“The Earth is warming by one degree per century” and “scientists are rejoicing”, it was March 5, 70 years ago

70 years ago today, on March 5, 1954, the newspaper “Paris-Presse” warned us: “The Earth is warming by one degree per century.” The supertitle of the article: “Wheat will soon grow in Siberia and Alaska”, and the subtitle: “…and the English will become winegrowers again”. The article is published on page 6, a sign that the editor-in-chief of “Paris-Presse” does not take too seriously this information offered to them by a 31-year-old journalist, who calls himself Michel Bosquet, but who goes by the name Gerard Horst. A few years later he would be known worldwide under the name André Gorz.

At the time, Gorz was looking for himself. Born in Vienna, spent a few years in Switzerland, where he studied chemical engineering, while discovering the work of Sartre, and writing articles in a left-wing newspaper, “Servir”. He moved to Paris almost five years ago. He first worked for the World Citizens’ Movement, then he joined “Paris-Presse” in 1951, as a journalist. He spent four years there, before joining “l’Express” in 1955. In 1964, he co-founded “le Nouvel Observateur”.

In 1954, for “Paris-Presse”, he wrote articles on various social subjects linked to science (atomic tests, electric automobiles, public health, ionizing waves with unknown effects, radioactivity). Sometimes, reports his biographer Willy Gianinazzi, he writes on foreign affairs. In his articles, he learns the “tricks of objectivity”, as he recounted four years later in his autobiographical essay, “The Traitor”. Each of its articles contains “like a dose of discreet venom, the material for an indictment omitted to let the facts speak”.

The title of this paper from March 5, 1954 is visionary, despite quite a few inaccuracies. Here is the text, with bolded passages and the original intertitle.

Wheat will soon grow in Siberia and Alaska

THE EARTH IS WARMING ONE DEGREE PER CENTURYE

…and the English will become winegrowers again

The globe is warming. Ocean levels continue to rise due to melting glaciers. Another 50 years, and a good part of Northern Europe will be submerged, in particular vast coastal strips of France and Belgium, a good half of Holland, a whole part of Germany, Denmark and Poland . In Iceland, Greenland, Spitsbergen, climatological stations no longer leave any doubt: the globe has entered a period of very rapid warming: one degree centigrade per century, since around 1850. In critical regions, however, the rise in temperature is much more significant: 10° on average in Spitsbergen since 1920. In Canada and Siberia, glacial regions are retreating at a rate of 100 meters to several kilometers per year. Glaciers are retreating by 500 meters per year on average. In Scandinavia, farmers plow fields formerly covered by ice. The coastal strips which, in Europe, are threatened with submersion, will be largely compensated by the northern regions which will become fertile again. Driven out by the waters, the peasants of Northern Europe could find new lands in Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska. England will cultivate vines again.

To explain this rise in temperature, geologists put forward several hypotheses, of which here is the most convincing: it is the industries built by humans which are causing the warming of the Earth. Not, of course, by the heat they give off, but by the gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide that factory chimneys send into the atmosphere.

A thousand billion tons of gas in the atmosphere

Carbon dioxide, of which the atmosphere contains 0.01% or 1,000 billion tons, is in fact the main regulator of the earth’s temperature. Like a polarized screen or the roof of a greenhouse, this gas allows direct rays of the sun to pass through, which heat the atmosphere and the ground. But it prevents heat from escaping back into the vacuum, or at least slows heat loss.

If the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere increases, heat leaks into a vacuum decrease proportionally. However, over the last 50 years, the level of carbon dioxide has increased by approximately 10 percent. Where do the additional 100 billion tonnes come from? Coal burned in factories, answer the scientists who began by looking far away for the causes of an increase which were there, before their eyes.

At a rate of 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of coal burned, These are 4 billion tonnes of gas that chimneys project into the atmosphere each year. Such a considerable supply of gas has disrupted the perfectly balanced economy of the plant and mineral kingdoms.

Plants in fact absorb a thousand billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, almost all of which they return to the atmosphere as they decompose. Only a tiny fraction, around 10 million tonnes, is buried in the ground and lost. Collected over millions of years, it is the origin of coal deposits.

The human economy has come to disturb this balance. At the same time as it suddenly gasifies the world’s carbon reserves, it destroys the forests capable of absorbing them again.

The climate will therefore continue to warm. Scientists are delighted: wheat will grow in Siberia and Alaska. But the northern European countries are much less happy about it. Since the turn of the century, tidal waves have significantly increased in frequency in the North Sea. The Dutch, English, Belgians, and Germans will be forced to work tirelessly on a dike construction program for decades to come.

(UNESCO; News Chronicle London; New York Herald Tribune)

“It was a funny job”: André Gorz and his journalist double