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.
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...
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.
Is this snarky comment really all you have to contribute to the conversation? At least make the effort to do the math. The conference occurred in November 1959, around 59 years ago. This is well before consensus about the reality of global warming began to form among atmospheric scientists. That's the point of this article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
You state "59 years ago ... well before the consensus about the reality of global warming began to form." And I had pointed out that 59 years ago there were several different threats to the world that were pointed out by brilliant people, what is the point of going back and cherry picking one that panned out? (the others haven't)
I really did not see any point to the article. Since you did (see the point) , and you assert that the point involved the timing of the conference and the discussion it contained, what is that relevant to? The greenhouse effect was discovered in the 19th century[1], and by 1959 it was common knowledge. Teller was doing a nice side by side comparison of energy technologies in 1959 and notes one side effect that burning fossil fuels has, based on 19th century science, that nuclear power does not.
When I read that article I felt that it creates a false narrative that somehow the petroleum industry was 'warned' and then through 'and its conspiracy of silence, deceit, and obstruction' somehow blocked something. And my argument is that this is silly, if we were to take any scientific hypothesis as fact and start acting before the science was in (and I gave several examples of where that would have been 'bad') we (collectively) would have made the wrong choice.
Erlich/Simons bet. Erlich lost. The limits to growth are misunderstood and relate more to the rate of exploration and exploitation under economic forces, than actual hard limits of resource in geology.
Pauling vitamins.. turns out mega doses kill. Vitamin D toxicity is a thing.
Kinda not melted. In geological time ranges, his error is statistical noise.
