Forty years ago, on this day, December 20, 1983, a documentary about what was coming was shown.
1983 Climate Crisis
This summer’s record temperatures may be one of the signs that the earth’s atmosphere is warming up. NOVA looks at the climate predictions and hazard warnings for the next century, based on the effects of our soaring consumption of fossil fuels.
Original broadcast date: 12/20/83
Topic: environment/ecology
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 343ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that 1983 had been a big year for environmental issues. You had the June conference of the Global 2000 people but most significantly in October you’d had the EPA and NAS reports, which presumably were part of the impetus for this documentary which you can see online.
Some of this footage may have been taken from the 1981 Anglia TV documentary “Warming Warning” – which would explain the director credit for Richard Broad…
What I think we can learn from this is that people knew.
What happened next
The NOVA documentary got repeated and I think in 1986 it was on in New York and I did a blog post about it without knowing all the details.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..