[jhellan]

We all knew. I learned about CO2 greenhouse warming in high school in 1974. At a lecture at the University of Trondheim, Norway, around 1980, (in)famous physicist Edward Teller joked that we of all people shouldn't be worried about global warming.

[mangecoeur]

This! I've noticed a pattern recently of headlines that person X or company Y "knew all the way back in the 70s/80s". The real tragedy is that we have delayed doing anything about it for so long, people are now "rediscovering" the original warnings as if they are historical revelations.

As a quick refresher: the original climate deal, the Kyoto Protocol, was signed in 1992, by then everyone was well on board with the science. In fact, the climate negotiations were spun off from the convention on reducing CFCs (Vienna Convention of 1985), which are important greenhouse gases as well as being damaging to the ozone layer. It was thought (correctly) at the time that because CFCs were produced and used in a limited number of places, it would be much easier to resolve that problem and move the wider greenhouse gas negotiations into a separate treaty, which took another 7 years until 1992.

[chx]

Teller warned the oil industry in 1959. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

[soulofmischief]

I know Teller wanted to come across as calm and respectable so that people would take him seriously, but if he could look back now he would probably have acted like a deranged lunatic preaching in the streets about the dangers of carbon pollution.

I also think the same of Carl Sagan. For all his wonderful and critical achievements, I bet if he could see how things turned out, he would have unquestioningly devoted his life to spreading awareness about climate change here on Earth instead of focusing on astronomy and nuclear war.