Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/02/a-1968-book-predicts-life-in-t.html
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The predictions about global warming look impressive, until you realize the issue was already on the political radar in the mid-1960s, and that president Lyndon Johnson already received a detailed scientific assessment of the risks of rising CO2 levels in 1965:
Most of the basic science around climate change actually dates back to the nineteenth century, and the term “greenhouse effect” was coined at least a century ago:
We’ve know about climate change a remarkably long time.
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Seems to me a lot of these non-fiction attempts at prognostication get outdated with such alarming rapidity that they’re barely worth picking up at all.
But I cannot hesitate to link to E.M. Forester’s The Machine Stops, which managed to get so much right over a hundred years ago.
http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
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MORE AMAZING THAN SCIENCE FICTION
How is this not science fiction?
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Atom bomb powered fracking?! Holy crap. Please, no one tell the Republicans about this idea.
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From 1960:
The there’s this from NPR this morning:
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“…compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records),” Pool predicts. “That is, he will have the technological capacity to do so. Will he have the legal right?”
Depends. How big is the market cap of his silicon valley company?
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1965 is nothing, it was pointed out back in 1899: http://www.colby.edu/sts/controversy/pages/9historical.pdf
In 1899, Nils Eckholm, an early and eager spokesman for anthropogenic climate control, pointed out that at present rates, the burning of pit coal could double the concentration of atmospheric CO2. This would “undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the Earth.”
The concept of global warming wasn’t remotely new in the 60s.
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Yes, exactly. That’s what I said. Eckholm is the originator of the term ‘greenhouse effect’ described in the second link I posted.
The new thing in the 1960s, was that scientists brought it to the attention of the then US president.
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Did they include anti-agathics?
That’s funny, I own the Hebrew version of the book which I bought a few years ago and suddenly remembered, I started doing a series of Facebook posts about it. They got a lot right (Population, communication technology) and some hilariously wrong (3D holograms by 1986, Wars fought only by robots in space).
Also for some reason the Hebrew version is called “Toward the year 2019”
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Perhaps it was published one year later, in 1969?
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