Politics in Fiction & Entertainment / The Newsroom and Climate Change
The Newsroom is Aaron Sorkin's most recent TV production (his earlier work included the award winning series The West Wing, and his movie The Social Network, which won several academy awards. The Newsroom is about a fictional cable network news channel (ACN) and its producer Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels), news division president Charlie Skinner (played by Sam Waterston), and the owner of the parent company: Leona Lansing (played by Jane Fonda). And as you'd expect, there are a lot of personal stories intertwined behind the headlines ACN is covering in its nightly news programs.
[ The Newsroom and the End of the World ]
The Newsroom is in its third and final season on HBO; and its current story arcs are dealing such topics as the Boston Marathon Bombing, a possible corporate take-over, a network struggling with lowered ratings, an ACN employee who is facing possible federal charges for being in the possession of highly classified information, with FBI raids conducted on the network's offices, removing hard drives, etc. All of the writing is pretty great (no surprise with Aaron Sorkin at the helm, really) showing the constant struggle of accurate news reporting with a network's need to make money to stay in business and scooping the competition.
To prevent a possible leak by an ACN reporter (the reporter overheard an EPA official making disparaging remarks about the administration and its lack of focus on climate change), that same EPA official agrees to give an on-air-interview regarding a new report on CO2 levels passing THE milestone of 400 parts per million.
And out of the blue, that interview with the EPA official's interview took place on last Sunday's episode.
While the interview is fictional, the information contained in it is not. A lot of the fictional EPA official's information was based on a study co-conducted by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. When the fictional EPA official stated that people alive today would likely die from catastrophic planetary failure, that was based a real analysis of data.
Although the study based on HANDY is largely theoretical - a 'thought-experiment' - a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.
Source.
But unlike the ACN interview, the NASA report does offer a faint glimmer of hope:
Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.