Don't-Say-We-Didn't-Warn-You Dept.: It's a Wonderful Clip
A fun game among climate-watchers — oh, heck, anybody can play! — is finding early references to global warming in scientific and popular media. The year 1958 is significant in the history of climate science because that's when Charles David Keeling first started measuring continuous CO2 monitoring at the Mauna Loa Observatory. As it turns out, that same year none other than Frank Capra produced an educational film called, The Unchained Goddess, in part about global warming, a phrase that also appeared for the first time that year. This is seven year before the first presidential acknowledgment of the "carbon dioxide problem." Where's Jimmy Stewart when you need him? (Unearthed by The Center for Investigative Reporting).
This is just astonishing:
This is just astonishing:
Posted by Eric Roston at 9/10/2008 6:03 PM 
Categories: Business-as-usual,Climate,Films,auteurs,Global Warming,Antarctica,History
Categories: Business-as-usual,Climate,Films,auteurs,Global Warming,Antarctica,History
It was more astonishing to see it as a young boy in school. We'd watched Hemo the Magnificent, The Restless Sea, Our Mr. Sun, etc. All first-rate movies and accurate on the science. They were made by Bell Labs and our commie-fightin, Sputnik catching government. They were full of new material and fascinating insights. But that stupid clip came out of nowhere; man it troubled me. I thought about it for several days.
How could something so completely implausible be real? Why had I never heard anything about it before? Why would movies with standards so high chose to include a 'stupid' claim like that?
And at ~ age eleven I began to focus on anything in the media that mentioned the Ice Age, ancient climates and latter, CO2 warming. And more than forty years after that the puzzle fits (unfortunately) together.
The movie came out the year Keeling began his measurements, so writers must have talked with theoretical experts. Roger Revelle was also in S. Calif, but I suppose it might have been others.
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Jay, Thanks very much for sharing this memory!
ER
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