For Earth Day, the 1983 WGBH Episode of NOVA: The Climate Crisis, The Greenhouse Effect
22 hours ago
Charles Rotter
From the Internet Archives
An hour of hilarious alarmism and bad predictions for Earth Day.
Russell Cook also has a post based on this episode over at the Gelspan Files.
“The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect” – when did the smear of critics get added to that template?
Posted on April 21, 2023
A “just askin’” post today for investigators with more reach / resources than I have, concerning the epic-level, decades-long defamation of skeptic climate scientists who stand accused of colluding with fossil fuel industry executives in disinformation to undercut the ‘settled science’ of catastrophic man-caused global warming. The fundamental question is, when exactly was that accusation formulated? What was the accusation meant to protect?
My long term educated guess was that it was meant to protect the line about ‘man-caused global warming’ which arose after the infamous summer of 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen made his big “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate” splash at a congressional hearing on the topic. During my formative grade school / high school / college years, the prospect of imminent global cooling was all I ever heard about. But I missed a particularly creepy broadcast video about the dim prospects of a warming world from 1983.
Yeah, 1983. I found out about this video arising out of an alert of the latest “New Initiative on Climate Change” direction of the PBS “Nova” program, within which was a boast by Nova that their first program on the climate issue was their 1983 “The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect” program. Huh. News to me. So, I found it and watched it. Almost right off the bat at the 2:09 point, the program runs into a brick wall with Dr Walter Orr Roberts predicting
… by the year 2000, we expect we would be in a unprecedented new climatic regime, different from anything in the recorded history of mankind.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/04/22/for-earth-day-the-1983-wgbh-episode-of-nova-the-climate-crisis-the-greenhouse-effect/
