Ten years ago, on this day, November 30th, 2014,Aaron Sorkin’s drama show The Newsroom “does” climate change.
“The person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 399ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Sorkin has tried to get people thinking about climate change before. Check out “The American President” from 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_President
What I think we can learn from this
We ignored all the warnings, because to not do so would require collective action, and we really suck at that.
What happened next
Which then got chided by various “lefties” for, oh the usual – insufficiently hopey-changey blah blah blah
https://grist.org/living/aaron-sorkin-tackles-climate-change-on-the-newsroom-and-oy/
The emissions kept climbing and the predictions came closer. Some of them have arrived. Others, well, they’re pending.
References/further reading
Black, M. (2017). Environmental Deadpan: New Scales and Sensations of Ecological Fallout. American Quarterly 69(2), 397-409. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0033.
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.
Also on this day:
November 30, 1978 – House of Lords debate on Atmospheric Changes…
One reply on “November 30, 2014 – US TV show The Newsroom tackles climate change”
Thank you Dr. Marc Hudson, this is such a great illustration of what we already knew about the effects of climate change by 2014, and the fact governments around the world chose to do nothing but make it worse by allowing more fossil fuel extraction. The derogatory way the interviewer says ‘professional career’, as though being a climate scientist is a joke. ‘Let’s see if we can find a more positive spin? People are starting their weekends.’ ‘We want to inform people, but we don’t want to alarm them.’ People will be more than alarmed when they shortly come face to face with the Fafocene.