The first time climate change ‘went viral’ – 70 years ago Premium

Fully 70 years ago this month, May 2023, the danger of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere first travelled around the world.

We have grown so used to many things. To the pictures of wildfires and cremated animals, to the ice sheets calving into the ocean, to the promises of world leaders that they will heed the “last chance” warning of the scientists.

It is hard for anyone under the age of 40 to remember a time when carbon dioxide build-up, whether it was “the greenhouse effect”, or “global warming” or “climate change” or now “climate crisis”, was not in the news.

The long hot summer of 1988 – 35 years ago – is held as the moment that world leaders began to mouth the right pieties.

Presidential candidate (and soon to be president) George H.W. Bush said he would use the “White House effect” to fix the Greenhouse Effect (he didn’t). U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned of a giant experiment being conducted “with the system of this planet itself”.

But it was actually 35 years before that – fully 70 years ago this month – that the danger of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere first travelled around the world.

That carbon dioxide trapped heat was uncontroversial. Irish scientist John Tyndall (possibly drawing on the work of an American, Eunice Foote) had shown that it did back in the mid-1800s.

In 1895, Swedish Nobel prize winner Svante Arrhenius had suggested that, over hundreds of years, the build-up of carbon dioxide released when humans burn oil, coal, and gas might trap so much heat as to melt the tundra and make freezing winters a thing of the past.