If you are 57 years old, or younger, you have lived your whole life in the era of climate disruption warnings. The article reprinted below appeared in the June 20, 1957 issue of the Woodstock Sentinel-Press under the headline, “Are We Tampering with Our Climate?” It is amazing to read how accurate the climate researchers were on what they saw coming. Here’s the article edited a bit for length:
Geophysicists just can’t help wondering if men, having revolutionized the world industrially, aren’t also tampering with the earth’s climate. All evidence seems to point in that direction.
Ever since men learned they could work industrial wonders by fueling a machine with gas and oil or stoking it with coal, things just haven’t been the same on this earth. Now we learn that maybe things haven’t been the same up in the sky either.
The rub is that when fossil fuels such as gas, oil and coal are burned, they pour carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air. In an atmosphere which already has enough CO2 to keep things working smoothly, too much more of it could play hob with nature’s balance.
Some geophysicists, for example, believe too much CO2 would make the climate warmer. This could set off a chain reaction of changes of conditions on earth. If the warm climate lasted long enough ice caps would melt and the seas would rise and flood coastal cities. Southern California might dry up completely, while Alaska and Siberia might become major beach resorts. It could upset what Dr. Roger R. Revelle describes as the “easy motions of the atmosphere.” . . .
. . . geophysicists hope to bring the whole question into sharper focus during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) when natural scientists from 58 nations will simultaneously mount an intensive [study] on the many secrets of earth and sky. Beginning July 1, (1957) when the IGY officially opens, weather experts and geophysicists from many of these nations will launch a thoroughgoing study of the CO2 content of the air and oceans. . . .
What will this prove? Geophysicists hope it will at least clarify the role of CO2 in the energy balance of the atmosphere and provide a reference peg on which to hang future samplings. The ultimate goal is to determine what mankind is doing to its own climate.
Dr. Revelle compares the earth’s atmosphere to a glass-roofed greenhouse. In the atmosphere are two important minor gases – CO2 and water vapor. Visible light from the sun easily filters to earth through these gases. On the earth these short-wave light rays are either absorbed or reradiated upwards as long-wave heat rays. But the same gases that let the light through will not let much of the heat out.
This “greenhouse effect” prevents earth from freezing at night and boiling during the day: If either of these gases – CO2 for instance – should be notably increased, the “roof” would be more opaque than ever. Less heat would escape. Temperatures quite possibly would grow warmer.
Since the 1800’s the industrial revolution has been pouring out CO2 at a terrific rate – almost 12 percent of the total billions of tons already present in the atmosphere from natural causes, such as volcanoes.
If this keeps up, Dr. Revelle points out, within the next 100 years some 1,700 billion tons of CO2 – 70 percent of the total now in the atmosphere – will be unloaded [added] from industrial sources. About two-thirds of this will be absorbed into the sea, Dr. Revelle explains. But still, atmospheric CO2 can be expected to rise perhaps 20 percent.
Theoretically, this could warm the lower atmosphere by several degrees. Experts estimate that only a two-degree [Fahrenheit] rise, if it persists for several hundred years, is needed to melt all the ice caps and raise the sea levels 100 feet.
Dr. Revelle says this great international unloading of industrial CO2 in the atmosphere amounts to a large-scale geophysical experiment that men are conducting in spite of themselves. It is, he points out, “an experiment that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” . . .
Such documentation has been arranged as part of the IGY oceanographic program. . . . On some 40 stations throughout the world . . . many nations will join in the CO2 program and take periodic samplings. . . . Since the objective is to obtain a valid worldwide average of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and sea, it is mandatory, Dr. Revelle says, that “the program must be conducted on a worldwide [cooperative] basis.”
This article was written when the research was beginning. The alarm that drove this research has been validated. The rate at which the industrial economy has been burning carbon fuels is triggering chaotic climate change. With every new report for the past 57 years, the warnings have been ramped up. The warnings are now extreme. Scientists don’t give extreme warnings unless they are scared. And they are now genuinely scared at what they see happening to the climate.
Fifty-seven years is a long time for political and business leaders to get their heads around this situation and take corrective action. They have generally not done so, and are even now actually refusing to do so.
We are being urged to “say yes” to more and more hydrocarbon extraction when we know full well every new barrel of oil and every cubic meter of natural gas that comes out of the ground will ramp up the costs of climate chaos. The costs of climate chaos will eventually buckle our debt ridden financial system and cut the security of industrial civilization off at the knees.
The political economy of hydrocarbon extraction is a short run bubble. It will come to an end. The political economy of renewable energy is the only alternative that can provide prosperity and security for the next 57 years. The sooner we accept this, the better for the future.
Sam Arnold and Keith Helmuth are members of the Woodstock Sustainable Energy Group