History rhymes again

Tropical storm Ida may soon develop into a dangerous hurricane. So, after five decades of climate change warnings, how many more do we need to make the climate crisis our highest priority?

Aug 27, 2021

On November 6, 1965, the U.S. agreed with Cuba to airlift Cubans who wanted to go to the United States. In the next eight years, around 300,000 Cubans took advantage of this program and left for the country that had played a central role in its domestic politics for a long time.

On that very same day, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.

The report concluded that:

"Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth of the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there."
"By the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties in the atmosphere."

Although the report correctly warned about the increase of carbon dioxide, it noted that it would take a few more years before climate models could reasonably project future global surface temperature changes.

They were right; nine years later, one of the report's authors presented a climate change model that turned out to be remarkably accurate by today's measurements. Of course, some essential aspects of climate change that we know of today were missing in the report, like the warming by other greenhouse gasses or the cooling by aerosol pollution, but these more or less leveled out each other's impacts.

The urgent and the important

Johnson had other things on his mind than the first climate change report on the desk of an American president. November 1965 is the month of the U.S. forces' first major battle in Vietnam. Meanwhile, society was rapidly changing; it was the year of civil rights marches and anti-war protests.

Had Johnson put on the radio on November 6, 1965, he would have heard America's number one single of that week. Starting with Charlie Watts' spectacular rhythm that provided the spine of 'Get Off My Cloud,' while Mick Jagger sang about 'looking out the window, imagining the world has stopped.'

But the world didn't stop. American intervention didn't stop (only sometimes for good reasons), nor did anyone stop climate change (for no good reason). Instead, the wheel of history started spinning faster and faster, a trend that hasn't stopped. I could fill this page with exponentially growing graphs beginning in 1965: use of resources, production, pollution, population, defense spending, or the number of fast-food restaurants in the city where you are living.

Those graphs lead to other exponential growing graphs, like greenhouse gas emissions or rising atmospheric temperatures and destruction by extreme weather events. Thirty years later, Jagger described the song as a post-teenage-alienation song; "the grown-up world was a very ordered society in the '60s, and I was coming out of it." And I guess we all joined.

Tropical Storm Ida: probability fo tropical-storm-force winds (map: NOAA)

Today's main headline news covers the airlift from Kabul and the tropical storm Ida, which formed yesterday evening near the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. Experts fear that Ida will intensify quickly. It is nearing hurricane status as it approaches Cuba and may develop into a powerful hurricane by the time it reaches the Louisiana Gulf Coast on Sunday. By then, it is likely to be still strengthening, which would make it a much more damaging storm at landfall than a weakening storm at similar wind speeds.

It is too early to tell how this one will end, but it is soon enough for all people in the area to take measures. I don't think history should guide us on predicting events on specific dates, but let's call it a reminder of past events that meteorologists expect Ida to make landfall precisely on the 16th anniversary of hurricane Katrina.

The case for climate action

The measures should, of course, be more structural than local preparedness in the days before a hurricane strikes. Scientists predict an increase of quickly intensifying storms as they approach landfall as a consequence of climate change. If we don't collectively and efficiently tackle climate change, we will get more extreme weather, human suffering, and inequality. It is frustrating to know that scientists warned the president of the most powerful nation in the world about the effects of burning too many fossil fuels more than half a century ago.

I suppose Johnson never read the report, presidents get a lot on their desks, and he had urgent news asking for this attention. One of his predecessors, Eisenhower, knew all about the urgent and important principle. Each president since (well, I can think of one exception), and every kid at school, understands the principle, but they all struggle to act upon it. The climate crisis is the perfect example.

As a last thought before I close, the report that Johnson received speaks in its final paragraph about a possible fix for climate change. The report recommends further investigating: 'injection of condensation or freezing nuclei that will form cause cirrus clouds to form at high altitudes.' It is an early reference to geo-engineering. So let me end with the words of Mick Jagger, who sang in that same week in early November 1965: ‘Get off my cloud.’

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