The Age of Global Warming: A History (5 page)

4

First Stirrings

Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved                

To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,

And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,

And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice

That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou,

O Derwent! winding among grassy holms

Where I was looking on, a babe in arms,

Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts

To more than infant softness, giving me

Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind

A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm                   

That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

William Wordsworth

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the rudiments of a mechanism of man-made global warming had been documented. And as if to confirm it, temperatures rose through the first decades of the new century. According to a 1922 newspaper report, the Arctic seemed to be warming up. Fishermen, seal hunters and explorers sailing the seas around Spitsbergen and the eastern Arctic pointed to ‘a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures … Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted’.
[1]

  The 1930s was a hot decade in North America. 1934 would vie with 1998 as the warmest year of the twentieth century (NASA’s Goddard Institute, one of the custodians of the global temperature records, would have difficulty deciding which was the hotter). Six of the fifteen hottest Julys since 1895 were in that decade – each year from 1930 to 1936 except 1932.
[2]
The 1936 heat wave, which killed five thousand people, set temperature records, some of which have not been exceeded.
[3]
Dust bowl storms swept the American prairie, caused by severe drought and soil erosion, described by a NASA climate scientist as ‘the major climatic event in the nation’s history’.
[4]

The Central England temperature series, the longest reliable temperature series in the world, shows temperatures rising from the middle of the 1890s, a partial decline in the first decade of the twentieth century, followed by a rising plateau over the next three decades.
[5]
  Data from Nordic countries also conforms to a broad pattern of rising temperatures to peak around 1940.
[6]
 

Might this have been caused by industrialisation?

One man thought so. Guy Stewart Callendar was born in 1898, two years after Arrhenius’s 1896 paper. The son of a distinguished Cambridge physicist, Callendar was a talented scientist specialising in the thermodynamics of steam and kept copious notes on temperature and climate records. In 1938, Callendar published a paper on
The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature
.

Temperatures, as measured by two hundred weather stations worldwide, had risen and the five years 1934–38 were easily the warmest such period at several stations whose records started up to one hundred and eighty years earlier. Humans had added one hundred and fifty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere since the end of the nineteenth century, around three quarters of which was still in the atmosphere. Callendar estimated that the higher level of carbon dioxide was a major factor explaining the temperature rise, accounting for two thirds of the warming trend of 0.005 degrees centigrade a year experienced in the first half of the twentieth century.

Global warming was first known in scientific circles as the Callendar Effect.
[7]
If the 1930s’ Dust Bowl had happened fifty or sixty years later, it doesn’t require much imagination to guess what it would have been blamed on.
*
Why did it take half a century for the Callendar Effect to be transformed from a scientific curiosity into a planet-threatening crisis?

In the 1930s, there were more pressing issues – the Depression, recovery from the First World War and the threat of a Second, the rise of fascism and communism and the retreat of the nineteenth-century liberal order. 

Something else had to change.

Attitudes towards man’s interference in nature underwent a profound transformation over the course of the twentieth century. Nowadays, it is (pre-)judged as bad, manifested in opposition to genetically modified food crops; foregoing the opportunity to wipe-out malarial mosquitoes in Africa with the use of DDT and the banning of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), a non-toxic chemical used in a wide variety of applications believed by some to be a cancer-causing toxin. At the beginning of the twentieth century, science was allied with industrial progress in benefiting mankind.

This transformation is reflected in changed attitudes towards global warming. Arrhenius thought that burning fossil fuels would accelerate a virtuous cycle in preventing a rapid return to the conditions of the ice age, removing the need for a forced migration from temperate countries to Africa. It might even inaugurate a new carboniferous era of enormous plant growth.
[8]
Callendar shared this belief. Carbon dioxide emissions would extend agriculture northwards, stimulate plant growth and, quite possibly, indefinitely delay return of the ‘deadly glaciers.’
[9]
Callendar was to have direct experience of the benefits of intervening in nature. During the Second World War, Callendar designed the FIDO fog dispersal system for the Royal Air Force. ‘There is no need,’ Churchill said, ‘to fight the enemy and the weather at the same time.’
[10]
 

America was first to experience the impact of concern about nature on politics. There, it reflected the cultural values of its leaders, especially Theodore Roosevelt.

After the First World War, Britain imported environmental ideas from Germany, where they were grafted on to an indigenous strain of urban nostalgia for the countryside. Far from America being an inspiration, British environmentalists saw America’s commercial culture as embodying the features they most detested in their own. For many of them, Germany showed the path back to nature.

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister’s stories and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with lost Atlantis”, gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.
[11]
  

Theodore Roosevelt’s need for nature never left him. As president, Roosevelt would often take his companions on lengthy point-to-point walks, walking in a dead straight line.

On several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes. I remember one such occasion when the French ambassador, Jusserand … was along, and just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody said, ‘Mr Ambassador, Mr Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves,’ to which he promptly responded, ‘I think I will leave them on; we might meet ladies.’
[12]

It is hard to imagine the Marquis of Salisbury, the inhabitant of Downing Street when Roosevelt took office, leading such an expedition. Salisbury took no exercise other than riding a tricycle around his estate at Hatfield House and grew immensely fat.

The vigour espoused by Roosevelt contrasts with the solitary contemplation of Henry David Thoreau, who spent two years living on the edge of Walden Pond in the 1840s. Thoreau’s was a radical rejection of civilisation. He pitied the young men who inherited farms and houses and cattle. Better to have been born in open pasture and suckled by wolves, so they might see their fields made them ‘serfs of the soil.’
[13]
  To Roosevelt, it was ‘right and necessary’ that the way of life of the Wild West should pass – ‘the safety of our country lies in its being made the country of the small home-maker.’
[14]
Both men shared what Ralph Waldo Emerson called an original relation to the Universe. ‘I am no worshipper of Hygeia,’ the Greek goddess of health, Thoreau wrote, ‘but rather of Hebe … who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigour of youth,’
[15]
a sentiment that accords with Roosevelt’s philosophy of the strenuous life.

As a child, Roosevelt seemed destined to become a naturalist. He assembled a collection of rare birds and mammals that he later donated to the Smithsonian. He had an astonishing ear for birdsong. On a walk in England’s Itchen Valley with Lord Grey, the British foreign secretary, having heard a bird sing, all he needed to know was its name, and it was unnecessary to tell him more. ‘He knew the kind of bird it was, its habit and appearance. He just wanted to complete his knowledge by hearing the song,’ Lord Grey recalled.
[16]

‘More was accomplished for the protection of wild life in the United States than during all the previous years, excepting only the creation of the Yellowstone National Park,’ Roosevelt wrote of his time in the White House.
[17]
He acted, he said, ‘to preserve from destruction beautiful and wonderful wild creatures whose existence was threatened by greed and wantonness’, overseeing the creation of five national parks, four big game refuges, fifty-one bird reservations and the enactment of laws to protect the wildlife of Alaska.
[18]

Roosevelt also subscribed to the depletionist scare first popularised by Jevons the previous century. ‘The idea still obtained,’ Roosevelt later wrote, ‘that our natural resources were inexhaustible.’
[19]
He invited state governors and the presidents of societies concerned with natural resources – the environmental NGOs of the day – to a three day conference held in May 1908 at the White House. ‘It is doubtful whether, except in time of war, any new idea of like importance has ever been presented to a Nation and accepted by it with such effectiveness and rapidity,’ Roosevelt wrote.
[20]

The conference established the National Conservation Commission, led by Gifford Pinchot, one of the leading conservationists of the era. Published six months later, the commission’s report estimated that America’s natural gas fields would run out within twenty-five years and its oilfields by the middle of the century. Coal was less of a worry. Reserves appeared adequate to the middle of the twenty-first century.
[21]
When it was sent to Congress in January 1909, the report was described as ‘one of the most fundamentally important documents ever laid before the American people’.
[22]

With less than three months of his presidential term left, Roosevelt decided to convene a North American Conservation Conference. It met in February (some things happened faster at the beginning of the twentieth century than at its end). The conference decided that the issue needed to be elevated from a continental to a global level – ‘all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources, and their inventory, conservation and wise utilisation’.
[23]
Before February was out, the US government had sent invitations to forty-five governments. On 4
th
March, Roosevelt’s term was over and the project lapsed. It would take another sixty-three years before the first global conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972 and not, as Roosevelt had planned, in 1909 at The Hague.

Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership had brought nature into American politics, uniting the nascent environmental movement already prone to division. Conservationists, led by Gifford Pinchot, were depletionists following in Jevons’ footsteps and believed in taking a utilitarian approach to the use of natural resources. Preservationists such as John Muir, the first president of the Sierra Club, founded in 1892, rejected the Conservationists’ utilitarianism. For Muir, as for Emerson and Thoreau, nature was a transcendental reality. Nature was needed for men’s souls, not for meeting their material needs. Roosevelt vaulted over Muir’s breach with Pinchot. Pinchot had advocated allowing sheep – hoofed locusts, Muir called them – to graze in forest reserves.  Roosevelt spent three days with Muir in Yosemite and, acting at Muir’s prompting, expanded the Yosemite National Park.

The First World War heightened American concerns about energy supplies, a ‘case of national jitters’ after the narrow escape from acute energy scarcity in 1917–18.
[24]
The 1917 Lever Act put the coal industry under government control, setting prices, allocating supply and requisitioning firms not acting in the public interest, all of which helped trigger America’s first energy crisis – lightless nights, heatless Mondays, shutdowns of factories producing non-essential items, and fuel riots.
[25]

Those jitters led to the creation of the United States Coal Commission in 1922. Its three-thousand-page report, assembled by a five-hundred-strong team, sounded the alarm of impending scarcity – the output of natural gas had begun to wane and the production of oil could not long maintain its present rate. As for coal, rather than analyse the impact of government regulation in restricting supply (the geology of the United States hadn’t changed in the fourteen years since the findings of Roosevelt’s National Conservation Commission), it argued that output of coal would struggle to meet demand.
[26]

Appointed by President Harding, the commission’s report was received by his successor, Calvin Coolidge. The new president responded to the commission’s report in his first annual message to Congress in December 1923. Acknowledging that the price of coal was ‘unbearably high’, Coolidge gave the barest of nods to its depletionist case and made plain he was not going to intervene in the coal industry. ‘The Federal Government probably has no peacetime authority to regulate wages, prices, or profits in coal at the mines or among dealers, but by ascertaining and publishing facts it can exercise great influence,’ Coolidge declared. The real threat to coal supplies was not from imminent resource depletion. It was the coal industry’s poor labour relations. On this front, Coolidge promised ‘uncompromising action’, urging passage of legislation to settle labour dispute as ‘exceedingly urgent’.
[27]

Coolidge’s stand stemmed the depletionist tide for much of the Roaring Twenties. Although Pinchot contemplated running against Coolidge for the Republican nomination in the 1924 election, he decided not to. The Depression in the 1930s reversed the tide. The assumptions underpinning much of Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era economic policies ran in the opposite direction. High prices and the dangers of scarcity gave way to low prices and glut, which were blamed for worsening the Depression.

In Europe, calls for a return to nature between the two world wars were a reaction to modernity rather than an articulation of modern man’s need for it – with one major exception.  Often they embodied a call to return to the ways of the past; sometimes they were linked to questions of national identity and, on occasion, more than tinged with blood-and-soil nationalism.

The few voices from the political Left tended to be outside the mainstream. The Marxist belief in scientific socialism and the coming dictatorship of the proletariat made communists such as Lenin ideologically hostile to attempts to battle the laws of history. The British Labour party, in the words of Ernest Bevin, emerging out of the bowels of the trade union movement, was hardly in the business of turning the working class into peasants. Elsewhere in Europe, peasant-orientated movements and parties were not about recovering man’s relationship with nature, but pressing claims for land redistribution from landlord to tenant.
[28]

In its attitude to nature, National Socialism, together with its British offshoot, was profoundly different from Italian fascism and similar movements elsewhere in Europe, which placed culture and nature as conflicting entities, elevating culture above nature. This led to tension between Italy and Germany when Mussolini embarked on a programme of cutting down trees in the South Tyrol.
[29]
According to Anna Bramwell in her courageous book,
Ecology in the 20
th
Century
,