Forty years ago, on this day, October 18, 1983, your average television-watching American gets a dose of reality.
On October 18, 1983, all three U.S. television networks ran two-minute stories on the greenhouse effect, and CBS and ABC placed their stories at or near the top of the news programs. What had happened? The Environmental Protection Agency had issued a report analyzing the impact of the greenhouse effect on the temperature of the earth. CBS and ABC featured John Hoffman of the EPA urging that preparations be made for the future.
Sachsman
EPA report – https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/10/18/EPA-report-predicts-catastrophic-global-warming/2626435297600/
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 342.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Can we delay a greenhouse warming?” had come out. It said that, well, you could institute a global carbon tax or rather even if you could, which was a long shot, it would only delay warming by a few years. This was, I think, the first time that all three major networks simultaneously covered the environment story.
What I think we can learn from this
We should remember that Walter Cronkite had been talking about climate in his documentary, The 20th Century, in the episode, The Power of the Sea on March 22 1960. Spilhaus had said what he said.
What we can learn is that 40 years ago, American people were told what was happening pretty clearly. I don’t think there was any massive spike in membership of the Sierra Club or EDF or whatever. And as Joshua Howe in his excellent “Behind the Curve” notes, they just weren’t taking it on as an issue because it’s too big. It’s too diffuse,
“Joseph Smagorinsky, author of the climate-modeling chapter for Changing Climate, was highly critical of the EPA report. Speaking at Youngstown University, he said, “Evidently the EPA was hell-bent on coming up with spectacular numbers. . . . It’s bad enough when an individual does this kind of thing, but when a federal agency does it . . .”105” (Nierenberg et al. 2010:344)
What happened next
The American people did not rise up and save themselves, because some of them at least probably thought “why bother, we’re all gonna get nuked anyway?”
This, you see, was also the time of the Second Cold War fears of the nuclear winter, if there were a “nuclear exchange” (of course that also got people thinking about the atmosphere as something that humans could seriously fuck up.)
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.
