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hatrack

(59,439 posts)
Thu May 4, 2017, 06:54 AM May 2017

From Now-Defunct Thames Television, A Pretty Solid Climate Documentary From . . . 1981



Leo Hickman in Carbon Brief:

On the evening of Tuesday, 8 December, 1981, the UK’s only commercial TV channel, ITV, broadcast an hour-long documentary called “Warming Warning”. It was among the earliest occasions – possibly the earliest – anywhere in the world where a major broadcaster aired a documentary dedicated solely to the topic of human-caused climate change.

The documentary, which was made by the now-defunct Thames Television, has sat in the archives largely unseen ever since. Until now. Carbon Brief has tracked down the copyright holder, FremantleMedia Ltd, and persuaded it to release into the public domain a selection of key clips from the documentary.

The clips provide a poignant, historical insight into what scientists knew about climate change almost four decades ago – and how the world was beginning to react in terms of the resulting geopolitical, technological and societal ramifications. Many of themes still resonate strongly today.

To put it in context, the documentary was broadcast seven years before Dr James Hansen’s famous “it is already happening now” Senate testimony in 1988, nine years before the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report was published, and 25 years before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. After it first aired in 1981, Warming Warning went on to be broadcast in the US (in 1990 on PBS), Greece, Japan and Israel, according to FremantleMedia.

EDIT

https://climatecrocks.com/2017/05/03/is-this-the-earliest-full-climate-documentary/#comments
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From Now-Defunct Thames Television, A Pretty Solid Climate Documentary From . . . 1981 (Original Post) hatrack May 2017 OP
Very good find. Here is one from a 1958 show too. mackdaddy May 2017 #1
I could have sworn that I saw a documentary on global warming when I was still in high school ... eppur_se_muova May 2017 #2

eppur_se_muova

(36,227 posts)
2. I could have sworn that I saw a documentary on global warming when I was still in high school ...
Thu May 4, 2017, 09:48 PM
May 2017

or maybe even jr. high school., viz. between 1974 and 1977.

I was thinking Jacob Bronowski had hosted, but apparently not. James Burke was my second guess; he hosted this program in 1989+ : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0334827/

Not sure how I got all that misremembered, but I definitely remember global warming being a topic of concern for most of my life.

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