From Ignorance to Denial to Disaster: 60 Years of Living With Climate Change — Part One: The 1960s and 1970s

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This is the first of what will be four articles looking at how awareness of the climate crisis has developed, and been supported, ignored or resisted, over the last 60 years. I’m writing these articles to reflect on my 60th birthday, at the end of February. The second part, covering the 1980s, is here.

60 years ago, as my poor mum grew ever larger, carrying what would be her only child — me — the UK experienced its coldest winter since records began. The Big Freeze began on December 12-13, 1962, and by December 29-30, when my mum was seven months pregnant, the snow lay nine inches deep in Wythenshawe, south of Manchester, and just a few miles south east of where my parents lived, in Sale.

In January, the upper reaches of the River Thames froze, and at Herne Bay, in Kent, the sea froze for a mile from the shoreline. By February, when I was born, storms reached Gale Force 8 on the Beaufort scale, and a 36-hour blizzard “caused heavy drifting snow in most parts of the country”, reaching 20 feet in some areas, as “gale-force winds reached up to 81 miles per hour.” Many parts of the country were swathed in snow for two months continuously, and it was not until March 6, when I was six days old, that the Great Freeze came to an end.

The discovery of “global warming”, from the 1820s to the 1960s

It was difficult to think, back in 1963, that human activity was already contributing to an alarming increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but it was indeed the case. Scientists had been investigating how the earth’s atmosphere functioned since the 1820s, when the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier suggested that the earth’s atmosphere might act as some kind of insulation system, making the planet warmer than it would otherwise have been if it was dependent solely on solar radiation.

In 1838, the French physicist Claude Pouillet speculated that water vapour and carbon dioxide could be responsible for this insulating effect, and further investigations took place in the 1850s via Eunice Foote, a US amateur scientist and women’s rights campaigner, and John Tyndall, an Irish physicist. In 1896, a major breakthrough in our understanding came via the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who was “the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes were large enough to cause global warming”, and in 1938 the English engineer Guy Stewart Callendar studied historic and present measurements of atmospheric CO2 to “demonstrate that the Earth’s land temperature had increased over the previous 50 years”, proposing that the increase “could be explained as an effect of the increase in carbon dioxide.”

The research of Arrhenius and Callander was, however, generally met with skepticism, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists were able to establish, without any doubt, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere were increasing, and that it was human activity that was responsible. In 1953, in an article entitled, ‘Invisible Blanket’, TIME magazine reported that, “In the hungry fires of industry, modern man burns nearly 2 billion tons of coal and oil each year. Along with the smoke and soot of commerce, his furnaces belch some 6 billion tons of unseen carbon dioxide into the already tainted air.” TIME had been alerted to the problem by the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass, who told the magazine that “[t]his spreading envelope of gas around the earth … serves as a great greenhouse”, and warned that, “At its present rate of increase”, and “if man’s industrial growth continues”, the CO2 in the atmosphere “will raise the earth’s average temperature 1.5° Fahrenheit every 100 years.”

In 1957, two other scientists, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, in California, conducted research into “the rate at which carbon dioxide added by fossil fuel combustion since the start of the industrial revolution had accumulated in the atmosphere”, concluding that the human race was “carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” A newspaper article subsequently suggested that “a large scale global warming, with radical climate changes may result” from the increased CO2 in the atmosphere, which was the first use of the term “global warming.”

Revelle and Seuss subsequently worked with Charles David Keeling, establishing the first research that involved continuous measurements of CO2, which were taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, and have continued to this day.

These findings — later named the Keeling Curve — showed continually increasing CO2 levels from the very beginning of his work at Mauna Loa, with the increases clearly correlating to man-made fossil fuel emissions. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, has called the Keeling Curve “one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century”, and yet in the 1960s it — and the concept of “global warming” — failed to raise alarm bells in society as a whole.

Perhaps this was because the rise didn’t appear spectacular enough, and anything that sounded alarming was forecast to happen in the next century — an unimaginably long time away. Certainly, graphs show that the global mean surface temperature across the planet was around 0.3°C above pre-industrial levels in 1963, but it has, of course, risen inexorably ever since, reaching at least 1.15°C in 2022. Another way of looking at it is that the parts per million (PPM) of CO2 in the atmosphere were about 320 when I was born, but have now reached 420.

With hindsight, however, the warning signs were there — in, for example, the smog, largely caused by Britain’s heavy reliance on burning coal, that led to the Great Smog of London in December 1952, when, according to recent research, as many as 12,000 Londoners died. In 1956, in response to the belated recognition of the impact of this fossil fuel-generated air pollution, the government passed the Clean Air Act, but another severe smog episode occurred in December 1962, when up to 700 people died. In the north, meanwhile, the place of my birth — Salford, where my mum gave birth to me in a maternity hospital — had been commemorated by the folk singer Ewan MacColl, who wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’ (later, memorably, covered by the Pogues) about the polluted atmosphere in Salford and the Greater Manchester area in 1949.

In the US, where most of the most recent research had been taking place, a major breakthrough came on September 27, 1962, five months before my birth, with the publication of ‘Silent Spring’ by the marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson, whose critique of the indiscriminate use of pesticides — whose effects she called “biocides” — sowed the seeds for the environmental movement that assumed ever greater significance throughout the 1970s. For the most part, however, numerous other struggles took precedence over environmental awakening in the 1960s — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the rise of a hedonistic, rock and roll-based youth culture. The Beatles were at the forefront of a British musical invasion, but at home the Swinging Sixties were less revolutionary than in the US — primarily, it seems clear looking back, because the British government wasn’t drafting young men in their tens of thousands to die in a pointless foreign war.

Growing up in Hull

In 1966, my parents moved from Sale to Hull, a largely overlooked city that had grown up around a fishing port on the east coast, and where the poet and librarian Philip Larkin had also moved, in 1955, later writing, in a wry comment on the rather more restrained British approach to social revolution, that “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) – / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”

It was in Hull — or rather, in one of its suburbs, Cottingham — that I spent my childhood and adolescence, and I recall cold winters and significant snowfall, as well as largely temperate summers, as was to be expected from a country with “a humid temperate oceanic climate”, as defined by the Köppen-Geiger climate classification system, with reference to the whole of north-western Europe. As Wikipedia explains, “These climates are dominated all year round by the polar front, leading to changeable, often overcast weather. Summers are mild due to cool ocean currents. Winters are milder than other climates in similar latitudes, but usually very cloudy, and frequently wet.”

That description sums up the climate I grew up with, which seemed somehow static and unchangeable, much more closely tied to local life and the seasons than it became from the 1980s onwards, when giant supermarket chains began to dominate the country, increasingly providing people with whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. Vegetables (and fruit) were seasonal, meat was produced locally and sold by local butchers, milk produced locally was delivered by milk floats, and supermarkets sold only a small range of tinned goods and other products manufactured by US and British companies. Most of our holidays were in the UK, although we took a ferry and drove around Europe when I was four, and again when I was seven, although I didn’t fly anywhere until 1984.

Outside of the streets, parks and fields I played in, my cultural life as a child involved books (and, after the discovery of some Marvel comics on a family holiday in 1972, super-hero comics), a limited amount of TV, and, increasingly, the pop music that, in a religious household with an interest in classical music, I had only stumbled upon when I was transfixed by a jukebox playing ‘He’s So Fine’ by the Chiffons in a motorway service station when I was seven years old. Internationally, my most vivid memories from this time are of the Apollo space missions, culminating in the first moon landing on July 20, 1969.

The 1970s

By 1970, when I was transfixed by the Chiffons, and may have prevailed on my parents to start watching ’Top of the Pops’, the climate crisis went mainstream in the US, when, on May 22, the first Earth Day event took place, with 20 million Americans taking to the streets in peaceful demonstrations calling for environmental reform. Earth Day was largely inspired as a response to a colossal oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, in January 1969, when a blowout from a Union Oil well unleashed over three million gallons of oil, killing over 10,000 seabirds, dolphins, seals, and sea lions, although a rather longer route to its genesis can be traced back to the publication of ’Silent Spring’,and its galvanizing effect on environmental awareness.

Another influence, however, was the ‘Earthrise’ photo taken of the earth by Apollo 8 crew member Bill Anders in December 1968, which, as Australia’s ABC News explained, “shows our entire world as a small and blue and very finite globe”, and which nature photographer Galen Rowell has described as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” It was, ironically, only when we flew into space that we appreciated what an extraordinary and fragile place our planet truly is.

The impact of Earth Day — still commemorated every year, and increasingly global in its scope — led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the passage of numerous acts of pro-environmental legislation in the US, and it was also at this time that two environmental protest groups, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, began to attract widespread support.

Moreover, increasing environmental awareness also led to the UN holding its first Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, in June 1972, and establishing the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The 26 principles established at Stockholm included recognition that “Natural resources must be safeguarded”, that “The Earth’s capacity to produce renewable resources must be maintained”, that “Wildlife must be safeguarded”, that “Non-renewable resources must be shared and not exhausted”, that “Pollution must not exceed the environment’s capacity to clean itself”, and that “Damaging oceanic pollution must be prevented.” In reality, of course, the principles were, sadly, not adhered to, and it was to be another 20 years until the next major push for meaningful change — at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.

On the ground in Hull, however, back in the early ‘70s, my most prominent memories of the time are of the OPEC oil crisis, and the blackout caused by striking miners and railway workers in 1973 and 1974. Both were exotic as a child, as we left our parents to roam the darkened streets at night, and car-sharing briefly became the norm, which struck me, I recall, as somehow more egalitarian than the notion of nuclear families all accumulating and using their own products, without the notion that anything should be shared. It also brought home to me how dependent we all were on fossil fuels, although still no one seemed to be discussing the impact of those fossil fuels on our precious atmosphere.

In the summer of 1976, as the Sex Pistols were declaring ‘Anarchy in the UK’, Britain experienced an unprecedented heatwave. For two months, from June 23 to August 27, relentless sun battered the UK, with the highest June temperature ever recorded in the UK taking place on June 28, when it was 35.6°C, and with the hottest day being July 3, when the temperature reached 35.9°C in Cheltenham.

Because it had been an exceptionally dry 12 months since the summer of 1975, the country was hit by drought, and water rationing had to be introduced. Trees died and crops failed, and massive swarms of seven-spotted ladybirds (over 23 billion according to experts) descended on the south and east of the country, their population having increased massively because the warm spring had hugely increased the population of their prey, aphids. In Hull, as 13 year olds, we killed them for our sport, as Shakespeare would have said, which, afterwards, made me feel rather bad, but I recall also that there was something about them that reminded me of the plagues I had been taught about that were allegedly inflicted on the Egyptians by the God of the Old Testament.

That summer was a freak incident, affecting only Europe — and the UK in particular — but it provided a glimpse of a much more widespread future if anyone had been able to articulate it coherently in the media and in the corridors of power. The Keeling Curve was still rising, after all, but the urgency just wasn’t getting through. Perhaps it would have been lost on me, as I negotiated being a teenager — coping with school, looking for sex (or was it love?), and becoming more and more immersed in the worlds of punk and new wave, and the wild years of Marvel’s experimentation, as the comics company was infiltrated by young writers weaned on America’s counter-culture.

Overall, however, although environmental themes were touched on in the culture of the time — in 1973’s ’Soylent Green’, for example, set in 2022, food shortages caused by overpopulation, pollution and global warming led to humans being killed and processed into food — most of the cultural landscape of the ‘70s didn’t specifically focus on the threat to the viability of life on earth caused by climate change.

The rise of Thatcher

By the end of the decade, however, the anti-authoritarian and anti-materialist impulses that were far more dominant than environmentalism in the culture of the ‘70s were about to be confronted by an alarming political shift, as Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s Prime Minister, driven by a dangerous desire to “liberate” capitalism from what she saw as the constraints of the public ownership of industries and utilities, the power of the trade unions, and the burdens of the welfare state and of high taxation.

Anyone with any sense would have recognised that removing constraints on an economic model that prioritises ever-increasing profits over everything else would be a disaster, but this was not a time of common sense; instead, as the last 44 years have shown, it was the dawning of an age in which a blind belief in the efficacy of “the markets” was to become the driver of economic and political life, with malignant outcomes throughout society and on the wider world, not least in its impact on environmental concerns.

To be continued in Part Two: The 1980s.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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