Carbon Dioxide, Congress, and the President -- 50 Years Ago

By: Bob Henson , 4:32PM,GMT on February 7,2015

The human-induced rise in greenhouse gases typically heats up the room when it’s discussed on Capitol Hill. Yet the issue scarcely gained notice when it was brought to the attention of Congress by President Lyndon Johnson a half-century ago this weekend. On February 8, 1965, Johnson delivered a “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty.” The bulk of the message dealt with land and water conservation, highway beautification, and other goals now considered mainstream. Tucked midway through the text was this observation: “Large-scale pollution of air and waterways is no respecter of political boundaries, and its effects extend far beyond those who cause it. Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”


Figure 1. Scenes like this--from an industrial section of Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1973--were once commonplace in the largest U.S. cities. Image credit: Frank J. Aleksandrowicz/National Archives and Records Administration.

Johnson’s message came years before passage of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, at a time when air- and stream-fouling pollutants were far more prevalent than today and litter was a national scourge yet to be seriously tackled. As the public discussion turned to these assorted but related threats in the late 1960s, carbon dioxide remained far in the background, but concern among scientists been building for years. A crucial paper by Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), published in the journal Tellus in February 1957, noted the rise of carbon dioxide levels and warned: “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”

A few months after that paper, Charles David Keeling launched the routine measurements of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa that continue today. The data quickly made it clear that CO2 in the global atmosphere was increasing year over year. The topic even gained enough traction for famed director Frank Capra (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) to include a reference to to it in an hour-long TV special in 1958, “The Unchained Goddess.” Part of the nine-episode Bell Laboratory Science Series, which aired between 1956 and 1964, the program focused mainly on weather but warned of the ultimate potential for dire effects from the unchecked growth of carbon dioxide. It noted that, at the time, more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide were being emitted each year due to human activity. Emissions in 2013 totalled more than 39 billion tons (36 billion metric tons).


Video 1. Here’s a dramatic one-minute excerpt from the 1958 film by director Frank Capra illustrating the expected effects of high-end global warming. Capra was a scientist who graduated from California Institute of Technology in 1918 and did many science films for education while working for Bell Labs.

I touched base this week with Spencer Weart, author of the superb book “The Discovery of Global Warming,” whose entire contents (plus extra material) are available online through the American Institute of Physics. Weart pointed out: “Revelle and Keeling already understood that the carbon dioxide buildup could have dangerous long-term impacts, such as a devastating rise of sea level.” A few months after Johnson’s message to Congress, a presidential advisory committee produced “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.” This report (see PDF) included a section calling out possible effects of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, including melting of the Antarctic ice cap, warming of sea water, increased acidity of freshwater, and an increase in photosynthesis. The report concluded, rather dryly, that “ . . . climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”

For more on Johnson’s message to Congress, and a related conversation that was tape-recorded in the White House just days earlier, see this excellent Daily Climate article by Marianne Lavelle.

Bob Henson