The Australians who sounded the climate alarm 55 years ago: ‘I’m surprised others didn’t take it as seriously’

Australia will join other countries at Cop29 to discuss the escalating climate crisis, but some political and scientific leaders have been talking about it for decades

Half a century ago, Richard Gun stood on the floor of parliament and became the first known Australian political figure to warn about the “sinister” threat posed by climate breakdown. Today his maiden speech is a distant memory.

“I never thought of myself as the first politician to issue a warning about climate change,” he says. “At the time it seemed to me an existential threat to our civilisation and it seemed like a sufficiently important issue to mention.

“Looking back, I’m a bit surprised other people didn’t take it as seriously.”

As Australia prepares to participate in Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Gun’s largely forgotten warning provides a poignant milestone to help measure the country’s action on the climate emergency.

With greenhouse gas emissions rising, fossil fuel production expanding, and devastating fire and floods becoming more frequent, the scale of these threats underscores the warnings given by political and scientific leaders all those years ago – and the amount of wasted time.

Gun is a retired doctor who remains involved with the University of Adelaide and is still active on the issue of climate breakdown. When he first entered parliament in 1969 as the newly elected Labor member for Kingston in Adelaide’s southern suburbs, he was 33 years old.

He began his March 1970 speech by addressing what he called “the problem of cities” and highlighting “an alarming tendency to put cars first and people last”. Halfway through, he pivoted to another issue he was deeply concerned about – growing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“But, whatever these ingenious proposals can do in reducing smog, they still cannot prevent consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide,” he said. “It is the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which may be the most sinister of all effects.

“The only way that this can be controlled is by reducing the amount of combustion taking place.”

The statements were found by Dr Marc Hudson, a climate and energy transitions academic who says that until Gun there was “no good evidence that Australians were paying close attention” to growing concerns about the greenhouse effect like people were in the US.

“After Gun we start to find other people in federal parliament raising alarm early in the early 1970s,” Hudson says. “This matters because it should make us cautious about the idea that what is lacking is information. It forces us think about [how] this is also about resistance to change – psychologically, economically and financially.”

Senate committee’s air pollution warning

Gun partly attributes his awareness about climate breakdown to the joint Senate select committee on air pollution, which published the results of its investigation in 1969.

Though its focus was air pollution more broadly, the Senate committee directly addressed the risk posed by the climate crisis: “Man has been using the atmosphere as a huge rubbish dump into which is being poured millions of tons of waste products each year,” it said.

The report did not return to the issue again but its warning marks the first known time an arm of the Australian government recognised the impending threat – an insight that appears to originate with remarkable evidence given by the Tasmanian scientist Prof Harry Bloom.

Bloom was the chair of chemistry at the University of Tasmania. His initial scientific work concerned molten salts and he briefly had a stint with the storied Truesdail Laboratories in the US.

At a hearing in Hobart on 6 February 1969, Bloom delivered an impassioned speech – described by one senator present as an “address” – which outlined his frustration that no one was talking about the threat posed by growing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

“If carbon dioxide built up to such an extent in the Earth’s atmosphere as to trap radiation from the sun and cause climatic conditions to change all over the world, perhaps heating the whole world and melting the ice caps, nothing could be done about it at that stage,” Bloom said. “At this stage, when we recognise the problem exists we ought to do something about it before it becomes too late.”

When challenged by a senator who suggested he was overreacting, Bloom insisted he had “seen some very highly scientific studies of this matter” but did not name which, even as he insisted there was “no doubt” he was correct.

Bloom was ahead of the curve but his early warning has received little recognition. Graeme Pearman, the renowned Australian scientist who first began investigating the science of climate change at the CSIRO, met Bloom later in his career but said he “had no inkling” the chemist had an interest in the issue.

Bloom passed away suddenly, aged 70, in 1992. His son, Walter, who maintains a collection of his father’s papers, says he was surprised to learn about his father’s early concern over climate breakdown. He also does not know where his father first encountered the issue.

Walter does, however, remember the fierce backlash that followed his father’s fight on environmental issues, an experience that foreshadowed the campaign against climate science.

Bloom later advocated for phasing out leaded petrol but is best known for raising alarm about heavy metal pollution in the Derwent River from heavy industry.

In response, a local paper ran a front-page story labelling him “The Prophet of Doom” and Walter recalls how the wives of fishers organised an “oyster-bake” where they spent a day eating river shellfish to prove there was no issue. At one point, Walter recalls someone scrawled a swastika on the front fence of the family home.

“I remember the police and the efforts to clean this thing off,” Walter says. “You have to realise that we had no Jewish upbringing whatsoever … I think of a line that is often falsely attributed to Albert Einstein that says: ‘Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.’

“People get emotional about these things. They think that their livelihood is in trouble, or their friend’s livelihood is in trouble, or they won’t be able to eat oysters again, so they react.”

Today the University of Tasmania awards a prize in Bloom’s name for the best honours thesis in chemistry. Prof Anthony Koutoulis, the university’s deputy vice-chancellor of research, says Bloom should be lauded.

“Harry Bloom’s foresight was extraordinary – he anticipated the environmental crises we now grapple with daily,” Koutloulis says.

“His work highlighted the vital role of science as both an early warning system and a call to action. At a time when few were listening, Bloom was sounding the alarm about the planetary costs of inaction.”

When it comes to the “calamitous failure of the political consensus to follow scientific consensus” in Australia, Gun says that he did not anticipate the level of pushback from industry or the level of climate denial that he later witnessed.

“It still astonishes me. To deny the greenhouse effect is to deny the laws of physics. Why otherwise clever people would take such a position is a mystery,” he says.

Though he says Australia is getting “back on track” after the Abbott years, as a much older man, Gun now has a “much more desperate” warning as he watches the country continue to open new coalmines and expand gas production.

“I am not yet convinced the opportunity for change has been totally lost, but overall I’m not optimistic,” he says.

“I’ve only got one great-grandchild, but I don’t want any more because I’m fearful they are going to inherit a planet that will be barely livable.”

Cover photo: Former politician Dr Richard Gun raised concerns about the risks of carbon dioxide in a speech in 1970: ‘I’m a bit surprised other people didn’t take it as seriously.’ Photograph: Bri Hammond/The Guardian