The Climate Action Plan subcommittee should be meeting this week, but they have decided to hold meetings in a rather desultory way, every other month.
There just isn't a lot of urgency for actual progress on cutting our emissions in half by 2035.
Here are what may be the first discussions of the greenhouse effect in local news. In scientific journals and in national publications there had been discussions in the early 20th century about carbon dioxide and warming, but nothing meaningful in local media. At the moment, these are strong candidates to be the very first mentions.
While the piece from 1931 is an outlier, the stories from 1956 form a meaningful cluster.
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| June 28th, 1931 |
This note from 1931 minimizes any harm by saying it was a "normal" oscillation.
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| March 16th, 1956 |
This piece from March of 1956 does not dwell on negative consequences.
But another one does.
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| March 16th, 1956 |
A later piece from July also does, and centers on the prospect of ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and coastal flooding.
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| July 22nd, 1956 |
And another from December.
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| December 29th, 1956 |
These are all wire stories, and they do not seem to have registered with any editorial response locally. They appear to have been ignored across the board as something too fringey and too distant, perhaps included in the paper as filler. But today we see the broad outlines as accurate.
There does not seem to be a good capsule biography of Edward O. Hurlburt out there, but wikipedia has a substantial entry on Roger Revelle.
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