
In 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming - maryfoxmarlow
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming
======
ChuckMcM
At the time of course Teller was trying to get the nuclear industry out of the
slump it was in rather than save the planet. And it didn't help that he was
"wrong" in his numbers, we have already passed the additional 10% of CO2 (360
ppm) in the atmosphere and New York is not submerged, and Greenland and pole
ice caps are not melted.

So I wonder a bit about what the Guardian is trying to tell us here. That we
should have listened 100 years ago to Teller and taken action? How about to
Pauling and his vitamins, or Toffler and his "future shock", or Erlich's
"Population Bomb"?

All of these topics have the potential to be huge things and deserve the
research funding they received but looking back 100 years and picking out one
that was closer to the truth than the others isn't really helpful unless your
advocating more funding for basic scientific research.

~~~
eesmith
You wrote: "it didn't help that he was "wrong" in his numbers"

That is a misreading of the text.

He said: "Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it
will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5."

The change in the instrumental temperature record from 1959 to now is about
1C, or 1.8F - well within his range of 1-5F.

He also said "there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and
the level of the oceans will begin to rise". He did not, as you summarize it,
say that Greenland and the polar ice caps will have melted.

We believe the ice caps have started to melt, and the oceans begun to rise.

This is within the range of his estimate.

It's possible to calculate what the sea level rise might be if the ice melted.
However, he did not give a time frame for what that would happen.

You wrote "we should have listened 100 years ago to Teller and taken action".

This event was in 1959, which is only 59 years ago. The "100" is because the
talk was on the centennial of the American oil industry.

100 years ago would be closer Arrhenius's original research on the topic, from
1896, than it would be to Teller's talk.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect)

~~~
nkkollaw
You picked 2 unimportant points he made and totally ignored what he was trying
to say.

The point was that many people said many different things that didn't happen
at all, it makes no sense to pick one that guessed it right 59 years later.

~~~
eesmith
My complete answer is in several parts, based on the different threads which
existed before I started.

This part of the thread was to focus on the incorrect reading by ChuckMcM.

I followed up on the "what [ChuckMcM] was trying to say" (I assume the 'he'
refers to ChuckMcM and not Teller) at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16048733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16048733)
, which was posted about 5 minutes before you posted your criticism.

I do not believe that a single wall of text would be a better way to get my
points across.

------
awful
This is from when I was a kid; Dr. Frank Baxter, Unchained Goddess, 1958, I
saw it in the 1960s
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY)

~~~
awful
I mean, if kids were being told about this, why such a surprise that the oil
companies were being warned?

------
Pica_soO
Maybe euthanizing the oil industrial complex with cheap nuclear energy would
have been a good plan. After it was gone- we could have started over.

