We played a clip from the above during yesterday’s Green News Report, but here’s the whole two and a half minutes worth. (A near-eternity in network evening news time.)
It was the evening of April 3, 1980 when legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite first warned America of scientists’ concern about global warming. An obscure and quaint anniversary for news geeks, to be sure, but an interesting one, because it illustrates three important points…
First, thanks to the just-the-facts-ma’am approach of “Uncle Walter” and correspondent Nelson Benton, the story unfolds simply and succinctly, absent false balance and perverse punditry. It highlights how mainstream media news reporting has mutated and deteriorated in the intervening years, and now routinely fails to examine serious, complex issues like civilization-challenging climate change.
Second, it’s remarkable how long politicians have known about the looming, compounding consequences of dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — at least since 1980, when this national news broadcast covered a Congressional hearing on the subject. And yet, in all of those years, Congress has still failed to act.
Third, it’s even more remarkable how long the climate change denial industry has managed to successfully block action — at least 35 years — and somewhat sickening, considering the lost decades of missed opportunity, even as we are just beginning to grasp the magnitude and reach of climate change impacts.
Thanks to the two Peters of climate communication: the indispensable Peter Sinclair of Climate Crocks, who unearths these historical gems and creates the best climate science videos; and Peter Dykstra of The Daily Climate, for highlighting the Cronkite report’s nicely-rounded 35th anniversary, and for his wry observations on the state of TV news. Dykstra is a former CNN executive producer, after all [emphasis added]:
…
And to paraphrase the signature close to Uncle Walter’s nightly newscast, that, unfortunately, is The Way It Is.
Indeed it is.
ADDENDUM: That 35-year-old report is still accurate and relevant today — featured prominently in Peter Sinclair’s recent post in his “Climate Change, Elevator Pitch” series, this one with science historian Naomi Oreskes (co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, now a must-see documentary film)…
Desi Doyen is the co-host and managing editor of The BRAD BLOG’s Green News Report, the producer of KPFK’s The BradCast and an occasional guest host on The Young Turks. Follow her on Twitter at: @GreenNewsReport.
While Cronkite’s April 3, 1980 broadcast is quite useful in demonstrating that concerns about man-made global climate change had been voiced inside the MSM some 35 years ago, it is important to note that climate scientists were voicing those same concerns long before the April 3, 1980 broadcast.
As Al Gore revealed in Inconvenient Truth, he was first learned about those concerns from his professor, oceanographer Roger Revelle, when he was in college.
Gore enrolled in undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1965. He took a class from Prof. Revelle in 1969.
Revelle and other scientists first began publishing findings relating to the relevant CO2 studies in the mid 1950s.
“A 1958 video which shows we went into the catastrophe with our ‘eyes wide open’.”
It is a discussion on a science oriented TV show … mainstream media … an excerpt from “The Unchained Godess” produced by Capra.
“Extremely dangerous question … a few degrees would melt the polar ice caps” …
They are melting already at about a 1 deg. Celsius warming.
As a graduate student in the late 1980s, I taught an International Relations course at Syracuse University in which I used the annual “State of the World” report from the World Watch Institute to get at the global dimension of emerging environmental issues. Checking out old editions of State of the World at the library is one way to see how far back these problems have been well understood. Inaction was not due to lack of knowledge, only lack of will.
I remember that time period as the point when the probability shifted from our civilization ending in an environmental whimper rather than a nuclear bang.