What The World Needs Now Is Wonks, Climate Wonks (1965)

Let Me Sum Up

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2y ago 51:17

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In this week’s very special episode, your intrepid hosts eschew the usual compilation of current climate affairs (it’s not like much is happening anyway) and jump into the LMSU DeLorean to time warp our way back to 1965 USA where the ties are paisley, the clothes psychedelically tie-dyed and the climate science prescient (albeit mostly being done by a bunch of white guys).

For this week’s paper we present to you Summerupperers a veritable rolled gold classic climate paper, ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment - Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel’ from the President’s Science Advisory Council, commissioned by then US President Lyndon B. Johnson. Delving specifically into Appendix Y4, ‘Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’ this is a truly seminal paper that invokes the earliest use of the term ‘climatic change’, sets out the emerging science around increasing CO2 which had only recently started to be accurately measured, and puts it on the radar of a national government for the first time.

We certainly had some thoughts on the things the paper did and didn’t say and even wondered what we would have done had we been given the chance to brief LBJ on climate change in 1965 (hint, check out our LMSU Holiday Special 2022: Don’t Sum Up). We heartily commend this paper to you Summeruppers, unearthed by Tennant from the excellent website Skeptical Science.

We always have One More Thing to say and Luke gave a shout out to a paper that was mentioned (but then forthcoming) in this week’s paper from the US Weather Bureau that promised more advanced climate modelling that confirmed and built on thrust of what the President’s Science Advisory Council had to say in 1965.

And that’s all from us this week Summerupperers! We shall see you next time and until then, please keep tweeting your thoughts to us at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic and if you would like to weave some golden threads through our back catalogue, give us your feelpinions or suggest papers to read we are always here for that - hit us up at [email protected].

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