Today the 51st anniversary of Earth Day — began April 22, 1970, when life had a much-clearer feel and look to it, there was optimism in the long-range scope of nourishing our still green-ass planet.
Just a bit more than two months later, the Environmental Protection Agency came into being, founded by Republican Dick Nixon.
And supposedly the world was saved:

My memory of the first Earth Day in 1970. #earthday #climatechange pic.twitter.com/pAOLEkbsoI

— Alison Bechdel (@AlisonBechdel) April 22, 2021

However, here a half-century later and the shit has way-hit the fan. In 1968, global CO2 levels were at 323 ppm (parts-per-million); 10 years later, 335 ppm; and the latest figures from NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii just a week ago was 415.81 ppm. Reportedly, 350 ppm for humanity is the ‘safe’ level of CO2 — it was at about 280 ppm in the late 1700s before the Industrial Revolution.
Earth Day has become more tradition than actual physical work point.

Even as Joe Biden held the Leaders Summit on climate change today, the uphill fight is a huge undertaking after decades of neglect — via The Washington Post late this afternoon:

In one of the most surreal summit meetings ever, President Biden on Thursday hosted more than 40 world leaders in a bid to restore the United States’ damaged diplomatic reputation and to rally nations around the globe to make deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

With Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and special presidential envoy for climate John F. Kerry seated around a horseshoe-shaped table in the East Room of the White House, the faces of presidents and prime ministers flashed by on a large screen, one by one putting forth their own limited plans for meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

Biden kicked off the meeting promising to cut U.S. emissions to half of their 2005 levels by the end of the decade.
Several other world leaders also pledged to speed up cuts to their own emissions, restore forests, phase out coal plants, and put people to work building wind turbines and solar panels.
And many leaders beseeched the world to act more urgently — and find more money — to help nations already grappling with existential threats from rising seas and other impacts.
…
“This is a moral imperative, an economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities,” President Biden said at the start.
“Time is short, but I believe we can do this. And I believe that we will do this.”

Yes, time is way-short. Biden did promise hope with a pledge today ‘…to reduce U.S. emissions between 50 and 52 percent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels — significantly more aggressive than the target set by President Barack Obama six years ago.‘

Too little, too late, who knows at this point. Although the world was somewhat aware of changes to the world’s climate in the 1970s and 80s, we had no idea it was building into a clusterf*ck situation we have in the nowadays. There are villians in this scenario and it’s the oil companies, especially Exxon.
The plot line from Inside Climate News in September 2015:

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation’s headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen.
Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon’s leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience.
He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.
Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

“Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.
…
Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research.
In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed.
It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions.
It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

And a landmark event June 23, 1988: Testimony by Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Space Institute before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resource:

My principal conclusion are: (1) the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements, (2) the global warming is now sufficiently large that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect, and (3) in our computer climate simulations the greenhouse effect now is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of occurrence of extreme events such as summer heat waves; the model results imply that heat wave/drought occurrences in the Southeast and Midwest United States may be more frequent in the next decade than in climatological (1950 – 1980) statistics.

Still no decent response, and no decent response for more than 30 years.

Shamefully, I was a way-late arrival to the horrors of climate change. Up until the 2007 IPCC Report on Climate Change, I wasn’t even aware of anything at all about it, and I mean, ‘at all.’ Shitty, too, when even a main character in “The American President” (1995), a movie I really enjoyed, was a political activist working for an environmental lobby group and climate change was discussed fairly frequently, I still didn’t have even a peek of acknowledgement of the coming crisis.
Not until more than a decade later with the IPCC report, which was another landmark event (Science Daily): ‘The key conclusions were that: It is “unequivocal” that global warming is occurring; the probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes is less than 5-percent; and the probability that this is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases is over 90-percent.‘

First time ever, man-made shit.
And an updated bright note — not!
The latest shitty climate-change report via the Guardian this morning:

Swirling and meandering ocean currents that help shape the world’s climate have gone through a “global-scale reorganisation” over the past three decades, according to new research.

The amount of energy in these ocean currents, which can be from 10km to 100km across and are known as eddies, has increased, having as yet unknown affects on the ocean’s ability to lock-away carbon dioxide and heat from fossil fuel burning.

One expert said the changes described in the research could affect the ability of the Southern Ocean, one of the world’s biggest natural carbon stores, to absorb CO2.

So it goes…yet smile back years and years:

Uncle Walter when life was fresh and somewhat happy — or at least not so fucking sad….

(Illustration from the UN’s International Children’s Painting Competition, and found here).