By 1988 the idea that the climate was warming due to carbon emissions was widely reported internationally and dubbed the “greenhouse effect.” This is the same year the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a major milestone. At this time, climate scientists were moving towards a consensus that global warming had already begun. As we know, the politicisation of climate science was to follow.
Over the decade prior to this, however, filmmakers had already been working to find ways to communicate knowledge about climate change and the changes that might be on the horizon. A Change of Climate was produced by the ABC television and the film unit for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s peak science body (and the Antarctic Division of the Australian Dept Science) in 1977.
This film takes as its point of departure The Australasian Climatology Conference held in December 1975 in Melbourne at Monash University. Over 200 scientists attended the conference, and several are interviewed in the film, often sitting on the grass around Monash’s leafy campus. While little information is offered in the film about the conference or its importance, this was the first conference convened by the Australian Branch of the Royal Meteorological Society. The gathering takes place at a moment in the development of climate science when there uncertainty as to whether the planet was on track for another ice age or for a warming climate. With numerous interviews with experts as its basis, this film offers a wide snapshot of climatic change and the evidence that underpins it. It visualises not only talking heads, but also scientists in the field collecting earth cores and ice cores, undertaking research in Antarctica, discussing fossils at crater lakes, launching weather balloons, and working on space stations.
A Change of Climate features interviews with Australian and international scientists at the conference and other experts, beyond the conference, in ways that gesture to international networks of climate research, including the CSIRO’s contribution to this science in the 1970s and 80s. As Ruth Morgan writes, at the time the Southern Hemisphere’s weather patterns were a missing part of the puzzle of global climate knowledge. Australian scientists led the way in this knowledge creation.
A Change of Climate is an awkward film. Scientists lack fluency as they stumble through ‘off the cuff’ interviews. The scientific information presented is hard to decipher. The camera, at times, zooms during interviews. Nevertheless, the film brings multiple detailed warnings about the effects of greenhouse gases, fossil fuels and deforestation. But, due to the state of the science, and the wide number of expert voices disperse statements about the future – they oscillate between deferring the possibility of an ice age to thousands of years, or debating whether and how predictions about climate warming should be communicated given the current evidence. Perhaps the most jarring aspect of this awkwardness occurs with the opening and losing sequences which are shot in a nudist camp, including interviews with men and women about the potential for a warming climate.
In stark contrast, What to Do About Co2 was produced by the CSIRO in 1984. It offersa more equivocal and persuasive account of climate warming. Rather than giving leaving explanations to scientists, this programme has an onscreen presenter (Jeffrey Watson) who manages interviews and takes the viewer through the story of climate change and the persuasive evidence. Interviewees are polished in their address to the camera and the tone is energised from the beginning due to interview segments with David Bellamy, the characterful English botanist and environmental campaigner. What to do about C02? is again very anchored in Australian science. It showcases Australian advances in climate science including the crucial meteorological station in Tasmania at Cape Grim.
When seen together, these examples convey information about the crucial moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s when climate science transformed from a significant area of knowledge for meteorologists to an important challenge tour planetary future that required careful and clear science communication.
Key Films
A Change of Climate (1977)
Produced jointly by ABC television, the CSIRO film unit and the Antarctic Division of the Australian Dept Science. Rights held by the ABC archives. 44mins long. Shot on 16mm. Written and directed by Roger Secombe, produced by Michael Daley. Broadcast on the ABC at least twice (August 1978). The flagship programme of 5 significant science films commissioned in the 1975/6.
Produced by the CSIRO film unit. 40mins long. Shot on 16mm and edited on film. Written and directed by Russell Porter. Broadcast multiple times on the ABC in the “Discovery” slot for science programmes and circulated in high schools.
Relevant Sources
Morgan, Ruth A. “Southern skies: Australian atmospheric research and global climate change.” Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 30.1 (2021): 47-63.
Hughes, John. “From cold war to hot planet: Australia’s CSIRO film unit.” Studies in Documentary Film 12.1 (2018): 72-96.m
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