Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, Apple Macintosh was introduced, Indria Ghandi was assassinated, astronauts made the first untethered space walk and Miami Vice was first aired. The Live Aid concert took place in an effort to highlight the plight of Ethiopia’s suffering from the effects of a severe drought. In 1988 a ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ Concert was held in London and a Pan Am flight crashed in Lockerbie as a result of a terrorist bomb. British Coal was in rapid decline and being lined up by the government as the "ultimate" privatisation. 'Yuppie' culture was in full swing with the ‘filo o fax’ and first mobile phones introduced. The World Stock market crashed and the Berlin wall fell, pro-democracy demonstrators where 5. massacred in Tiananman Square, the USA invaded Panama and the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska spilling millions of gallons of oil. The World Wide Web was created by Berners-Lee.
Resource efficiency was driving environment in business. The 1980’s turned out to be the warmest decade with 7 of the 8 warmest years recorded up to 1990. Even the coldest years in the 1980’s were warmer than the warmest years in the 1880’s.
In 1985 the British Antarctic survey discovered a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. The first major international conference on the greenhouse gas effect took place at Villach, Austria and warned that greenhouse gases would “in the first half of the next century, cause a rise of global mean temperature which is greater than any in mans history”. This could cause sea levels to rise by up to a metre research say. The Conference also reported that gases other than CO2 such as methane, ozone, CFCs and nitrous oxide would contribute to global warming.
1986 saw the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster and in 1987 saw the warmest year on record and an ice core from Antarctica revealed an extremely close correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature going back more than 100,000 years.
The United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to analyse and report on scientific findings . Global warming attracted worldwide headlines after Dr James Hansen of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies lab told a Congressional hearing “global warming is at hand” and blamed a major US drought which fuelled massive wildfires in Yellowstone Park on it’s influence. A meeting of climate scientists in Toronto subsequently called for 20% + cuts in global CO2 emissions by 2005.
ETSU extended it’s activities to energy efficiency / transport programmes. Emissions standards were set for power stations.