The climate crisis? We’ve been investigating it for more than 100 years
Climate warnings have been around for decades. Guardian reporting on the issue dates back as far as 1890 It reads like a summary of the year so far: drought in Europe, floods in Pakistan, and a high pressure system stuck in the North Atlantic, disrupting normal weather patterns. And scientists blaming it all on climate change. But the Guardian article in question was not published in 2022, but in 1978 . Though the climate crisis is a 21st-century emergency, the Guardian and Observer have been investigating its earliest manifestations for more than 100 years. For example, when we reported last year about the fragility of the Gulf Stream , it was our most-read article on the subject but not the first. That came 131 years earlier . The Gulf Stream has changed its course, the piece from 25 January 1890, reported. ... This change, we are told, has been in operation for two years, and as a consequence New England has almost forgotten the rigours of winter. The standard terminology has been around longer than you might think. The first mention of the greenhouse effect came in 1935, when the Observer published a short piece under the heading Three year period of warmth . Two decades later, the phrase global warming was first deployed in a 1957 Guardian article titled Possible melting of polar ice-caps, though in subsequent years, the chief concern was of the weather turning colder, not warmer. By the early 1980s, the idea that human-made greenhouse gas emissions were creating a heat-trapping effect in the atmosphere, slowly warming the planet, was still an embryonic scientific theory. But the Guardian was starting to publish regular explorations of the science and the stakes. In 1980, climate scientist Tom Wigley wrote: In the time it has taken you to read this sentence, mankind has injected another 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, are being consumed at such a rate that scientists predict a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by the middle of the next century. As a consequence, the E arths climate may be altered dramatically causing rainfall, temperature and wind patterns to change. Continue reading . A year later, John Gribbin was one of the first to argue that the greenhouse effect would quickly become a political problem. For several years now, individual climatologists have been warning that a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will change the climate, acting like a blanket around the Earth and warming the globe. But it is only now that politicians are becoming aware first that this an immediate problem affecting decision on energy policy being made now. Continue reading. But the moment that really catapulted the climate on to front pages came in 1988, when Nasa climatologist James Hansen warned the US Congress that the greenhouse effect was causing global warming . At the time, experts were predicting that the Earth could warm by 1-2C by 2030, a warning that now looks prescient. Later that same year, environment correspondent Paul Brown , wrote: Large swaths of the planet will be plunged into misery by climate change in the next 50 years, with many millions ravaged by hunger, water shortages and flooding, according to evidence published yesterday. Prophetic. For the next 16 years, the subject would dominate Browns work. It wasnt always easy, he says: there were times when editors werent convinced that climate change was as important as, say, the recession of the early 1990s. Brown felt otherwise. I realised it was the most important story facing the planet because Id spoken to a lot of scientists who were desperately worried about the situation, he reflected. Brown said that scientists were often careful about speaking out publicly because of backlash from fossil fuel companies. But privately, over a beer on the sidelines of a big conference, they wereterrified. Ive always thought that journalism had a purpose, and one of the purposes was to make life better for the readers, he said. And I thought that climate change was the most important story I was ever going to cover. And it was my job to use all my journalistic skills to get the message out there. I felt that as a newspaper, the Guardian embraced that. Coverage intensified after the Kyoto agreement (1997). The mood grew ever more sombre . David Adam succeeded Brown as environment correspondent in 2005. By now, the climate crisis was generating regular front -page stories , as the UN began issuing terrifying warnings and the subject became political. Environment secretaries told me on more than one occasion you need to give us more stick in the press about what we arent doing, Adam recalled. Our stories would create pressure that enabled them to go to colleagues and say that public opinion is urging us to do more. By 2009, the Guardian sent an unprecedented numbers of journalists to the annual conference of the parties (COP) in Copenhagen. A year later, it championed the 10:10 campaign (to cut carbon emissions by 10 percent in 2010 ). More reporters have been hired and the issue has been declared an editorial priority. In 2019, the news organisation published a pledge that outlined how it intended to intensify its climate journalism, sharpen the language used to describe the crisis , and reduce its own emissions. It reports on pledge progress every year and has since renounced advertising from fossil-fuel extractive industries and divested assets from the sector. The Guardian publishes more than 3,000 pieces of climate-related journalism every year. And its not all gloom and doom. Ever since the outset, its journalists have been as interested in solutions as problems. Reporters were definitely on to something in 1913 when they remarked that solar energy could provide a solution for developing nations. If only it could be tapped ...