Isaac Asimov: Warning of Greenhouse Effect in 1977
January 6, 2012
A lot of people have seen Science Fiction giant and chemist Isaac Asimov’s video talk from 1989 ( posted below the fold here) – but he was talking about climate change and sea level rise much earlier – as this 1977 radio interview shows.
January 6, 2012 at 10:02 pm
Doctor Isaac Asimov (not an honorary degree).
You were once known as “the great explainer” and we really wish you were still alive today today to lead humanity out of the darkness. Your passing in 1992 left a huge intellectual hole in our society. The sci-fi world took a huge hit as well.
Neil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/Asimov-suggested-reading-order.html
January 6, 2012 at 11:25 pm
I’m fairly certain the interviewer is David Suzuki, so I suspect the radio interview was on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s show Quirks and Quarks. Of course Dr. Suzuki is constantly under fire from denialists for his attempts to educate and energize people to take action on climate change.
January 7, 2012 at 5:25 am
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always
has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Azimov
January 7, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Starting in the 1970′s and mainly due to Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”, the title of “the great science explainer” slowly shifted from Isaac Asimov to Carl Sagan. Now maybe it was partly due to polarizing politics, religion and politics (eg. Jerry Falwell), or uber-conservative broadcasters like FOX, but there was almost no mention of Asimov’s death in 1992 and only slightly more attention paid to Sagan’s death in 1996. Contrast these two events with the death of Ronald Regan in 2004 then you begin to realize what North American people value.
Food for thought: Lisa Randal’s recent book states that the main reason for shutting down the “Superconducting Super Collider” in 1993 was that the US Congress didn’t want to continue funding it (12 billion) while also bailing out the S&L banks (estimates at over 100 billion). So once again, financial hijinks diverted western society’s path. At that same time, Europe continued plans to convert the LEP into the LHC even though the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered the costly reintegration of poor East Germany with rich West Germany. What’s the point of this comparison? It looks like North Americans no longer care about big science even though this knowledge is the basis for all future technological developments. Is it any wonder why some people don’t believe we ever went to the moon? No, because it would be politically impossible to do it today (unless there was a perceived threat that your cold-war enemy might make you look bad to the rest of the world).
January 7, 2012 at 1:47 pm
35 years ago Asimov was way ahead of his time- he took an oblique scientific reality- not researched much- and like a clairvoyant was almost totally accurate.
January 8, 2012 at 12:15 pm
My alltime favourite SF and science author. Gem of a find here Greenman – thanks.
I only wish Isaac Asimov – & Carl Sagan – were still around today. Sigh.
January 8, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Another possibly relevant Asimov quote :
“The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own “national security” to be paramount above all other considerations. There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.”
- Isaac Asimov, Pages 419-421, ,‘ I Asimov : A memoir’, Bantam Books, 1995.
January 8, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Wisdom in statements like this never cease to amaze. Humanity will not be able to solve “our” current climate crisis until we adopt philosophies like this one.
January 9, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Not to nitpick but Asimov was actually a chemist, not a physicist. He had a Ph.D. in bio-organic chemistry from Columbia. I actually worked in the same lab space in Havemeyer Hall many many years later.
January 9, 2012 at 7:07 pm
thanks.will update the post.
January 10, 2012 at 8:13 am
Methane release and Runaway Climate Change
http://climateforce.net/2012/01/09/methane-release-and-runaway-climate-change/
ps. There is a CBS video from decades ago with Walter Cronkite and his stark waring about global warming ( just in case you looking for more material…) http://www.videosurf.com/videos/Global+Warming?visual_search=10540
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWNOLw53RHk
January 10, 2012 at 8:17 am
If you google “torrent + our angry earth” you can get the audio book of Isaac Asimov + Frederick Pohl’s scientific book about global warming. (out of print)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Angry_Earth
January 10, 2012 at 11:35 am
The following search phrase may be a little more fruitful. Paste it into the Google search box as-is.
filetype:torrent “our angry earth”
January 11, 2012 at 3:10 am
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