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Not a great idea to expect to learn about the world from sensationalist TV. Especially not such an immature field as climate science in the 90's.

hedora 5y ago
You do realize I mean the 1990's right? The show was broadcast in color, so it came after climate change science had "matured". Concretely, the magnitude of our current predicament was correctly forecast by computer models well before 1980, and the basic mechanisms and effects those models were based on were well-established by the 1960s. Claims to the contrary have been extensively documented to be part of a paid misinformation campaign the fossil fuel industry ramped up in the early 1980s. The show wasn't particularly sensationalist, for what its worth. Climate change was a bipartisan concern back then, and it mostly focused on the fossil records that backed up the claims it made. It also talked about the solar cycle's impact on earth's average temperature and compared the magnitude of the effects over time. All the technology that was needed to head off disaster was already commercialized, assuming a one-two punch, where phase two involved better batteries. No one imagined we would choose to take no action for another 30 years.
- sacrosancty 5y ago
  > our current predicament was correctly forecast by computer models well before 1980 So what? There are false climate predictions from back then too, and nobody knew which ones would turn out to be true or false. It was an immature field and predictions were all over the place, including global cooling. If I produce a dissenting climate prediction, will you produce evidence that that specific piece of research was both paid for by the fossil fuel industry and known to be false by the general climatologist community?
- hedora 5y ago
  To get an idea of the optimism, Biff from Back to the Future was based on Trump and ends up waxing an engineer's car. If I had to bet what actor would be president in 2016, I'd have guessed Patrick Stewart, and that his second move (after installing the captain's chair in the oval office) would be pointing at a clean energy plan to replace our carbon nuclear fission power grid with fusion / solar and saying "make it so".

hedora 5y ago

You do realize I mean the 1990's right? The show was broadcast in color, so it came after climate change science had "matured". Concretely, the magnitude of our current predicament was correctly forecast by computer models well before 1980, and the basic mechanisms and effects those models were based on were well-established by the 1960s. Claims to the contrary have been extensively documented to be part of a paid misinformation campaign the fossil fuel industry ramped up in the early 1980s. The show wasn't particularly sensationalist, for what its worth. Climate change was a bipartisan concern back then, and it mostly focused on the fossil records that backed up the claims it made. It also talked about the solar cycle's impact on earth's average temperature and compared the magnitude of the effects over time. All the technology that was needed to head off disaster was already commercialized, assuming a one-two punch, where phase two involved better batteries. No one imagined we would choose to take no action for another 30 years.

sacrosancty 5y ago
> our current predicament was correctly forecast by computer models well before 1980 So what? There are false climate predictions from back then too, and nobody knew which ones would turn out to be true or false. It was an immature field and predictions were all over the place, including global cooling. If I produce a dissenting climate prediction, will you produce evidence that that specific piece of research was both paid for by the fossil fuel industry and known to be false by the general climatologist community?
hedora 5y ago
To get an idea of the optimism, Biff from Back to the Future was based on Trump and ends up waxing an engineer's car. If I had to bet what actor would be president in 2016, I'd have guessed Patrick Stewart, and that his second move (after installing the captain's chair in the oval office) would be pointing at a clean energy plan to replace our carbon nuclear fission power grid with fusion / solar and saying "make it so".