There’s a plethora of stories coming out that are framing climate change as something no one was talking about until recently. Pardon my language, but that’s some fucked up revisionism.
Maybe folks in power want to absolve themselves from their inaction, or media outlets feel guilty for not giving climate change the coverage it deserved for decades, but somehow we blew right past “this is what we’ve been warning about” to “if only we’d been warned!?”
Setting aside the fact that we’ve known about the physics of CO2 warming the planet since > Eunice Foote (1865), Arrhenius (1896) et al, a US presidents’ advisory council raised concerns about the greenhouse effect in 1965. Wally Broecker used the term “global warming” in 1975.
The IPCC formed in 1988; its first Report was released in 1990. In the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, developed countries pledged to hold emissions to 1990 levels. In 1997, nations signed the Kyoto Protocol, pledging a 5% reduction in emissions by 2012. The US Senate refused to ratify.
James Hansen’s famous testimony to Congress was in 1988. Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance came out in 1992. @MichaelEMann’s famous “hockey stick” graph was published in 1998.
This was all before I finished high school. And those are just some of the highlights.
This was all before I finished high school. And those are just some of the highlights.
There have been popular books and articles on climate change published regularly since the early 2000’s, at least. The Day After Tomorrow (which significantly raised public awareness about climate change) came out in 2004. An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006.
(Correction: Foote’s paper was delivered in 1856, not 1865.)
Decades of scientific reports warned of fires, sea level rise, drought, floods, heat waves, new diseases and pests, extinction, crop losses.
Decades of scientific reports warned of fires, sea level rise, drought, floods, heat waves, new diseases and pests, extinction, crop losses.
I don’t blame average folks for not knowing about climate change.
But the people who were supposed to do something about it knew. They thought they’d be fine, or they chose short-term power and profit. Or they believed fossil fuel industry lies, while taking fossil fuel money.
But the people who were supposed to do something about it knew. They thought they’d be fine, or they chose short-term power and profit. Or they believed fossil fuel industry lies, while taking fossil fuel money.
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