This distinguished cultural historian (1889-1970) wrote many influential books in which he tried to rehabilitate religion as a driving force in western history. Among others he influenced T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien. What was the challenge? As he wrote:

“The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world,..but claims the whole person. Once more Christianity is faced, as it was at the beginning, with the challenge of a world which will accept no appeal from its judgment…Indeed it would almost seem as though the prospect today was even darker than it was at the beginning. Then, at least, Christianity was a new thing in the world, and its possibilities were still untried; but now that Christianity has been in the world for 19 centuries, the modern world regards it as a thing of the past – a system that has been tried and found wanting, and that no longer has anything to offer modern man”:

Religion and the Modern State (1935) [see under Writings]

Teilhard de Chardin became famous because of his theory of the Omega Point. But would the ultimate evolution of humankind turn out well or bad?  ” Disease and hunger will be conquered by science…hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in the ever-warmer radiance of Omega [or]  evil may go on growing alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the end of some specifically new form, There are no summits without abysses.”

Bernard Shaw said this in 1907 (when there was much admiration around for Nietzsche’s Superman idea):

” Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, and also outside the moral world”.

[Don Juan in Hell]

See under Writings

Shaw loved to attack drama critics ” for their gross ingratitude to us, their arrant Philistinism, their shameless intellectual arrogance, their low tastes. their hatred of good work, their puerile romanticism, their disloyalty to dramatic literature, their stupendous ignorance, their susceptibility to cheap sentiment, their insensibility to honour, virtue, intellectual honesty, and everything that constitutes strength and dignity in human character….”

(piece in Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1908)

As Bernard Shaw wrote:: ” What really happened was that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science, and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorifying grotesquely in the license suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors”.

{Heartbreak House]

Do you find here an echo of Freud’s theory in Civilisation and Its Discontents?

During Callendar’s later years (c.1950-1964) his CO2 climate warming theory was questioned by other climate scientists, who pointed to the undoubted complexity of global climate science and called for more research into factors such as the timescale of ocean-atmosphere exchange, deep ocean conditions and apparent discrepancies in the uptake of fossil fuel carbon. He continued his deep research (in a private capacity) and by the time of his death opinion was swinging strongly in his direction. As James Fleming concludes about this remarkable man:

“[His research judgment]] led him to conclude that the trend towards higher temperatures was significant, especially north of the 45th parallel: that the increased use of fossil fuels (and, to a lesser extent, deforestation and other practices) had caused a rise of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that would only continue and would most likely accelerate; and that increased sky radiation from the extra CO2 was directly linked to the rising temperature trend. The world’s glaciers were shrinking, and he thought it unlikely that the oceans would absorb the excess carbon” [Callendar Effect, p.87].

Fleming goes on to say that most scientists now agree that Callendar was basically right, and that we now live in a world that has reached levels of atmospheric CO2 unknown to Callendar. 

Rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere had been well documented by 1950. What was the effect?

“Reduced to its simplest terms…whereas CO2 is almost completely transparent to solar radiation, it is partially opaque to the heat which is radiated back to space from the earth [mainly due to the expansion of industry]. In this way it acts as a heat trap, allowing the temperature near the earth’s surface to rise above the level  it would attain if there were no CO2 in the air… It may be said that the climates of the world are behaving in a manner which suggests that slightly more solar heat is being retained in the atmosphere. This could be due to its increasing opacity to terrestrial heat as a result of the additions of CO2”

[Guy Callendar, “Can CO2 Influence Climate? ” Weather  4 (1949), pp. 310-314].

Despite Guy Callendar continuing to collect vital statistics on global warming, and publishing significant papers (such as one in 1961) his ideas met with dogged resistance from fellow meteorologists. Callendar explained this in a revealing note in his papers:

His fossil fuel theory was seen as too single-minded; ” the idea that man’s actions could influence so vast a complex [system] is very repugnant to some”; authorities in the past had pronounced against it, on the basis of faulty observations (which he had corrected); “Last, but not the least. They did not think of it themselves”.

Finally: ” CO2 as a cause of climate change… is above the heads of nearly all writers on the subject”‘

[from Fleming, Callendar Effect, pp.82-83] 

Guy Callendar wrote a game-changing paper in 1938 documenting rising global temperatures and linking this to the increasing burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Since 1900 humans had added over 150,000 million tons of CO2 to the air, and this was not dissipated in any of the ways that scientists had suggested (absorbed by oceans, circulation of the atmosphere, etc). He predicted a steady increase in temperatures in the century ahead.

However as James Fleming has pointed out, “Callendar was by no means an environmental alarmist, since he wrote of the benefits of the combustion of fossil fuels, including extension of the cultivated region northward, stimulation of plant growth by CO2, and the probable indefinite delay of the ‘return of the deadly glaciers’ “. [Callendar Effect].

Callendar’s thesis was for a time weakened by the fact that there was a period of relative cooling from the 40s to the 60s. Callendar himself became more seriously alarmed about disastrous future trends in climate change as he got older, and his “Callendar Effect” would go on to become a highly influential climate change theory.