On this day, December 8 in 1981,
As the excellent Carbon Brief has it –
“On the evening of Tuesday, 8 December, 1981, the UK’s only commercial TV channel, ITV, broadcast an hour-long documentary called “Warming Warning”.
It was among the earliest occasions – possibly the earliest – anywhere in the world where a major broadcaster aired a documentary dedicated solely to the topic of human-caused climate change.
The documentary, which was made by the now-defunct Thames Television, has sat in the archives largely unseen ever since. Until now. “
Read more here https://www.carbonbrief.org/warming-warning-1981-tv-documentary-warned-climate-change
Here’s a good clip
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 340ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
The IEA had held a meeting in about greenhouse gases in February. In September Tom Wigley gave a speech at a Uranium Institute seminar in London. Meanwhile, James Hansen et al. had published a paper in August, in Science (and the Reagan Administration had punished him by withdrawing already-agreed funds). Presumably these were a major push for the documentary…
Why this matters.
“We” “knew”. Our problem is not information. Our problem is power – who has it, in whose interests they wield it, how they are monitored, challenged etc.
What happened next?
It was only 7 years later, in 1988, that the issue “broke through”, and politicians had to take a position on it.