed Crime of all times – which, among other things, locked pollution and destruction of nature in as the norm in our industrialised societies, even though everyone knew it would cause havoc and mass deaths and in really should be condemned as a Crime Against Humanity.
World Economic Forum describes what happened back then like this:
“The benign-sounding Global Climate Coalition appeared in 1989. A few years later the US lobbying group issued a press release emphasizing that some scientists think “the world’s climate is naturally, gradually cooling.” In the lead-up to negotiations for a global climate agreement in Kyoto in 1997, the group placed an advertisement calling it a “bad deal for America.” The US opted out.
Abundant denialism carried into the next century. A form of news reporting that both-sidesed the “debate” by portraying denialists as independent thinkers, despite evidence to the contrary, didn’t help.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger agrees:
In 1992 in an address to the chiefs of state and governments, 46 prominent scientists and other intellectuals endorsed by further 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, declared that they wished to make their “full contribution to the preservation of our common heritage, the Earth” and “forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data.”
Big business lies
The Lying Game obviously was a question of survival for one of the most lucrative and wealthy industies on the planet. Lying became big business. It is what has enabled fossil fuel companies to become richer than entire countries, it has increased luxury and power to the richest one per cent of the population, and enabled just eight wealthy men to own more than what half of the human population owns.
→ Al Jazeera – 17 April 2021:
The Campaign Against the Climate: Debunking climate change denial
“The shocking exposure of a multi-million-dollar, 30-year denial campaign that has undermined science and cast doubt on the dangers of climate change.”
30 more years went by. The fossil fuels industry’s most efficient trick – the Lying Game – worked exactly as intended: The numerous discussions back and forth about whether or not to “believe” in climate science increasingly became a political blockage. Those politicians who had showen willingness to act disappeared from the stage. Even talking about the issue – in particular during election periods – was no longer an option. It was deemed “too complex”: Politicians in major parties were warned by their advisors that this was topic too hard for voters to even think about. So better not mention it.
Silencing the ‘alarmists’
Many more reports and studies later, loads of ‘time to act’-articles, inconvenient films and rising temperature graphs later, a majority of people had simply blocked off, following their elected leaders’ poor example.
The concept of ‘fake news’ is often described as an entirely new phenomena of our time, but really, it has been around since the invention of the paper press. Truth is what you choose to believe. The only thing new is that social media makes it a lot easier to avoid ever getting confronted with the reality of science. Opinions fill the space.
In order to continue living as the fossil fuel industry had set it all up for us – enabling us to consume and burn their coal, oil and gas as if we were addicted to it – people would avoid eye contact with any scientist, any climate-concerned neighbour or nephew, and in order to keep them at a distance, they would label them with expressions such as ‘alarmists’, ‘greenies’, ‘radical environmentalists’, ‘climatists‘, or ‘treehuggers’.
Renewed scientific warning
In 2013, 520 scientists in 44 countries sent a ‘Message to world leaders’, reminding them that “ultimate monetary costs for climate mitigation and adaptation grow substantially each year action is postponed.”
“There is a lot of new and alarming scientific insight about the environmental changes currently taking place and how this is profoundly affecting humanity. How we mitigate and manage these interacting environmental impacts will determine whether or not human quality of life declines over the next few decades,” explained one of the signatories, Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Looking the other way
Scientists who didn’t want to be seen as ‘alarmists’ got more and more silent. Talking about climate change became a social taboo. And when at rare occasions we did talk about climate change, we would tend to talk about it as a ‘natural disaster’ or as if it were some freak of nature. In that way people could conveniently forget how the problem got around in the first place. They could suppress that the climate disruption is a result of deliberate decisions made by human beings – predominantly wealthy men in suits – who knew what was coming and then, even so, decided to ignore it and create confusion about it.
Over the last 25 years, this game has been running relatively quietly under the radar of media and public attention, culminating with the industry’s official hijacking of legislative powers in countries such as Australia and the United States, where federal governments got busy removing regulations on carbon pollution, restricting clean energy development, and boosting production of the dirtiest most polluting fuels.
Just as outrageous we think it is that the German people in the 1930s simply looked the other way when they heard what was being done to the German Jews, we also somehow have found a way to collectively suppress the fact that year after year, millions and more millions of people around the world are dying – getting violently and tragically killed – as a direct consequence not of any ‘natural forces’ but of those executive board room decisions made in the 1990s.
In the world as it looks today, it is important to remember this: it is not climate change which is our enemy and which threatens our livelihood and our future. And it is not ‘nature’, as the Australian Prime Minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, claimed in a statement on national tv on 3 April 2017: “Right through New South Wales and Queensland we have seen nature flinging her worst at Australians…”
No, Malcolm Turnbull, it wasn’t ‘nature’ – and you would have known this very well, because in 2010 in Sydney, you were the one to tell Australians that they had zero carbon budget remaining:
“Our response to climate change must be guided by science. The science tells us that we have already exceeded the safe upper limit for atmospheric carbon dioxide. We are as humans conducting a massive science experiment with this planet. It’s the only planet we’ve got.”
~ Malcolm Turnbull in 2010
Speaking at the Deakins on the Politics of Climate Change in 2010, Malcolm Turnbull also said:
“Climate change is real, it is affecting us now, and it is having a particularly severe impact on Australia. And yet, right now, we have every resource available to us to meet the challenge of climate change except for one: and that is leadership. Our efforts to deal with climate change have been betrayed by a lack of leadership, a political cowardice the like of which I have never seen in my lifetime before.”
There was one coward politician exposing himself, like so many others of them. Because seven years later, after becoming the country’s leader and Prime Minister, Australians witnessed Turnbull turn lack of climate action leadership and political cowardice into a brand for his biggest parliamentarian failure.
“Natural” disasters
Climate change is not a “natural” phenomena, we should never be thinking of it in that way. It is man-made. This dangerous situation was created by people such as Turnbull and the 180 likeminded turncoats who walked back and forth between fossil fuel company offices and the Australian parliament during the decade. Along with their likeminded colleagues in other countries.
The CEOs and politicians who have decided to ignore the scientists’ warnings and bring on the climate havoc, they are the ones courts should be holding to account. Not the climate activists protesting against this madness by blockading traffic in the streets.
In a normal world, it would be the media’s natural role to point out the wrongdoings, but most of mainstream media has failed to live up to that responsibility.
Which means it really is up to us, the ordinary members of the community, the average citizens on the ground, to call for justice and that the climate criminals are held to account. And vote politicians in who will act.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Pogo on Earth Day 1971: “Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”
Pogo is right: All fingers are pointing at us.
Expressed in poetry, Prince Ea puts it this way:
Playing with fire
As a whole, humanity has keept burning more and more fossil fuels every year, even though everyone knew the consequences. Business leaders and politicians prioritised short term profits over long term safety and stability.
Meanwhile severe climatic havoc now confronts us and threatens our livelihoods with destructive weather events, tornados, heat waves, bush fires, droughts and flooding, melting of poles and gletchers, rising sea levels, killing of coral reefs, extinction of species and many other serious and existential threats.
How is this possible? One would have thought that journalists would be the ones to know what to do, how to intervene. After all, journalists are trained to investigate and report on matters that are important to our society.
However, apart from a few media outlets that work hard to make a difference – such as The Guardian in the United Kingdom, the New York Times in the United States, to some extent The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, Information in Denmark – most of mainstream media have made a deliberate and conscious policy decision to play the tune of the fossil fuel industry, which means: to look the other way. Ignore the scandal. Simply pretend it isn’t happening.
It enabled leaders such as Malcolm Turnbull, US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin to get away with ignoring and discrediting the scientific evidence that the Earth’s climate today is changing faster and even more dramatically than climate scientists’ models predicted 10 years ago.
For instance, Putin told the world that climate change is unstoppable and not caused by human activity, so “we better just get used to it” – while continuing to drill and dig for more fossil fuels, of course. The media didn’t challenge him with a single question about this.
Our responsibility
Our democracies have become ‘fossilised’, paralysed. State captured. Consequently, people keep buying and burning the fossil fuels as if nothing was wrong. People eat meat, buy imported goods, fly long distances for holidays and a so many other activities without any thought for the pollution and wreckage it creates.
Apart from extreme weather catastrophes, every year, millions of people are dying from illnesses related to oil, coal and gas pollution. The World Health Organisation has found about six million dead bodies a year which the world’s cynical fossil fuel industry leaders and fossil-funded politicians and media profiles should be held to account for. These warning signs are a warning for us all.
Meanwhile, we, the ordinary citizens, have a collective responsibility for allowing this mess to continue as long as we don’t don’t react at a personal level on what the scientists have been shouting to us for generations that we must do.
Just like the politicians, we can’t say that we haven’t been warned. We have. Again and again.
Below follows more details about the ignored climate science history.
Scientists in 1988: ‘Time for politicians to act’
“Time for politicians to act”, wrote New Scientist in their October 1988 issue.
It has, in other words, been ‘Time for politicians to act’ through three decades now – and we, their voters, have allowed them to continue procrastinating and finding excuses for continuing to subsidise and mingle with the fossil fuel industry while cutting support to renewables energy projects and any innovative technologies in the field.
A 1988-report, ‘The Greenhouse Effect: Issues for policy makers’ stressed that “although the developed countries consume four-fifths of the fossil fuels burnt each year, less-developed contries will be most vulnerable to the ill effects of global warming, such as rising sea levels.”
“The time to ‘wait and see’ whether global warming poses a serious threat to life on Earth is over, says a report released this week by the Joint Energy Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain. The report calls for an international effort to control pollution from carbon dioxide.”
Quote from New Scientist, 1988
→ Source: www.books.google.com.au
→ Share this on Facebook
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1988: The “White House effect”: Promise to act on climate
A combination of growing scientific alarm about the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a long hot summer in 1988 made climate change an election issue in the Unites States. On the campaign trail, then-Vice President George H. W. Bush announced in his presidential campaign:
“Those who think we’re powerless to do anything about the “greenhouse effect” are forgetting about the “White House effect”. As President, I intend to do something about it… In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House… We will talk about global warming… And we will act.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both the British Prime Minister Thatcher and the American president Bush were strong advocates for action on climate change, as was the then leader of the Australian Liberals, Andrew Peacock.
→ The Conversation – 20 October 2016:
Why the silence on climate in the US presidential debates?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1988: NASA’s James E. Hansen testifies to Congress
‘Global warming’ became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said:
“Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.”
Hansen’s testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded. Global change never gained traction in either the scientific literature or the popular media.
→ Source: NASA, U.S. Senate, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, “Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change, part 2” 100th Cong., 1st sess., 23 June 1988, p. 44.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save the planet. The science of climate change was settled. The world was ready to act. Almost nothing stood in our way – except ourselves.”
~ Nathaniel Rich in New York Times on 1 August 2018
→ New York Times – 1 August 2018
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
“This two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. This happened in our lifetime
Going half a century back
1965: Scientists warn the American president
The story about how we have been warned by the scientific community about global warming and the effect of greenhouse gas emissions goes much further back.
Marc Hudson, a PhD Candidate from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at University of Manchester, wrote in The Conversation:
“Awareness of the threat of climate change goes back more than half a century, well before its sudden arrival on public policy agendas in 1988.”
Lyndon B. Johnson, who was president of the United States from 1963 to 1969, made the first presidential statement about climate change in the United States. The words were written for him by pioneering climate scientist Roger Revelle.
Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee wrote – on page 127 in a report entitled ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment’ more than 50 years ago:
“By the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere. (…) The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”
The members of the science advisory committee suggested that the problem could be solved with geo-engineering – they called it “tools for modifying atmospheric circulation in ways which might counteract the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.” They estimated, for instance, that a one percent change in the Earth’s reflectivity would cost about 500 million dollars a year.
→ More about the topic of geo-engineering at the bottom of this page
→ ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment – Report of The Environmental Pollution Panel’, President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1965.
“This report unquestionably will fan emotions, raise fears, and bring demand for action. The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.”
Frank Ikard — president of the American Petroleum Institute, aspeaking at an oil industry conference in 1965, describing the research into climate change caused by fossil fuels.
→ Desmog – 20 November 2018:
‘Time is Running Out,’ American Petroleum Institute Chief Said in 1965 Speech on Climate Change
→ Desmog – 30 January 2024:
Revealed: A U.S. President Was First Informed of CO2’s Impact 59 Years Ago This Month
“A 1965 memo to Lyndon Baines Johnson discloses the link between CO2 emissions and climate change — showing federal climate action could have started decades sooner.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1966: Mining industry journal: “The situation is urgent”
Video by the YEARS Project
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“We’ve known what’s coming for half a century now, and we’re on the precipice of its arrival. There’s never been a more important time to listen to the science.”
Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist and author
1967: Meteorologists’ climate model
Headlines are never as reliable as going to the scientific source itself, and the ultimate source, in this case, is the first accurate climate model ever: by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald. 50 years after their groundbreaking 1967 paper, ‘Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity’, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right. Their major result, published on 1 May 1967, was:
“According to our estimate, a doubling of the CO2 content in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature of the atmosphere (whose relative humidity is fixed) by about 2°C.”
What we’ve seen from the pre-industrial revolution until today matches that extremely well.
→ Forbes – 15 March 2017:
The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1968: Warning from Stanford’s researchers
In 1968, the Stanford Research Institute delivered a report titled ‘Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Polluters’ to the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for the fossil fuel industry.
The report, unearthed by researchers at the Center for International Environmental Law, is one of the earliest attempts by the industry to grapple with the impacts of rising CO2 levels, which Stanford’s researchers warned if left unabated “could bring about climatic changes” like temperature increases, melting of ice caps and sea level rise.
The term “global warming” would not appear in a peer-reviewed academic journal until 1975.
→ Read more on OSTI.gov:
Sources, abundance, and fate of gaseous atmospheric pollutants
→ The Guardian – 16 March 2018:
It’s 50 years since climate change was first seen. Now time is running out
“Making up for years of delay and denial will not be easy, nor will it be cheap. Climate polluters must be held accountable.” Article by Richard Wiles
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1969: Memorandum from US President Nixon’s adviser
In 1969, an adviser to US President Richard Nixon argued in a memo that the “carbon dioxide problem” might be one that can seize the imagination of voters “normally indifferent to projects of apocalyptic change.” He suggested the administration get involved.
17 September 1969: Memorandum for John Ehrlichman
Also in 1969, a brief newswire item noted that scientists had “warned the human race” about pollution’s impact on the climate: “Scientists Caution on Changes in Climate as Result of Pollution”.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1973: Australian senator puts a case for solar energy
On 29 November 1973, Don Jessop, a Liberal senator for South Australia, made this statement in the Australian parliament:
“It is quite apparent to world scientists that the silent pollutant, carbon dioxide, is increasing in the atmosphere and will cause us great concern in the future. (…) Of course, I am putting a case for solar energy. Australia is a country that can well look forward to a very prosperous future if it concentrates on solar energy right now. Scientists say that it will take about 20 years to perfect this source of energy but I am convinced, and there is scientific backing for my belief, that the development of solar energy can be accelerated and that probably within 10 years solar energy could be a definite proposition for Australia.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1973: Professor John Bockris saw the future of Australia’s climate crisis
In 1973 and 1974, professor John Bockris at Flinders University in Adelaide “may have been going “a bit too far too fast”, but we should have followed him,” wrote the ABC almost 50 years later:
→ ABC News – 13 April 2022:
50 years ago, John Bockris saw the future of Australia’s climate crisis
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1975: Wallace Broecker in Science vol 189: ‘Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?’
“The exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor
and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years,” wrote Wallace S. Broecker from Columbia University in New York, USA, in an article in Science in August 1975.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1977: ‘Catastrophic climate change’ memorandum to the American president
In 1977, a distinguished American geophysicist named Frank Press sent this letter to the White House warning of catastrophic climate change. “…once the climatic effects become evident not long after the year 2000; the situation could grow out of control…”
“Catastrophic climate change,” that’s how he phrased it, that’s not me using the language of today to describe something in the past, it’s what Frank Press wrote to President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Frank Press served an eventful four year term as science advisor to President Jimmy Carter and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Offices of the White House.
→ The Guardian – 14 June 2022:
The 1977 White House climate memo that should have changed the world
“Years before the climate crisis was part of national discourse, this memo to the president predicted catastrophe.”
→ Read more
→ The memo retyped “Release of Fossil CO2 and the Possibility of a Catastrophic Climate Change”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1978: Global sea levels to rise 5 meters, warns scientist
John H. Mercer predicted the impending collapse of ice sheets in 1978. Mercer was hardly the first to sound an alarm about greenhouse gases – scientists were well on their way by the late 1950s toward connecting mankind’s burning of fossil fuels to Earth’s changing climate. But Mr Mercer made a groundbreaking contribution with a peer-reviewed research paper about West Antarctica’s instability he got published on 26 January 1978 in the scientific journal Nature.
In it, he warned the world that West Antarctica’s massive ice sheet — one of Earth’s largest and most important — would eventually melt from beneath, become dislodged, and cause global sea levels to rise 5 meters.
→ The Blade – 25 March 2014:
Eccentric OSU scientist vindicated on melting, global warming predictions
→ All Our Yesterdays – 26 January 2015:
Jan 26, 1978: Paper “West Antarctic ice sheet and C02 greenhouse effect: a threat of disaster”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1979: The first World Climate Conference
The first World Climate Conference was held in 1979 in Geneva, Switzerland. At this conference four decades ago, scientists expressed concern about the link between greenhouse gases, global warming and climate change.
Three key pieces of climate science
“It turns out that the events of 1979 were important… and were related,” tells Benjamin Santer, a climatologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who co-wrote a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change in March 2019 to celebrate the 40th anniversaries of three key pieces of climate science that contribute to modern certainty about anthropogenic climate change.
One of the reports published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 is often called the Charney Report after the chairman of the study group behind it.
“In retrospect, the Charney Report seems like the scientific equivalent of the handwriting on the wall,” the authors of the paper write. “Forty years ago, its authors issued a clear warning of the potentially significant socioeconomic consequences of human-caused warming. Their warning was accurate and remains more relevant than ever.”
The Charney Report estimated that warming could reach between two and 4.5 degrees Celsius, which signatories to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are currently working to prevent. It also anticipated that clouds and ocean warming would both play a role in shaping how warming worked on Earth.
→ The Conversation – 23 July 2019:
40 years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right
“This month the world has been celebrating the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon. But last week saw another scientific anniversary, perhaps just as important for the future of civilisation. Forty years ago, on 23 July 1979, a group of climate scientists sat down at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts for the first meeting of the “Ad Hoc Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate”. It led to the preparation of what became known as the Charney Report – the first comprehensive assessment of global climate change due to carbon dioxide.”
→ Nature – March 2019:
Celebrating the anniversary of three key events in climate change science
→ Popular Science – 28 February 2019:
Yes, humans are causing climate change. And we’ve known for 40 years.’
The certainty is not new or surprising.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1981: American oil company Exxon predicts ‘catastrophic’ warming
Through much of the 1980s, Exxon researchers worked alongside university and government scientists to generate objective climate models that yielded papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Their work confirmed the emerging scientific consensus on global warming’s risks.
Exxon’s 1980-climate modeling and science turned out to be spot on, and the company’s early modelling projections still hold up more than 30 years later.
One scientist, Werner Glass, wrote an analysis in 1981 for a senior vice president that said the rise in global temperatures would begin to be noticed in a few decades. Exxon manager Roger Cohen at the time called it “distinctly possible” that the projected warming trend after 2030 “will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).” By 2030, he warned, the damage could be irreversible.
However, as the consensus grew within the scientific world, Exxon’s managers decided to double down on the uncertainty and began campaigning to muddy research results.
InsideClimateNews has all the details:
→ InsideClimateNews – 22 September 2015:
Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models
→ The Guardian – 25 November 2015:
Two-faced Exxon: the misinformation campaign against its own scientists
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1981: ‘Warming warning’
The 1981 tv documentary that warned about global warming and shows just how much we knew about climate change as far back as 1981. ‘Warming warning’ was described like this in the newpaper’s tv program pages:
“A documentary about the serious effects our polluting of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide will have on the climate. Scientists are worried that at the present rate the Earth will be two degrees warmer by the middle of the next century with disastrous consequences for the polar regions. It is estimated that if the Ross Ice Shelf were to break up it could lead to an ice surge which would raise sea levels by up to twenty feet [6 metres] thus putting two million people, in London alone, at risk.”
‘Warming warning’ – an excerpt
Running time of this clip in original documentary: from 05:25 to 08:07
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1983: Exxon Mobile predicts temperature increase
In 2015 the Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism School, and Inside Climate News unearthed voluminous internal documents showing, among other damning points, that Exxon scientists told the company’s senior executives in the 1980s that burning fossil fuels would lead to “potentially catastrophic events.” Yet US media as a whole barely took notice — no TV network mentioned the 2015 scoops — and in some ways it still hasn’t. In 2022, State governments in New York and Massachusetts are pursuing lawsuits against ExxonMobil for its climate lies and the resulting damages.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1985: Carl Sagan testifies before US Congress
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1987: Australian conference about greenhouse gases
Melbourne university launches five-day meeting about global warming
30 November 1987 marked the start of the inaugural Greenhouse 87 conference hosted by Monash University and attended by 260 delegates. The five-day meeting was convened as part of a new federal government plan in response to the burgeoning global awareness of the impending danger of global warming. The Greenhouse 87 conference was hailed as a great success, creating new scientific networks and momentum.
The conference gave rise to a book called ‘Greenhouse: Planning for Climate Change’.
The Greenhouse Project helped to spark and channel huge public interest in and concern about climate change in the late 1980s. But politicians fumbled their response, producing a weak National Greenhouse Response Strategy in 1992.
→The Conversation – 20 November 2017:
It’s 30 years since scientists first warned of climate threats to Australia
→ The Conversation – 1 January 2018:
Cabinet papers 1994-95: Keating’s climate policy grapples sound eerily familiar
“Cabinet papers from 1994 and 1995, released on 1 January 2018 by the National Archives of Australia, show how Keating’s cabinet fought an internal civil war over how to respond to climate change, while working hard to protect Australia’s fossil fuel exports.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1988: Climate conferences and emission reduction goals
In 1988, an international conference in Toronto set the first global emission reduction targets, calling for a 20 per cent reduction of CO2 emissions worldwide by the year 2005. The brunt of this was to be borne by developed countries, using 1988 as the base year.
These “Toronto targets” became important benchmarks worldwide.
→ Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society – 27–30 June 1988:
The changing atmosphere: implications for global security. Conference statement
→ APO – Joan Staples – 11 November 2009:
Our lost history of climate change
CSIRO climate conferences in Australia
In Australia, CSIRO published this research report on climate change in 1988:
CSIRO about the greenhouse effect in 1988
“In recent years the term greenhouse effect has been used to describe the global warming expected as a result of man-induced changes to concentrations of atmospheric trace gases which absorb in the infrared.
Over the next 40 years it is thought that the greenhouse effect will lead to:
• Global warming of 1.5 to 4.5°C
• World-wide changes in climate
• Changes to rainfall distribution, storm frequency and all other parameters that make up climate
• Warming of the upper layers of the oceans leading to thermal expansion of the water. Coupled with a melting of land-based ice, this is expected to lead to a sea-level rise of botween 2O and 50 cm.
• Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide which, in the absence of competing effects from other sources such as acid rain and ozone, will act as a fertilizer and thus influence plant growth.”
~ Excerpt from ‘Division of Atmospheric Research Research Report 1985–1988’
Together with a governmental Commission for the Future, CSIRO organised two major conferences on climate change in 1987-1988. The government at the time was very much part of this. Environment minister Graham Richardson opened the 1988-conference with science minister Barry Jones attending as well.
As a result of this conference, climate change was widely publicised in the Australian media. A number of the current affairs television programs took up the issue and the Melbourne-newspaper The Age published a four page lift-out.
In 1989, environment minister Richardson took a submission to federal cabinet proposing a reduction in greenhouse emissions by 20 per cent of 1988 levels by 2005 – the Toronto Target. This was rejected by the economic and resource ministers, but even so, 1989 in Australia did see a greenhouse statement, and research funding, from the Prime Minister.
In the lead-up to a federal election later in the year, the government released a major environment statement, ‘Our Country, Our Future’, covering many traditional “green” issues but giving prominence to climate change. It supported international action, promised to look for ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions – including cooperating with the states on transport use – and provided $350,000 for public awareness and education.
“Changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere are occurring both regionally and globally. Locally these changes have effects on visibility and the quality of the air we breath. At a global level there is now strong evidence that these changes are likely to bring about significant climatic modifications as a result of the greenhouse effect.”
“Confident predictions of how future carbon dioxide emissions will affect the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere rely on an accurate model of carbon dioxide pools and their interactions. For accurate modelling the carbon dioxide concentration prior to 1850 must be known. It was at this time that industrialization and forest felling began to have an impact. Air bubbles trapped in polar ice from as long ago as the 17th century have been analysed by Division scientists in collaboration with scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division. It has been discovered that, prior to 1800, the carbon dioxide concentration was essentially constant at about 280 ppm.”
Three decades down the track, at a Melbourne launch event for a new climate action campaign initiative called Tipping Point, on 28 July 2018, researcher Joan Staples reminded the guests about this forgotten piece of Australian political history.
Joan Staples published her research nine years ago. You can read some of it here:
→ APO – 11 November 2009:
Our lost history of climate change
→ ‘Climate Change: On For Young and Old’ – 2009:
Australian Government Action in the 1980s
→ Peter Gardner – February 2019:
Greenhouse – the 1987 Monash Conference
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1988: Shell report: ‘The Greenhouse Effect’
In 1988, Shell prepared an internal report called ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ that analysed the impacts of climate change. It noted that fossil fuel burning was driving climate change and quantified the carbon emissions from its products (oil, gas, coal) made up 4 percent of global emissions in 1984.
The 1988 report was the result of an internal investigation into the effects of fossil fuels. The research group concluded that rising concentrations of CO2 were indeed caused by fossil fuel emissions, going as far as to recommend immediate action to head off future environmental damage. At one point, the report says, “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”
→ Chip Chick – 6 April 2018:
New Documents Reveal Shell Knew About the Damage Fossil Fuels Were Causing as Early as 30 Years Ago
→ DeSmog – 17 January 2024:
New Shell Files Could Aid Climate Cases, Attorneys Say
“Latest documents unearthed by Dutch climate activist seen as “valuable sources” for litigators.”
Newly discovered docs dating back to the 1970's reveal that Shell has known about the harm caused by oil & gas for decades.These files aid the massive climate lawsuits targeting Shell: https://t.co/FzoAJw2N3f
— Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) January 19, 2024
Hold the companies causing this crisis responsible. #ActOnClimate pic.twitter.com/Mzo5iMKwQs
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1988: American senators’ letter to Secretary of State
In 1988, a handful of US Senators, including Joe Biden, sent a letter about global warming to the incoming Secretary of State, proposing the country “take a lead role on this global problem”.
The New York Times wrote: “A bipartisan array of Senators have sent the new administration a signal that the environment will be a significant issue in foreign policy.
In their first letter to James A. Baker 3d before the hearings on his impending nomination as Secretary of State, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee raised only one issue: what the next administration intends to do about global warming.
“We hope that the new administration will fashion a series of initiatives so the United States can take a lead role on this global problem of unprecedented magnitude,” said the letter.
It was signed by the committee chairman, Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island; two other Democrats, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts, and three Republicans, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas and Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota.
The Senators said they intended to ask Mr. Baker whether the United States should endorse a goal of reducing carbon dioxide pollution from the burning of oil and coal, the single major contributor to the global warming trend, by 20 percent in the year 2005. That was the goal set this summer by an international conference in Toronto on the warming trend.
The letter reminded Mr. Baker that President-elect Bush had promised on the campaign trail to do something about global warming if elected.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1989 (a): Coalition to cast doubt on climate science
1989 is a turning point. In a move to coordinate a public response to the growing attention on climate change, a group of big businesses, including Exxon, BP and Shell, form the Global Climate Coalition. It sets out to cast doubt on climate science and lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
→ Sourcewatch:
Global Climate Coalition
→ Climate Liability News – 5 April 2018:
What Oil Companies Knew About Climate Change and When: A Timeline
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1989 (b): Bernie Sanders: Media does not cover climate crisis enough
Video on Facebook
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1989 (c): James Burke: After the Warming
Journalist James Burke traces the Earth’s history of ice ages and warming trends, and presents several possible scenarios caused by the greenhouse effect during the 1990s to 2050. The video release consisted of two videos, “The Fatal Flower” and “Secret of the Deep.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1989 (d): Associated Press: Rising sea levels could wipe entire nations off the face of the Earth
→ Associated Press – 29 June 1989:
U.N. Predicts Disaster If Global Warming Not Checked
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1991 (a): Shell educates about the threat of climate change
Shell’s 28-minute film ‘Climate of Concern’ which was made for public viewing, particularly in schools and universities, back in 1991, reminds us that the executives of Shell knew all about the threats of climate change back then.
‘Climate of Concern’ was unearthed by Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers of The Correspondent. He also retrieved many other documents showing the full extent of Shell’s understanding of climate change. Since the late 1970s, Shell began sharing data on climate change with other oil companies.
Regardless, instead of responding to the threat, they decided to ignore it. And they did more than that. Shell decided to start funding denial instead, as did the executives of all the major companies of the coal, oil and gas industries. Their strategy was to delay society’s transition away from fossil fuels. The immense profits in the industry enabled their lobby entities to influence and infiltrate national governments to ensure that air pollution would continue not to be regulated or punished, and that their destructive, polluting business model would keep profits flowing for decades ahead.
This strategic turning point took, where the fossil fuel industry finally got their propaganda machine working and turned the conservative side of politics away from action, took place in the mid-1990’s, and it is important to understand that this is main reason humanity now finds itself in a climate emergency situation.
“The oil giant Shell issued a stark warning of the catastrophic risks of climate change more than a quarter of century ago in a prescient 1991 film that has been rediscovered. However, since then the company has invested heavily in highly polluting oil reserves and helped lobby against climate action, leading to accusations that Shell knew the grave risks of global warming but did not act accordingly.”
→ Article about Shell’s film in The Guardian
→ Article about Shell’s film in The Correspondent
→ Read more: Shell Climate Documents
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1991 (b): Australian Geographic magazine
In 1991, Australian Geographic magazine featured an article on the greenhouse effect with a conclusion that, “We must alter our lifestyles. Are we prepared to do this?”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1992 (a): Appeal for sustainability and scientific ecology
There has alredy been numerous appeals from scientific organisations. Does anyone remember the Heidelberg Appeal? It was addressed to the chiefs of state and governments 25 years ago, published on 1 June 1992 in the Wall Street Journal over the signatures of 46 prominent scientists and other intellectuals. Subsequently it was endorsed by around 4,000 scientists, including 72 Nobel Prize winners. The appeal read:
Heidelberg Appeal to Heads of States and Governments
“We want to make our full contribution to the preservation of our common heritage, the Earth.
We are, however, worried at the dawn of the twenty-first century, at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development.
We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look towards the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man’s first appearance in the biosphere, insofar as humanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse.
We fully subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology for a universe whose resources must be taken stock of, monitored and preserved. But we herewith demand that this stock-taking, monitoring and preservation be founded on scientific criteria and not on irrational pre-conceptions.
We stress that many essential human activities are carried out either by manipulating hazardous substances or in their proximity, and that progress and development have always involved increasing control over hostile forces, to the benefit of mankind. We therefore consider that scientific ecology is no more than an extension of this continual progress toward the improved life of future generations. We intend to assert science’s responsibility and duty towards society as a whole. We do however forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data.
We draw everybody’s attention to the absolute necessity of helping poor countries attain a level of sustainable development which matches that of the rest of the planet, protecting them from troubles and dangers stemming from developed nations, and avoiding their entanglement in a web of unrealistic obligations which would compromise both their independence and their dignity.
The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology and Industry whose instruments, when adequately managed, are indispensable tools of a future shaped by Humanity, by itself and for itself, overcoming major problems like overpopulation, starvation and worldwide diseases.”
Heidelberg, April 14, 1992 (third revision)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1992 (b): ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’
1,700 of the world’s leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued a ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’ in November 1992.
“We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend on. We must, for example, move away from fossil fuels to more benign, inexhaustible energy sources to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of our air and water. Priority must be given to the development of energy sources matched to third-world needs—small scale and relatively easy to implement. We must halt deforestation, injury to and loss of agricultural land, and the loss of terrestrial and marine plant and animal species.”
→ Read the 1992 Scientist Statement: World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (PDF document)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1995: Global Climate Coalition: ‘Climate Change Science Primer’
The Global Climate Coalition produces a draft primer on climate change dated December 1995 and distributed with the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers’s letterhead. This was right after the IPCC 2nd assessment had been published. The draft primer acknowledges the scientific consensus, and explains how uncertainty could still be stated.
→ Climate Files:
1995 Global Climate Coalition Draft Climate Change Science Primer
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2007: David Attenborough: ‘Climate Change – Britain Under Threat
One-hour documentary by Sir David Attenborough – ‘Exploring impacts of Climate Change on UK’.
→ Published on Youtube.com
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2008: James Hansen shows true gravity of the situation
“A 2008 paper by James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change, showed the true gravity of the situation. In it, Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” His climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already blown past that limit.”
→ Download the paper (PDF) from www.columbia.edu
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This is one of the very first climate maps, from Woodbridge 1823. He drew isotherms around the world based on the annual average temperatures that had been measured in variety of cities. Source: Robert Rohde
Rewinding two centuries
1904: Artificial oxidation of coal
In 1904, Dr Van Hise at University of Wisconsin wrote “A Treatise on Metamorphism” which was discussed in newspapers around the world.
1912: Burning coal affects climate
The small article ‘Coal consumption affecting climate’ from 1912 is a striking example of how long we knowingly have ignored the problem.
→ Article by Andrew C. Revkin published in the New York Times on 21 October 2016:
News Coverage of Coal’s Link to Global Warming, in 1912
→ Source: www.trove.nla.gov.au
→ Share this on Facebook
This article is 109 years old. And we still aren’t doing enough to act on climate change. pic.twitter.com/lU3c1kCx0d
— MulindwaMoses (@mulindwa_guy) May 29, 2022
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1827: Discovery of the greenhouse effect
The damage caused by adding CO2 to our atmosphere has been known for almost 200 years now.
One of the first scientific works on climate change, and certainly a seminal study, was completed in 1827 by the French mathematician and physicist Jean Baptiste Fourier. He is generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect, whereby the presence of an atmosphere acts to increase a planet’s surface temperature. He suggested that the atmosphere might insulate the planet, creating a warming effect.
An excellent summary of the contributions of his work is provided here.
“From his work, scientists were able to describe how heat entered and left a planet’s system. He described heat loss by infrared radiation from the Earth and other planets. He correctly concluded that energy transferred within the Earth was negligible compared to that transferred by radiation. He also recognized the important nature of the atmosphere – that it is transparent to visible light but not to infrared light. This is why the greenhouse analogy to our atmosphere is so apt.”
~ John Abraham in The Guardian on 31 March 2017
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1856: Laboratory measurements of C02’s enhanced absorption of sunlight
In 1856, the American scientist Eunice Foote (1819-1888) was the first scientist to define the link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. In her laboratory she had isolated the component gases that make up the atmosphere, and she measured which one got the hottest in sunlight. It was, she found, carbon dioxide. The punch line being that in this way she proved that the more CO2 that’s pumped into the atmosphere, the hotter it gets.
From her laboratory experiment, she concluded that the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere must affect the Earth’s temperature.
Foote submitted her results to the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 23 August 1856. She wrote of her findings on CO2 that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action […] must have necessarily resulted.”
Unlike most scientific societies of the time, the AAAS actually permitted female members, but it would not give them the title of professional or fellow. It meant that as a woman, Foote could submit her results but was not permitted to read her own paper at the meeting; it was read for her by professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, who started by protesting that science should not discriminate on the grounds of gender. It was nonetheless the case that Foote’s paper was not widely published and after its reading, she vanished into obscurity.
Her research was published later the same year with her name as the author in the American Journal of Science and Arts. Her laboratory results showing the enhanced absorption of radiation by CO2 are also in the published record via a report by Wells (1857, p. 159-160).
That’s two years before Tyndall started his laboratory work. The Irish physicist John Tyndall is usually credited with discovering the greenhouse effect, publishing results in 1859 that demonstrated that gases such as carbonic acid trapped heat, and that this effect could and did take place in the Earth’s atmosphere, contributing to a changing climate over time.
“One receiver being filled with carbonic acid, the other with common air, the temperature of the gas in the sun was raised twenty degrees above that of the air. The receiver containing the gas became very sensibly hotter than the other, and was much longer in cooling. An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a much higher temperature; and if there once was, as some suppose, a larger proportion of that gas in the air, an increased temperature must have accompanied it, both from the nature of the gas and the increased density of the atmosphere.”
~ Eunice Foote
Foote’s story was first brought to light by Raymond Sorenson, an independent researcher, in 2011. Since then, UCSB researcher John Perlin has unearthed more details, and in May 2018, stories about her were then published in a range of media outlets.
→ Search and Discovery – 31 January 2011:
Eunice Foote’s Pioneering Research On CO2 And Climate Warming
By Raymond P. Sorenson
→ Santa Barbera Independent – 10 May 2018:
John Perlin Rediscovers Feminist Crusader Who Discovered Climate Change
“Who the Hell Is Eunice Foote and Why Should We Care?”
→ Quartz – 15 May 2018:
The female scientist who identified the greenhouse-gas effect never got the credit
→ ABC RN – 15 July 2018:
The father of climate science, my Foote!? A mystery revealed
→ Climate.gov NOAA – 17 July 2019:
Happy 200th birthday to Eunice Foote, hidden climate science pioneer
“American Eunice Foote was an amateur scientist from the mid-1800s whose experiments foreshadowed the discovery of Earth’s greenhouse effect.”
→ SPIE – 1 March 2020:
Something’s a-Foote with Climate Science History
“John Tyndall, Eunice Foote, and the greenhouse effect.”
The Case of the Extra Gigatons 🧵 pic.twitter.com/FtGTNiQFfg
— Climate_Quest 🧐 for a stable climate 🌍🌏🌎 (@climate_quest) May 30, 2022
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1859-1861: Description of the greenhouse effect
Irish physicist John Tyndall advanced research into the warming effects of carbon dioxide, concluding that atmospheric warming is tied to fossil fuel emissions. He wrote in his 1861 paper ‘On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption and Conduction’ that variations in these gases could have produced “all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.”
In 1859, he had given a presentation on the topic at the Royal Institution of Great Britain: ‘On the transmission of heat of different qualities through gases of different kinds’
→ M. Weather Hulme, Vol 64, no. 5, May 2009:
On the origin of ‘the greenhouse effect’: John Tyndall’s 1859 interrogation of nature
The Guardian wrote:
“Another major discovery occurred in the 1860s by researcher John Tyndall. He studied various gases and their ability to absorb radiant heat. Among the gases he studied were oxygen and nitrogen which he found were virtually transparent to radiant heat. On the other hand, he found that some gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide can absorb heat, even though they are present in small amounts.
The genius of Tyndall was his measurement device. He used a galvanometer with a tube that he could fill with various gases. He couldn’t use glass to make the walls because glass is a radiant heat absorber. In fact, his original paper was filled with a detailed description of his experiment and the issues he had to address to ensure quality results. But, in the end he was able to quantify the importance of trace gases on the energy absorptivity of our atmosphere. A nice review of his work is available here.”
→ The Guardian – 31 March 2017:
Scientists understood the climate 150 years ago better than the EPA head today
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1896: Predictions about global temperature rise
“The Swedish researcher Svante Arrhenius became the first person (that I know of) to make predictions about how much the Earth temperature would change as we add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The title of his work, ‘On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground’ says it all.
Using measurements of the energy incoming from the moon, Arrhenius showed that changes to trace gases in the atmosphere can dramatically affect the temperature of the planet. He also discussed how gases are able to absorb specific wavelengths of light. Using experimental data from other preceding studies, he predicted global temperatures would rise approximately 5–6°C in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
~ John Abraham in The Guardian on 31 March 2017
Svante Arrhenius, Professor of Physics and Rector at the Stockholm Högskola, calculated that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise Earth’s temperature between 8 and 9 degrees Celsius. Arrhenius was inspired by the startling discovery of his friend Arvid Högbom, who realized that human activities were releasing carbon dioxide at roughly the same rate as natural processes. Because of the rate at which industrial countries burned coal in 1896, Arrhenius believed human-caused warming wouldn’t reach problematic levels for thousands of years. But by the time he published his 1908 book ‘Worlds in the Making’, an attempt to explain the evolution of the universe to a popular audience, that rate had increased so much that Arrhenius was convinced that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could double within a few centuries.
In 1903 Arrhenius was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1896, Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius was the first to calculate how much #globalwarming a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would cause. Today we call that "climate sensitivity" and it is in the range 2.5 – 4°C (IPCC).
— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) January 1, 2024
From a lecture I gave in Helsinki last year. pic.twitter.com/6aQOEDxr47
“Electric cars might seem like the vehicles of the future, but they are actually a status symbol of the past.”
→ Curbed – 22 September 2017:
Before Tesla: Why everyone wanted an electric car in 1905
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1917: “Coal and oil a finite resource”
“Coal and oil are going up [in usage] and are strictly limited in quantity,” Alexander Graham Bell said in a speech he held in February 1917. He continued: “We can take coal out of a mine, but we can never put it back. We can draw oil from subterranean reservoirs, but we can never refill them again. We are spendthrifts in the matter of fuel and are using our capital for our running expenses. In relation to coal and oil, the world’s annual consumption has become so enormous that we are now actually within measurable distance of the end of the supply. What shall we do when we have no more coal or oil?”
He went on to note that hydropower was, at the time, limited, and implied that one day it might be possible to generate energy from the tides or waves, or “the employment of the sun’s rays directly as a source of power.”
→ World Economic Forum | Futurism – 9 January 2018:
Life in 2018, as predicted by people in 1918
→ ThinkProgress – 6 March 2017:
100 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell warned us about the ‘greenhouse effect’
“Back in 1917, the inventor of the telephone foresaw a future where coal and oil were replaced by renewable fuels.”
1917: “Put the sun’s energy in storage”
On 12 November 1917, the Lincoln Evening Journal in Nebraska published an article under the headline ‘Looking Ahead’. The piece was reprinted from the Chicago News and ridiculed the idea of worrying about whether people of the future would have enough coal. They needed coal now, and there’s absolutely no way that people of the year 2017 would still be using coal as energy.
What will be people be using a hundred years hence? The author speculated that perhaps someone will find a way “to put the sun’s energy in storage, and pump it into people’s houses thru pipes”. Solar power!
→ Gizmodo – 5 January 2017:
Article From 1917: Don’t Worry About Coal, They Will Definitely Be Using Something Else By 2017
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1938: “10% more CO2 = 0.25 global temperature rise”
Guy Callendar was the first to connect human activities to global warming.
Starting in the late 1930s, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer and amateur meteorologist, stirred the field by calculating that rising carbon dioxide levels were already warming the climate.
His research first appeared in the quarterly journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in April 1938: ‘The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature’.
This paper has been categorised as a breakthrough discovery in the field of climate change, though at the time, his work went largely unnoticed.
He had collected world temperature measurements and suggested that this warming was related to carbon dioxide emissions. He linked the three key elements of global warming: rising temperatures, rising levels of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, and infrared sky radiation. This became known for a time as the ‘Callendar Effect’.
He used a simple climate model to show that a 10 per cent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide coincided with the 0.25°C increase in average global temperature.
Professor Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and Dr Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading, both in the United Kingdom, have published a paper looking at Callendar’s legacy. Professor Jones said the steam engineer’s work was ‘groundbreaking’.
Callendar was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1898. He made all his calculations by hand in his spare time, decades before the effects of global warming became widely debated. The son of English physicist Hugh Longbourne Callendar, who studied thermodynamics, Callendar worked from his home in West Sussex. He died in 1964, aged 66.
→ BBC News – 26 April 2013:
Guy Stewart Callendar: Global warming discovery marked
→ The Conversation – 22 February 2022:
A mild-mannered biker triggered a huge debate over humans’ role in climate change – in the early 20th century
→ Biography: ‘The Callendar Effect – The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964)’
There are many more details and stories from the previous centuries in this article in Danish:
→ Information – 26 October 2016:
Klimaerkendelsen har været 150 år om at sætte sig
(The headline of this article in Danish language says: ‘The climate awareness has taken 150 years to sink in’)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1954: Earliest sponsorship of climate science by fossil industry
Documents affirm that the automobile and petroleum industries funded early climate science which California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researcher Charles David Keeling conducted at the Caltech between 1954 and 1956.
With the discovery of these documents, it is now possible to date the earliest sponsorship of climate science by the fossil fuel industry to 1954, approximately a quarter of a century before Exxon’s internal research program of the late 1970s.
It’s important to know that the oil industry sponsored climate science research in the 1950s because it reveals a picture of a much more nuanced, closely connected world of science and the frontiers of scientific discovery than the oil industry has admitted to.
→ Desmog – 30 January 2024:
New Evidence Reveals Fossil Fuel Industry Sponsored Climate Science in 1954
“Documents shed light on the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry, adding to growing understanding of Big Oil’s knowledge of climate change.”
“A changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization.”
~ Caltech memo, November 1954
This memo from the head of an industry-created group known as the Air Pollution Foundation represents the earliest known cautionary message to the oil industry about the greenhouse effect.
The foundation had been founded in 1953 by oil interests – primarily funded by the lobbying organisation Western States Petroleum Association – in response to public outcry over smog that was blanketing Los Angeles county.
The Air Pollution Foundation publicly claimed to want to help solve the smog crisis, but was set up in large part to counter efforts at regulation, memos unearthed by Climate Investigations Center indicate.
“The Air Pollution Foundation appears to be one of the earliest and most brazen efforts by the oil industry to prop up a … front group to exaggerate scientific uncertainty to defend business as usual. It helped lay the strategic and organizational groundwork for big oil’s decades of climate denial and delay.”
The memo is evidence that major oil companies, including Shell and precursors to energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were alerted about the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954.
→ The Guardian – 13 November 2024:
Big oil firms knew of dire effects of fossil fuels as early as 1950s, memos show
“Newly unearthed documents contain warning from head of Air Pollution Foundation, founded in 1953 by oil interests.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1956: New York Times writes about global warming
By 1956, the New York Times was writing on combustion-driven global warming.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1956: America’s biggest automakers knew
Also in 1956, in the study ‘The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change’, the Canadian physicist Gilbert Norman Plass drew connections between the physics of infrared absorption, the geochemistry of the carbon cycle, and computer modeling, estimating that by the year 2000, carbon emissions would be causing noticeable changes in the Earth’s radiation balance and thus the climate.
Plass, who was employed by Ford in 1956, estimated there would be a 1.1°C global warming per century due to human influence. He noted that if humanity consumes the Earth’s fossil fuel resources over the course of the next millennium, the CO2 content of the atmosphere would quadruple from its present value and the planet would warm by at least 7°C.
In two articles based on monthslong investigation, titled ‘Exclusive: GM, Ford knew about climate change 50 years ago’, E&E News described in October 2020 how scientists at two of America’s biggest automakers, Ford and General Motors knew as early as the 1950s that car emissions caused climate change, and that the two automakers had been “deeply and actively engaged” since the 1960s in understanding how their cars affected the climate.
→ Sources: nsdl.org and E&E News
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1957: The Guardian: ‘Threat to ports of the world’
“Possible melting of polar ice-caps”
“Delegates to the assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics today opened a special symposium on the carbon dioxide cycle, which, it is thought, could lead to the flooding of coastal cities and ports by A.D. 2000.
The threat arises from the amount of carbon dioxide being poured into the atmosphere through ever-increasing industralisation, from factory chimneys and the exhaust pipes of vehicles.”
Clipped from page 7 of The Guardian on Tuesday 10 September 1957. London, England.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1958: Bell Science Hour discusses weather, CO2 emissions and climate change
In the United States, Bell Telephone produces a one hour tv show that addresses weather knowledge and prediction. Human caused climate change is addressed at 50:00 minutes.
The all knowing Dr Frank Baxter explains a very modern understanding of climate science in 1958:
Dr. Frank C. Baxter: “Extremely dangerous questions. Because with our present knowledge we have no idea what would happen? Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the worlds climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which helps air absorb heat from the sun, our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.”
Richard Carlson: “This is bad?”
Dr. Frank C. Baxter: “Well, it’s been calculated a few degrees rise in the earths temperature would melt the polar ice caps. And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi valley. Tourists in glass bottom boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water. For in weather, were not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1959: Speaker at energy symposium warns the oil industry
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would […] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [….] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [….] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [….] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
~ Edward Teller, physicist, in 1959, addressing 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, and industry executives at a Energy and Man symposium organised by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business
→ The Guardian – 1 January 2018:
On its hundredth birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming
“Somebody cut the cake – new documents reveal that American oil writ large was warned of global warming at its 100th birthday party.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1962: Energy resources report: “The dangers of atmospheric contamination”
In 1962, Marion King Hubbert, Chief Geology Consultant at Shell and former director of its research labs, produced a book-length report on the earth’s energy resources for a committee of the National Academy of Sciences. The report shows the oil company’s knowledge of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change:
“There is evidence that the greatly increasing use of the fossil fuels, (…) is seriously contaminating the earth’s atmosphere with CO2. (…) Since CO2 absorbs long-wavelength radiation, it is possible that this is already producing a secular climatic change in the direction of higher average temperatures. This could have profound effects both on the weather and on the ecological balances.
In view of the dangers of atmospheric contamination (…) Professor [G. Evelyn] Hutchinson [of Yale University] urges serious consideration of the maximum utilization of solar energy.”
~ ‘Energy Resources – A Report to the Committee on Natural Resources of the National Academy of Sciences’, by Marion King Hubbert, 1962, Washington, USA
Hubbert explicitly acknowledged the potential risk that humanity’s growing use of fossil fuels could result in dramatic changes to the earth’s climate.
The document was brought to light by the Dutch reporter Jelmer Mommers of De Correspondent, who published it on the Climate Files website and can be found in Google Books.
“…a story that begins no later than 1958 and spans decades, continents, and an array of disciplines. They demonstrate that Shell had at its disposal both profound scientific expertise in relevant disciplines and the resources to deploy that expertise to profoundly shape long-term trajectories for both the company itself and the world as a whole.”
→ Center for International Environmental Law – 5 April 2018:
Internal Documents Shed New Light on Shell’s Role in the Climate Crisis
→ CIEL report: ‘A Crack in the Shell’ (PDF) – an analysis in CIEL’s ongoing Smoke & Fumes investigation into what the oil industry knew about climate change, when they knew it, and what they did about it. This analysis was co-authored by Steven Feit and Carroll Muffett.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1963: Conference on the “Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere”
In the USA, at 9:30 am on March 12, 1963, in Room 1-B of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Institute, six experts gathered to discuss the implications of a newly identified atmospheric phenomenon: the rising level of carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Hosted by the Conservation Foundation, a philanthropic organization, this small but vitally important symposium would help to bring a practically unknown area of scientific inquiry to national awareness.
“Man is altering the balance of a relatively stable system by his pollution of the atmosphere with smoke, fumes and particles from … fossil fuels” and by “the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide an industrial society releases to the atmosphere” wrote the foundation’s president, Samuel H. Ordway, Jr., in the foreword to the group’s 1962 Annual Report.
→ Read more
The most recent decade
2009: Appeal to world leaders’ ethics and morals
Call on world leaders to “consider deeply the ethical and moral questions at the root of the climate change crisis.”
In 2009, 25 non-governmental organisations in consultative status with the United Nations, leaders of the world’s religions, policy institutes, and members of civil society, signed an appeal directed at the world leaders who gathered at a UN Summit on Climate Change in New York.
Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change: Appeal to World Leaders
“We, the undersigned non-governmental organizations in consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, leaders of the world’s religions, and other members of civil society, urge the governments of the world to participate in the UN High Level Event on Climate Change through representatives at the highest level and unequivocally call on them to:
Consider deeply the ethical and moral questions at the root of the climate change crisis — questions of justice and equity that will determine the survival of cultures, ecosystems, and present as well as future generations;
Recognize that the quest for climate justice is not a competition for limited resources but part of an unfolding process towards greater degrees of unity among nations as they endeavor to build a sustainable, just and peaceful civilization;
Distinguish their contributions to this High-Level Event by demonstrating trust, justice, solidarity, and a vision of prosperity for the most vulnerable populations;
Demonstrate courage and moral leadership as they articulate the vision and secure the foundations for a comprehensive and legally binding agreement during the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCC and the 5th Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol in December 2009; and
Ensure that commitments in all arenas of the climate change challenge are guided by ethical and moral considerations so as to inspire the trust and confidence of individuals, communities and institutions to effect the changes needed to build a sustainable civilization.
We call on the gathered leaders to summon the same spirit and sense of urgency that led to the creation of the United Nations, to forge a climate change agreement worthy of the trust of humankind.
→ fore.yale.edu: ‘Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change: Appeal to World Leaders’
→ I posted a blogpost about this appeal on 3 April 2013.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2013: Message to world leaders from 520 scientists
In 2013, a 51-page ‘consensus statement’ was published with a message to world leaders and with information for policy makers, signed by scientists in 44 countries.
‘Scientific Concensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century: Information for Policy Makers’ warned that “global environmental harm is putting at risk the happiness and well-being of this and future generations.”
Here is an extract from the statement:
Climate Disruption
“Even best-case emissions scenarios (the IPCC B1 scenario) project that Earth will be hotter than the human species has ever seen by the year 2070, possibly sooner. Continuing current emission trends would, by the time today’s children grow up and have grandchildren (the year 2100), likely cause average global temperature to rise between 2.4 – 6.4°C, with the best estimate being 4°C. The last time average global temperature was 4°C hotter was some 14 million years ago.”
Impacts:
• Longer and more intense heat waves
• More frequent damaging storms
• Major damage to coastal cities as sea level rises.
• Water shortages in populous parts of the world.
• Local reduction of crop yields
• Economic losses, social strife and political unrest
• Spread of infectious disease.
• Pest expansions that cause severe ecological and economic losses
• Major damage to unique ecosystems
• Extinction of species. At least 20-40%Solutions:
Avoiding the worst impacts of human-caused climate change will require reducing emissions of greenhouse gases substantially and quickly. For instance, in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 parts per million by the year 2050, which would give a 50% chance of holding global temperature rise to 2°C, emissions would have to be decreased 5.1% per year for the next 38 years. This rate of reduction has not been achieved in any year in the past six decades, which puts the magnitude and urgency of the task in perspective.However, reducing emissions to requisite values over the next 50 years appears possible through coordinated innovation and deployment of new transportation and energy systems, which can be accomplished largely with existing technology. This will require rapid scaling-up of carbon-neutral energy production (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, hydrogen fuel-cells, nuclear, microbe-based biofuels) to replace energy production from fossil fuels.
In the transitional decades when fossil fuels will continue to be in widespread use, increased efficiency in energy use (better gas mileage for cars and trucks, more energyefficient buildings, etc.) will be necessary, as will phasing out coal-fired power plants in favor of lower-emissions facilities (natural gas).
While fossil fuels remain in use during the transitional period, carbon capture and storage (CCS) from major emitters like cement and steel plants will probably be necessary.
Scaling up carbon-neutral energy production fast enough will likely require legislation and government policies designed to stimulate the right kinds of innovations and realign the economic landscape for energy production.
Some effects of climate change already are underway (sea level rise, higher frequency of extreme weather, etc.). Plans to adapt to unavoidable climate changes will need to be developed and implemented for cities and public lands. Keeping agricultural areas productive will require changing the crops grown in some places, and ensuring seed stocks that are adapted to new climates.
Ultimate monetary costs for climate mitigation and adaptation grow substantially each year action is postponed.”
→ Read more: Message to world leaders from 520 scientists
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2016: Open letter to the Australian Prime Minister from 5,154 scientists
On 25 August 2016, 154 Australian atmospheric, marine, environmental, biological and medical scientists, including several leading climatologists, sent an open letter to their Prime Minister, demanding that climate policy match the science.
“We call on the Australian government to tackle the root causes of an unfolding climate tragedy and do what is required to protect future generations and nature, including meaningful reductions of Australia’s peak carbon emissions and coal exports, while there is still time. There is no Planet B.”
» Read the open letter
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2017: ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’
In November 2017, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries re-issued a warning from 1992: ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’.
In a peer-reviewed journal article which was co-signed by more than 15,000 signatories from the science community from all ends of the Earth, the scientists warned that mankind now must take immediate action to reverse the effects of climate change, deforestation and species extinction before it’s too late. The paper captured the environmental trends over the last 25 years, showed realistic concern, and suggested some examples of possible remedies, such as:
• reducing food waste through education and better infrastructure
• promoting dietary shifts towards mostly plant-based foods
• increasing outdoor nature education for children, as well as the overall engagement of society in the appreciation of nature
• divesting of monetary investments and purchases to encourage positive environmental change
• devising and promoting new green technologies and massively adopting renewable energy sources while phasing out subsidies to energy production through fossil fuels
• revising our economy to reduce wealth inequality and ensure that prices, taxation, and incentive systems take into account the real costs which consumption patterns impose on our environment
“Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production — particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption. Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
Humanity is now being given a second notice, as illustrated by these alarming trends. We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats. By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.”
(…)
“To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home.”
~ Excerpts from ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’, 13 November 2017
Panel (a) shows emissions of halogen source gases, which deplete stratospheric ozone, assuming a constant natural emission rate of 0.11 Mt CFC- 11-equivalent per year.
In panel (c), marine catch has been going down since the mid-1990s, but at the same time, fishing effort has been going up.
The vertebrate abundance index in panel (f) has been adjusted for taxonomic and geographic bias but incorporates relatively little data from developing countries, where there are the fewest studies; between 1970 and 2012, vertebrates declined by 58 percent, with freshwater, marine, and terrestrial populations declining by 81, 36, and 35 percent, respectively.
Five-year means are shown in panel (h).
In panel (i), ruminant livestock consist of domestic cattle, sheep, goats, and buffaloes. Note that y-axes do not start at zero, and it is important to inspect the data range when interpreting each graph. Percentage change, since 1992, for the variables in each panel are as follows: (a) –68.1%; (b) –26.1%; (c) –6.4%; (d) +75.3%; (e) –2.8%; (f) –28.9%; (g) +62.1%; (h) +167.6%; and (i) humans: +35.5%, ruminant livestock: +20.5%.
» For additional descriptions of the variables and trends, go to www.scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu
→ BigThink – 13 November 2017:
More Than 15,000 Scientists Issue a “Warning to Humanity”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2018: Climate proclamation from 301 Danish scientists
“Politicians are gambling with our future.” (…) “The consideration for economic growth must now clearly be secondary to the consideration for sustainability, health, pollution and climate.”
~ 301 Danish researchers’ climate proclamation
The focus on economic growth must give way to a more ambitious climate policy. This is our last chance if the Paris Agreement’s goal of a maximum of 2°C degree global warming is to be redeemed, 301 Danish researchers with various backgrounds wrote in a ‘climate proclamation’ published in the Danish newspaper Politiken on 11 May 2018.
“In relation to the choices that have the biggest impact on our individual climate footprint – such as living without a car, avoiding flying and eating less meat – we are all interdependent with society’s transport and energy infrastructure, demands from our workplaces, and expectations from family, friends and others social relations.
Therefore, what we need is politicians who will take the lead and introduce clear financial incentives. It can be via taxation and regulation of climate-destructive goods and activities, as well as targeted public investment and subsidies aimed at significantly reducing the environmental footprint.
This must be done to a far greater extent than we have seen from the changing governments so far. There are economic risks associated with initiating such major changes in investments, taxes, rules and taxes for any country. But the climate-related and environmental risk of postponing the problems is far greater – no matter whether we define it in financial figures, in international reputation, in biodiversity or in food safety.
Political measures that increase economic growth are directly detrimental to the planet’s ecosystems. Therefore, the consideration for economic growth must now clearly be secondary to the consideration for sustainability, health, pollution and climate.”
→ The climate proclamation (in Danish langauge)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deaths and destruction attributable to climate change
As this blogpost would demonstrate, there has been no shortage of appeals, calling for common sense and action, from scientists, scholars and activists. While we have been seeing growing interest in global campaigns like Earth Hour and Earth Day, there is still very little action or voters-reaction from the average population, the mainstream, the silent majority.
On the contrary, denial (“climate change is crap”, “it’s a Chinese hoax”), and apathy (“we are f*cked, so who cares”), appears to be the two most typical reactions to the topic. Certainly the two most predominant narratives in the Australian society in the early 2020s.
The scientific fact that over 93 percent of the global warming takes place in the oceans, while only a few percent in the atmosphere, and the consequences of this fact, is rarely mentioned, and often misunderstood.
After two centuries of continuous unregulated air pollution, which has been rising in volume year after year and which keeps warming the oceans, and after decades of warnings from the science community about what this will mean for the world’s coral reefs, when the first video footage ticked in in 2016 showing that the Great Barrier Reef is dying, the media responded as if everyone was taken by surprise and in shock. “How can this be happening?!” everyone was saying on national tv.
Eventually, after weeks of reporting and numerous upset letters to the editor and debates on tv, the responsible politicians still did… nothing! After all these years of warnings, nothing changed.
On the contrary, they continue to allow more climate-and eco-system destroying pollution – and even subsidise new coal and gas projects.
Our irresponsible political leaders who deliberately have been procrastinating on the issue literally have blood on their hands today. The World Health Organisation estimated in 2005 that climate change was already causing 150,000 deaths per year as of the year 2000. The United Nations stated that during the last two decades, disasters linked to extreme weather accounted for 475,000 deaths and $2.6 trillion in damages. Air pollution levels remain dangerously high in many parts of the world. Data from WHO shows that nine out of ten people breathe air containing high levels of pollutants. Updated estimations reveal an alarming death toll of seven million people every year caused by outdoor and household air pollution.
The DARA 2012 Report, which was commissioned by 20 countries, estimated that,
“Climate change causes 400,000 deaths on average each year today, mainly due to hunger and communicable diseases that affect above all children in developing countries. Our present carbon-intensive energy system and related activities cause an estimates 4.5 million deaths each year linked to air pollution, hazardous occupations and cancer…
Continuing today’s patterns of carbon-intensive energy use is estimated, together with climate change, to cause five million deaths per year by 2030, close to 700,000 of which would be due to climate change. This implies that a combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade. A significant share of the global population would be directly affected by inaction on climate change.”
~ DARA: ‘Climate Vulnerability Monitor – A guide to the cold calculus of a hot planet’, 2012, Executive Summary pp2-3, and Reuters: ‘100 mln to die by 2030 if world fails to act on climate’ on 28 September 2012.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Book about the Australian climate history
A decade ago, the award-winning climate scientist Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne set out to resolve this question by reconstructing Australia’s climate history for much of the last thousand years. In this video, Dr Joëlle Gergis talks with Nate Byrne on ABC News Breakfast.
Published by Melbourne University Publishing on youtube.com on 11 April 2018
Dr Joëlle Gergis: ‘Sunburnt Country – The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia’
What does climate change in Australia really look like?
What was Australia’s climate like before official weather records began? How do scientists use tree-rings, ice cores and tropical corals to retrace the past? What do Indigenous seasonal calendars reveal? And what do settler diary entries about rainfall, droughts, bushfires and snowfalls tell us about natural climate cycles? ‘Sunburnt Country’ pieces together Australia’s climate history for the first time. It uncovers a continent long vulnerable to climate extremes and variability. It gives an unparalleled perspective on how human activities have altered patterns that have been with us for millions of years, and what climate change looks like in our own backyard. Sunburnt Country highlights the impact of a warming planet on Australian lifestyles and ecosystems and the power we all have to shape future life on Earth.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1820s – Fourier suggests greenhouse analogy to explain Earth’s temperature
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) April 17, 2024
1850s – Foote & Tyndall show CO2, CH4 & H2O are key atmospheric ingredients for greenhouse effect
1890s – Arrhenius estimates amount of warming if CO2 is doubled
1930s – CO2 increase & warming observed https://t.co/hg1vOY7fSm
→ Global Environmental Change – 19 October 2021:
Early warnings and emerging accountability: Total’s responses to global warming, 1971–2021
“In this paper, we address this research gap by reporting new archival research and primary source interviews documenting Total’s long exposure to climate warming research and subsequent industry coordination, public communication, and lobbying activities regarding climate change.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
→ Share a post about this page on Twitter/X
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“As early as the mid-1960s, [they] planned their own business operations around rising seas and other harms from climate change, and yet engaged in a campaign to try to mislead the public about whether climate change was actually occurring.”
→ PRI – 6 May 2018:
Lawsuits took down Big Tobacco. Can they make oil companies accountable for climate change?
“A growing list of US cities and counties are suing fossil fuel companies for damages linked to climate change.”
→ Medium – 13 December 2015:
We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time
“Why I collected some newspaper articles on climate change from the 1800s onwards”
→ BBC – 20 September 2013:
A brief history of climate change
“Key milestones, scientific discoveries, technical innovations and political action.”
→ See also: #StandUpForScience #Science #ClimateScience #Renewables #NoMoreBadInvestments #PriceOnCoal #ActOnClimate #ChangeClimateChange #ClimateAction #ClimateSolutions