Lost opportunity: We could've started fighting climate change in 1971

[DBoon]

In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News.

The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the atmosphere. It would have engaged five government agencies in a six-year initiative, with spending of $23 million in the project’s peak year of 1974—the equivalent of $172 million in today’s dollars. It would have used then-cutting-edge technology, some of which is only now being widely implemented in carbon monitoring more than 50 years later.

But it stands as yet another lost opportunity early on the road to the climate crisis. Researchers at the National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, could find no documentation of what happened to the proposal, and it was never implemented.
...
It turns out that the monitoring proposal, which was authorized by the head of Nixon’s White House Office of Science and Technology, Edward E. David Jr., did get a second life in another form. After leaving the Nixon administration, David joined the oil giant Exxon, and as president of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company from 1977 to 1986, he signed off on a groundbreaking Exxon project that used one of its oil tankers to gather atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide samples, beginning in 1979. That research, which was first reported by Inside Climate News in 2015, confirmed fossil fuels’ role in global warming. It also showed the oil industry knew the harm of its products and is now a key piece of evidence in lawsuits by states and cities across the country seeking compensation from the oil industry for climate damages.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/nixon-administration-couldve-started-monitoring-co2-levels-but-didnt/

[Think. Again.]

1. K&R

Our need to stop the burning of fossil fuels has been nothing but missed and blocked opportunities since then. Still, we fight on.

[NNadir]

2. The origins of climate science date to the Early 19th century, with the work of Fourier...

...who sought to explain planetary temperatures based on the (then) recent discovery of infrared radiation.

What is surprising about this was that the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy was not actually formally understood at the time.

This was well before the discovery of the Steffan-Boltzmann law.

Arrhenius formalized analysis of the point by the end of the 19th century, and the point was also driven by a steam engineer named Guy Callendar in the 1930's, who was not taken all that seriously as he was not a formally trained atmospheric scientist. Roger Revelle would call global warming the "Callendar effect."

Some of this is discussed here in a Nature News item from 2004: Pierrehumbert, R. Warming the world. Nature 432, 677 (2004)

Other people worked on the problem in the 1960s and understood it quite well, including Alvin Weinberg, once director at ORNL, working with Freeman Dyson. Dyson, Callendar, and Arrhenius all thought global warming would be an overall positive outcome. We now know better.

In the early 1970's I doubt that additional monitoring and discussion would have went anywhere, particularly with respect to the use of fossil fuels. Indeed the pro-fossil fuel antinuclear movement, dishonestly masquerading as an "environmentalist" movement, was gathering steam and successfully put a hold on the only viable option to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. (Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, who had excellent credentials as a real environmentalist as opposed to an ersatz "environmentalist" pointed this out in several of his monographs.)

We are still doing effectively nothing about climate change, other than making it worse, and one notes that the fossil fuel marketing squads are still at it, among other things, here and elsewhere, working to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen," and talking nonsense about sequestration and other ineffective useless nonstarters, the worst of which is so called "renewable energy," a multitrillion dollar boondoggle that has entrenched the use of fossil fuels.

[Caribbeans]

3. 2 years later Dick and Hank literally tied the US Economy to OIL and the Petrodollar

which meant all this talk of "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" would have to wait 30, 40 more years.

But no one talks about Dick and Hank's abandoning of gold in favor of Saudi Crude and what they did. Understandable, really, for a nation that is all about appearances.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/092415/oil-currencies-understanding-their-correlation.asp

[NNadir]

4. Well you know Exxon is running ads these days pretending to care about climate change.

It is unsurprising to me that people seeking to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen" are also pretending to care about climate change.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

A video ad from Exxon of the type produced here by fossil fuel interests specifically working on rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen:

There is no limit to the disingenuous representations and overt dishonesty of the fossil fuel industry.

Any effort by any of its spokespersons and advertisers and three card Monty hydrogen rebranding sales people and salesbots to claim to give a rat's ass about climate change is obviously fraudulent.