That old EPA graph from 1979 still haunts me

I was digging through some old files from my dad's basement last week, he worked at the power plant outside Columbus for 30 years, and found a folded-up EPA chart from 1979. It showed projected CO2 levels for the year 2025, and I swear the line on that paper is almost exactly where we ended up, like within a few parts per million. I mean, we had the data back then, the warnings were right there in black and white, and we just kept burning stuff. It's wild to see a prediction from 46 years ago land so precisely, makes me wonder if we'd have done things different if everyone had seen that chart. Has anyone else stumbled across old climate projections that turned out scarily accurate, or is it just my dad's filing system being too good?

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fisher.mary1mo ago

Flip that chart upside down and squint, those old models were basically guesswork with a ruler. They had no clue about natural cycles or how tech would change everything, remember they also predicted we'd run out of oil by 2000. My uncle worked at that same plant and the engineers laughed at those projections back then, said the math was too simple. We're actually doing way better than the worst case scenarios, so maybe that 1979 line just got lucky, like a stopped clock.