Conversation

Edward Teller is mainly famous as the "father of the hydrogen bomb". But he wasn't dumb. He was invited to speak in 1959 at a big party in New York for the 100th birthday of the oil industry - a party put on by the American Petroleum Institute. Over 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, and industry executives were there.

And this is what he said:

‘”Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide.... The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?"

“Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect …. a temperature rise …. sufficient to melt the icecaps and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming