Fintan O’Toole: All my life there have been climate warnings. We’re ingenious at ignoring them

‘Antarctic Thaw Poses World Threat’. Variants on that headline appeared everywhere last week as we learned that the Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk to a new record low, and is melting at a rate of 150 billion tonnes a year. But this particular headline is from The Irish Times. And it’s from January 26th, 1978. It’s on the bottom of page 6, below the news that George Best was on honeymoon after his wedding in Las Vegas.

I was 19 then. If I read the short summary of a paper by a polar scientist John Mercer, published in the scientific journal Nature, about what was going to happen to the Antarctic it made no impression on me. But it has turned out to be eerily accurate.

Mercer said that once the ice started to melt, its loss would be rapid. To avoid this we had “to make the massive effort needed to switch over from fossil fuels to other energy sources”. That word “massive” is probably the only debatable one. Compared to the effort that is necessary now, the task the world would have faced in 1978, had it chosen to act, would have been minimal.

In fact, though, the predictability of what is now happening has been understood since before I was born. The scientists who predicted it were not marginal prophets.

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The Hungarian-American nuclear physicist Edward Teller is, with good reason, one of the villains of this summer’s blockbuster Oppenheimer. But in the 1950s he was, as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”, a Cold War hero and perhaps the most influential scientist in America.

In November 1959, when I was a year old, Teller addressed a conference called Energy and Man at Columbia University in New York. Its purpose was to celebrate the centenary of the US oil industry. Teller surprised his audience by telling them that he wished to address “the question of contaminating the atmosphere… Whenever you burn conventional fuel you create carbon-dioxide… Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.”

Left unchecked, he warned, this effect would cause the polar ice caps to melt and “submerge New York”. He added: “I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

[ Fintan O’Toole: Our habit of jetting off to sun holidays won’t end well. Just ask Icarus ]

It’s not hard to find warnings from even earlier dates. In September 1955, the New York Times carried, in a Science Notes feature on page 156 of its voluminous Sunday edition, a short item under the headline Why Earth Warms. It summarised a talk given by Dr John E Hutton, of the giant multinational General Electric, explaining the greenhouse effect quite precisely. He pointed to deforestation and to “air contamination by automobiles, trucks, trains and ships, with an increase in the number of factories and refineries and other means of pouring carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere”. Thus, the paper reported, “Dr Hutton’s conclusion that it is man who is warming up the earth and not nature”.

When I was 11 the New York Times was quoting J O Fletcher, a physicist at the establishment think tank the Rand corporation, as saying that “man had ‘only a few decades to solve the problem’ of global warming caused by pollution”.

When I was 19 William Nordhaus, a member of President Jimmy Carter’s council of economic advisers, was warning that “to avoid accumulation in the air of sufficient carbon-dioxide to cause major climate changes… by early in the next century, the burning of coal, oil and gas might have to be curtailed by taxation or rationing”.

And by 1981, when I was 23, the concrete evidence of the human-created greenhouse effect was being reported. In that year a team of federal scientists in the US predicted “a global warming of ‘almost unprecedented magnitude’ in the next century. It might even be sufficient to melt and dislodge the ice cover of West Antarctica.”

I’ve written in different contexts (especially the Irish one) about “unknown knowns”, but this is the greatest of them all. The fact catastrophic human-induced climate change has been fully understood during the whole lives of people who are now approaching their 70s.

But for most of those lives it has been perfectly possible not to grasp it, touch it, feel it, or take it personally. It has been “out there”, not “in here”, not internalised as a lens through which we see the world.

Perhaps, though, there is some hope in that very failure. For just as there are tipping points in climate change that should terrify us (the loss of the Antarctic ice sheet being one of them), there are tipping points in collective human consciousness as well.

There are lots of other things over the course of my lifetime that were unknown knowns – industrial schools and Magdalene laundries, for example. The evidence for all of them was even more overwhelming yet we were collectively ingenious in ignoring it.

Once we could no longer manage that cognitive trick these realities, deliberately unknown for so long, became appalling and unacceptable. This switch happened very rapidly and it is irreversible.

Humans can go on for whole lifetimes keeping certain kinds of knowledge at bay. But when the defences are breached awareness floods in and saturates reality.