London’s sooty air held 280 parts per million of CO2 when this Royal Institution physicist began to ponder the environmental consequences of the coal-burning Age of Steam:
By 1896 Sweden’s Svante Arrhenius had fleshed out Tyndall’s work by quantifying what went up in smoke, and by the time Teddy Roosevelt progressed to the White House, Popular Mechanics had spread the results far and wide:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
In 1959, with 316 parts per million of CO2 in the air, the American Petroleum Institute celebrated the industry’s centenary at a Columbia University, where H-Bomb physicist Edward Teller made a startling prediction:
“Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth… 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… 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.”
Some in the audience took him at his word. At 320ppm President Johnson commissioned this reporton what to do about CO2:
As ambient CO2 rose past the 10% mark in1985. and the world teetered on the brink of the Teller threshold, Carl Sagan took time off from his Nuclear Winter campaign to tell Congress what to do about the alarming rise:
“The idea that we should immediately stop burning fossil fuel has such severe economic consequences that no one, of course, will take it seriously. There are many other things we can do in response.”
In 1991, though model doubling sensitivity remained unsettled, Teller’s apocalyptic prediction met with success. The year CO2 reached 355 ppm saw Earth’s largest, coldest, and most Arctic warming sensitive nation disintegrated into a gibbering flock of Socialist Republics.
So devastating was the shock that all too few few COP meetings & IPCC reports later, Sagan & Teller departed this world dry-shod, at 362 and 382 parts per million respectively.
Only after CO2 passed 400 ppm, and an underwater press conference was staged in the Maldives did the world realize its peril and allow the Global South’s foremost climate statesman, the Right Honorable Prime Minister of Australia , rise to the occasion to observe:
” Coal is now an essential part of our zero carbon future.”
