When Did Big Oil Know About The Oncoming Climate Disaster? 1959, Thanks To Edward Teller
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Dunlop didn’t say what storm clouds specifically threatened the expansion of oil and gas. But the next “Energy and Man” speaker did. That speaker vividly described a new and unexpected threat to the industry: its vast and growing emissions of a greenhouse gas called carbon dioxide. Edward Teller was no back-to-nature romantic. The scientist who took the podium after Dunlop was known primarily for his lead role in creating the world’s first weapons of mass destruction. Teller was part of a secret government team at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that during the 1940s developed atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing the deaths of over 200,000 people. Yet Teller began his talk at Columbia by warning of a threat that was potentially greater than nuclear destruction. “And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere,” he said.
It’s no coincidence that Teller was aware of the latest climate science. During the same period when it was funding early atomic research, the U.S. military was also looking closely into earth sciences. This included Project Gabriel, a classified study of the impact of nuclear weapons on weather patterns launched by the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1949. In subsequent studies, military scientists sought to figure out through models the best weather conditions for explosions and how detonating nuclear weapons could affect the natural world. It was during the course of such research that these scientists first coined the term “environmental sciences.”
Teller knew the audience at Columbia might find it hard to be too concerned about carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that can’t be seen by the human eye and poses no immediate danger to people’s health. “So why should one worry about it?” he asked. Teller then provided an intro to the burgeoning field of climate science: “[CO2’s] presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect in that it will allow the solar rays to enter, but it will to some extent impede the radiation from the Earth into outer space. The result is that the Earth will continue to heat up until a balance is re-established.”
The impacts, he warned, could be catastrophic. “It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York,” he said. “All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.” This wasn’t the first time Teller had delivered such a warning. In late 1957, he’d spoken to members of the American Chemical Society about the impact of burning coal and oil, stating that the carbon emissions coming out of chimney and exhaust pipes could someday change the climate and melt a large portion of the polar icecaps. This had apparently caught the oil industry’s attention. In October 1959, the month before Teller’s Columbia speech, Royal Dutch Shell scientist M.A. Matthews published a paper saying he didn’t think Teller’s prediction would come true because “nature’s carbon cycles are so vast that there seem few grounds for believing Man will upset the balance.”
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https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/09/16/Petro-Elite-Warned-Climate-Calamity-1959/
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