I'm old enough to remember the sixties, and I remember that here in Sweden at least, smoking was allowed pretty much everywhere. No, not inside stores. But there was smoking in movie theaters, and in about half the compartments of trains, and on airplanes, and in absolutely all restaurants and cafés. At most workplaces, the staff rooms had an impenetrable fog of smoke in them. I remember when I worked in the largest hospital in Malmö in the mid-seventies. All the nurses spent their breaks in a tiny little staff room, where the smoke was so thick that you could hardly breathe. Sometimes I snuck down into the non-smoking staff room in the basement. When I did, I would be there all on my own. And let's not even talk about what it was like when I was fifteen years old, and I did my 'school practice' (which was something everyone had to do) in the newsroom of a newspaper! No, you don't want to know how much smoke there was in there! And what about when I started working as a teacher in 1981? The first school I worked at consisted of several buildings, and the building I worked in smelled suspiciously mouldy. I can't tell you what it was like to come into the staff room in the morning, which smelled just awfully of mould and yesterday's tobacco smoke!
My point? My point is that as far back as the sixties, there were newspaper articles and warnings from scientists that smoking was dangerous. But you can't believe the chorus of denial that was heard from the smokers, and from those who thought they made money by accomodating to the smokers. Smoking isn't dangerous! This person's grandfather smoked all his life and he lived to be a hundred. You can die young even if you don't smoke - there was this young woman who got lung cancer at thirty even though she had never smoked. And what about all the exhaust fumes from traffic? Why should anyone stop smoking when the city air is going to poison them anyway? Lots of things are dangerous, so why do some people insist on picking on smoking?
I can remember a Readers Digest article on smoking from the 1960s. I specifically remember that the article advised non-smokers not to be afraid of the puffs of smoke that smokers blew in their faces. "The smoker gets most of the smoke inside himself, and he is relatively harmless," said the article.
Today there is very little doubt that tobacco is one of the major killers in the world. But for decades, the danger of smoking was pretty much denied. And for decades, extremely little was done to regulate smoking.
I think it is the same thing with climate change today. There is so much research insisting that climate change is real and that it is at least to some extent caused by humanity, but this is denied by a lot of people. My feeling is that a few decades from now, humanity's (partial) responsibility for climate change will be as generally acknowledged as the danger of smoking is acknowledged today.
Ann
