My point was that this thinking was asinine levels of incompetence, because the Radium Girls cases had been reported in the New York Times in the 1920s, and radiation had given Marie Curie aplastic anemia. The long-term cancer risk and other long-term risks from radionuclide exposure was *known*. But they ignored it until the 1960s.
Sort of reminds me of the people in power ignoring the global warming risk, which has been absolutely clear since the 1990s, if not the 1970s. :-(
More like the warnings from smoking. My father remembers WW I vets calling them "coffin nails" when he was a kid, but few took the dangers seriously until the 60s.
There are worse dangers than global warming. The ice core records over the last million years show the world temps sometimes spike just before they plunge into a period of glaciation. All of human civilization has happened in one of the brief warm periods in the middle of an ice age (the last 2 million years).
If the world gets warmer, that would be economically bad for coastal cities, and low lying lands would go underwater, but looking at the Geologic record, that's more the norm than the exception. The last 2 million years have been among the coldest in Earth's history except for a very bizarre period about 650 million years ago when the ice caps went all the way to the equator for a while. For many millions of years there was a shallow sea that covered the prairie states up to around the Canadian border. The shoreline shifted back and forth over time and forests along the shore got inundated and buried periodically when the sea was expanding. These trees got buried and turned into coal. It's the reason Montana and some other nearby states have so much coal.
If we end up in a full blown ice age instead (we are at about the normal length of an inter-glacial period now), All of Canada except the tallest mountains would be buried under 1500-3000 feet of ice. In some glacial periods the ice has come as far south as Kansas, but the last one played footsie with Puget Sound i(the glaciers came and went over 90,000 years leaving massive hills of glacial debris) n the west, came down into Montana, and came down further in the east covering Manhattan. Most of Utah was a lake a couple of thousand feet deep. The Great Salt Lake is the last remnant of Lake Bonneville.
Florida was a lot wider and the Mediterranean mostly dried up into a much smaller salt lake. The Southern Sahara was a massive lake/march region. The Southwestern US was quite green and lush.
In an ice age, we would gain some land nearer the equator as the oceans dropped, but most mountains and northern regions would be buried under ice. A lot of places we grow food today would be unusable. The San Joaquin Valley would become a lake, most of the Midwest would be unusable, and Canada, Northern Europe, and much of Russia would have to be evacuated. Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico would be good growing regions, but the overall carrying capacity of the Earth would be much lower than it is now.
What we're doing killing off life in the oceans, polluting them with plastic, and using up all the fresh water will get us before any rising temperatures do. 90% of the plastic in the oceans has been traced back to a handful of rivers in Asia and Africa, the over fishing of the oceans is driven more by demands in Asia than North America (the US and Canada started managing coastal fisheries before the sea life became too depleted and poaching from Asian fishing factory ships has been a problem since). The depletion of fresh water is most acute in India and China where they have been using ground water to grow enough to feed their populations and the water is running out. Much of the surface water in those countries has been badly polluted.
Soil depletion is also a serious problem. The nutrition content in our fresh food has been dropping since the 20s. I saw somewhere that spinach grown in the 20s had something like 10X more iron than spinach grown today.
But I digress in a major way...
