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The Conversation
The Conversation
Environment
Marc Hudson, Visiting Fellow, Science Policy, University of Sussex

Climate change first 'went viral' exactly 70 years ago

We have grown so used to many things. To the pictures of wildfires and cremated animals, to the ice sheets calving into the ocean, to the promises of world leaders that they will heed the “last chance” warning of the scientists.

It’s hard for anyone under the age of 40 to remember a time when carbon dioxide build-up, whether it was “the greenhouse effect”, or “global warming” or “climate change” or now “climate crisis”, wasn’t in the news.

The long hot summer of 1988 – 35 years ago – is held as the moment that world leaders began to mouth the right pieties.

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