In the 1970s, the world seemed to be falling apart. From acid rain to overpopulation and resource depletion, ecological concerns were big news. And it was at this time that climate-change first became a hot political issue. But it wasn't global warming that frightened scientists, it was the complete opposite: a new ice age.
This programme, The Battle Begins traces the history of climate change from the beginning and examines just how the scientific community managed to get it so wrong back in the Seventies. Dave Keeling is one of the great unsung heroes of climate-change science. His painstaking measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from as early as 1958, gave the world the first hard evidence that levels were increasing.
It wasn't long before concern started to grow that global warming was a reality that could affect the human race in catastrophic ways. In the first episode, Iain looks at the early development of scientific research into the phenomena and uncovers the climate-change science pioneers, including a shadowy, secret organisation of American scientists known as "Jason", who wrote the first official report on global warming as far back as 1979.
However, almost as soon as global warming became an issue of official concern, along came the first sceptics. Iain investigates the origins of the sceptic movement in the Reagan administration in the USA. He shows how most of the arguments that are still being used by the sceptics today originated in a little-known report written in 1981. By the late Eighties, global warming had become a serious political issue. Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to argue for action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. It looked as if the world was uniting to take action. But it turned out to be a false dawn because, in the Nineties, global warming would be transformed into one of the biggest scientific controversies of the modern age.
Note: This BBC production not available in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Mainland China, Japan, USA, Canada.
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