The climate change debate - Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction - page 18

Cold War science
Spencer Weart, the director of the Center of History of Physics at the American Institute of
Physics, contends that all the scientific facts about enhanced atmospheric CO 2 and potential
global warming were assembled by the late 1950s to early 1960s. He argues that it was
only due to the physical geosciences being favoured financially in the Cold War environ-
ment that so much of the fundamental work on global warming was completed. Gilbert
Plass published an article in 1959 in Scientific American declaring that the world's temper-
ature would rise by 3°C by the end of the century. The magazine editors published an ac-
companying photograph of coal smoke belching from factories and the caption read, 'Man
upsets the balance of natural processes by adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere each year.' This resembles thousands of magazine articles, television news
items, and documentaries that we have all seen since the late 1980s. So why was there a
delay between the science of global warming being accepted and in place in the late 1950s
and early 1960s and the sudden realization by those outside the scientific community of the
true threat of global warming during the late 1980s?