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…