The Home of Donna Reed
152 2.4 annual billions today: U.S. Global Change Research Program, Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Global Change Research Program for Fiscal Year 2020. Washington, DC, 2020.
https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/reports/our-changing-planet-fy-2020
Accessed 11-14-22.
Quoted in Bianca Majumder, David Reidmiller, “Optimizing the Federal Budget Process and Timeline To Center Climate Science,” Center for American Progress, September 23, 2021.
Accessed 11-14-22.
152 six warmest recorded years: Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warmth In ‘88 Is Found To Set a Record,” The New York Times, February 4, 1989. “Dr. Phil Jones, a climatologist at East Anglia, said global temperatures rose on average about one degree Fahrenheit since the beginning of the century. He said the six warmest years on record were, in order, 1988, 1987, 1983, 1981, 1980 and 1986.”
152 “Washington is one messed-up kind of town”: Mike Sager, “Christmas: It Might Be Called Chilly—For the Fourth of July,” The Washington Post, December 25, 1982.
152 warming made the cover: Michael D. Lemonick, “The Heat Is On,” Time Magazine, October 19, 1987
“The Heat Is On” was the cover text, with “How the Earth’s Climate Is Changing” (as if in ultimate answer to those speculative Times pieces from the 1950s) and “Why the Ozone Hole Is Growing” hanging around underneath. At the beginning, the two emergencies were twined.
152 “We play Russian roulette with climate”: Wallace Broecker, “Unpleasant surprises in the Greenhouse?”, July 8, 1987. Nature 328: 123–26.
152 “I come here as sort of the prophet”: Ozone Depletion, the Greenhouse Effect, and Climate Change: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. United States Senate, Ninety-ninth Congress, second session, January 28, 1987. Committee on Environment and Public Works. Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution. U.S. Government Printing Office 1987.
Quoted in Spencer Weart, “Government: The View from Washington, DC,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics, August 2021.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Govt.htm
Accessed 11-6-22.
Per the Hearings, more Wallace Broecker; January 1987, 36 years ago:
dr. broecker. Thank you, Senator.
It is a pleasure to hear you all make such strong statements about the danger of these problems. I agree with you.
I also have an axe to grind. I come here as sort of the prophet saying something about what is going to happen in the future. I am a scientist, and I will normally be accused of being here, I suppose, because a lot of things I am going to say have to do with preparing ourselves for what is coming.
There are going to be harsh changes, regardless of what legislation you make, and we are going to have to learn to cope with them. The systems that we are impacting, I feel, are extremely complicated, that we generally underestimate the complexity that they have and, therefore, the manner in which these impacts are going to come upon us.
152 “They were placed in a curious position”: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 79.
They were so worried about the changes they saw coming, and the difficulty of persuading the world that the changes were coming, that they sometimes caught themselves rooting for the changes to appear. In fact it was hard to know how to feel.
153 In 1987, Jim Hansen: Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change: Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, 100th Congress, First Session, November 9, 1987. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987.
John Noble Wilford, “His Bold Statement Transforms The Debate On Greenhouse Effect,” The New York Times, August 23, 1988.
Karen Wright, “Heating the Global Warming Debate,” The New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1991.
Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury 2010. Chapter Six, “The Denial of Global Warming,” 184.
153 no one noticed: Jim Hansen told historian Spencer Weart about the hearing during his 2000 American Institute of Physics interview. “The one in ’87 was in November, The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources,” Hansen explained. “This was a November hearing. I remember after this hearing talking with Rafe Pomerance and the person for the Senate committee say, ‘What we really need to do is hold it in the summers.’”
Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 November 27, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-2
Accessed 11-12-22.
153 “And who was”: Michael D. Lemonick, “Global Warming Feeling The Heat,” Time, January 2, 1989.
153 Dr. Hansen asked for another shot: Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth, 129.
153 “So we scheduled the hearing that day”: Frontline, “Hot Politics,” PBS, April 24, 2007.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/wirth.html
Accessed 11-12-22.
At “the same time,” Wirth tells PBS, “you had this drought all across the country, so the linkage between the Hansen hearing and the drought became very intense.
153 “in Washington, or close to it”: In the years since this story became known among reporters and issue-followers, it has turned politically impractical: per the Washington Post, “For skeptics of global warming, the story has become an example of how left-leaning politicians have manipulated public perceptions on the issue.”
So Senator Wirth, who scheduled the hearing and volunteered this story to PBS in 2007, now said the story was untrue and that he had without explanation spread a falsehood.
As we’ll see, explaining climate change to politicians and voters who had every reason for wishing the problem to not be so, against a steady headwind from appealing counter-explainers hired by industry, is no easy row to hoe. Supporters of science had to learn to play a kind of aggressive defense. Senator Wirth figuring out in 1988 how to attract attention for this slow-dawning emergency seems to me heroic, so I have included the lawmaker’s first, unprompted recollection.
If you’d like to read his retraction of the story, it is at the link below. I take this as an example of how poisonous the political and cultural atmosphere around climate had become, after the 2009-2010 event called Climategate.
Glenn Kessler, “Setting the Record Straight: The Real Story of a Pivotal Climate-Change Hearing,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2015.
Accessed 11-14-22.
The 2015 Post piece disputes as well the summer date being selected for stagecraft, for heat. “The high temperature on the June hearing date was coincidental,” the Post summarizes. “And the hearing date was not set because it’s the hottest period of the year; instead, that was how the timetable for the bill was determined.”
But this was exactly how it was understood at the time: understood and appreciated.
The MacArthur Award-winning Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider (himself hesitant about the Hansen assertion that the man-made greenhouse was already affecting the temperature) published a climate book one year after the 1988 hearings.
The scientist reports, about June 1988: “The twenty-third—a day selected months earlier by Senator Tim Wirth, since it was the anniversary of the hottest day ever recorded in D.C.” This contemporaneous account exactly matching the one Senator Wirth would repeat to PBS two decades later. (Stephen Schneider, Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?, Sierra Club Books 1989. Chapter Seven, “Mediarology,” 195.)
Hansen himself had been at least partly instrumental in fixing a summer date for his testimony. The New York Times science writer William K. Stevens published Change in the Weather in 1999. Stevens reports,
Global warming had yet to excite much public interest as [Senator] Wirth convened his 1988 hearing. Earlier congressional hearings had failed to make much of an impact. James E. Hansen, a forty-seven-year-old climatologist, and other scientists had testified at these hearings, most recently on a miserably rainy day the previous November. He had argued both before and after that appearance that people would pay attention to global warming only if the hearings were held in the summer, when it was hot.
Stevens, The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate, Delacorte, 1999. Chapter Eight, “The Greenhouse Experiment,” 131.
This amplification comes from Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth. (Rich, 129.) “The biggest problem with the previous hearing,” Hansen explained, “had been the month in which it was held: November. ‘This business of having global warming hearings in such cool weather,’ he said, ‘is never going to get attention.’”
The benefits of the June date are explored by Spencer Weart in The Discovery of Global Warming. (Weart, The Discover of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2008. Chapter Seven, “Breaking Into Politics,” 155.)
The break came in the summer of 1988. A series of heat waves and droughts, the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, devastated many regions of the United States . . . In the middle of this [James] Hansen raised the stakes with deliberate intent. By arrangement with Senator Timothy Wirth he testified at a Congressional hearing in late June, deliberately choosing the summer, although that was hardly a normal time for politicians who sought attention.
In the augmented online version, Weart makes things even plainer; the idea was partially Dr. Hansen’s. “By arrangement with Senator Timothy Wirth, Hansen testified to a Congressional hearing on June 23. He had pointed out to Wirth’s staff that the previous year’s November hearings might have been more effective in hot weather. Wirth and his staff decided to hold their next session in the summer, although that was hardly a normal time for politicians who sought attention.”
Spencer Weart, “The Public and Climate Change (cont. – since 1980),” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics, August 2021.
https://history.aip.org/climate/public2.htm
Accessed 11-16-22.
153 the national weather map: Ronald D. Brunner, Amanda H. Lynch, Adaptive Governance and Climate Change, American Meteorological Society 2010. Chapter One, “Clarifying the Problem,” 9.
Brunner is a political scientist; Lynch an environmental scientist, also Director of the Brown University Institute of Environment and Society. Writing in an American Metrological Society publication, the two appreciate Wirth’s stagecraft, his weathercraft. “Nature was assisted by Sen. Tim Wirth and colleagues,” they explain. “With or without such political support, nature in this role penalizes inaction and sometimes forces action. This is an underutilized resource in compensating for a lack of political will.”
153 “became a giant supporting player”: Allan Mazur, Jinling Lee, “Sounding the Global Alarm: Environmental Issues in the U.S. National News,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23 No. 4, November 1993.
Senator Timothy Wirth of Colorado scheduled hearings on the greenhouse effect for 23 June, the anniversary of the hottest day ever recorded in Washington, DC. The weather cooperated with the temperature that day hitting 101 degrees. James Hansen was scheduled to testify, as he had done on three other occasions, usually with little notoriety. But this time the hearing room was full of reporters expecting an important story related to the drought. That evening NBC television news showed Hansen testifying that the greenhouse effect is probably causing global warming now, and the next evening’s broadcast connected the greenhouse effect with the drought.
“The timing of Hansen’s testimony of 23 June was critical, igniting a massive blaze of media coverage which is clearly discernible on all our indicators,” Mazur and Lee write. “Emphasizing Senator Wirth’s success in staging Hansen’s testimony as an event that would capture journalistic attention. As the issue caught fire, Congress allocated more of its resources to greenhouse warming (and ozone depletion), raising it by 1989 to a major federal issue.”
153 Federal emergencies in thirty states: Hugh Sidey, “The Big Dry,” Time Magazine July 4, 1988.
NBC Nightly News, “Drought, Governors’ Meeting,” Garrick Utley, Roger O’Neill, June 23, 1988.
153 The Big Dry: Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years, Chapter Nine, “The First Summer of the Third Millennium,” 89.
Hugh Sidey, “The Big Dry,” Time Magazine July 4, 1988.
153 barges beached and wallowed: 1,100 barges near Memphis, per NBC News. (NBC Nightly News, “Drought, Mississippi River,” June 25, 1988.) Nathaniel Rich, in Losing Earth, tracks 3,700. (Rich, Losing Earth, Chapter 14, “Nothing But Bonfires: Summer 1988,” 127.) Jonathan Weiner, in The Next One Hundred Years (88), just goes with “thousands,” while narrating a biblical litany of calamities.
All but five percent of the big rivers in the U.S. were running low. The Mississippi dropped so low that it stranded thousands of barges and exposed old shipwrecks: paddle-wheelers from the Gilded Age, and (on one tributary of the Big Muddy) the skeletons of three Civil War ships, the Dot, the Charm, and the Paul Jones, scuttled during the Confederate retreat from Vicksburg in 1863.
Wheat died in Canada and the Soviet Union, and rice died in the People’s Republic of China. China (where 1988 was the Year of the Dragon) lost more than 10,000 people and 500,000 houses in droughts, floods, typhoons, and freak hailstorms. Shanghai in July was even worse than New York City; more than 1,000,000 people took sick from the heat.
NBC Nightly News had broadcast an especially creepy detail: In one Kansas lake, Dan Molina reported, “the water level dropped so low that fish have died on bare ground, and lime is being spread to kill the stench.” And there the fish are, above the mud, flopping silver oblongs.
153 heat records: NBC Nightly News, “Heat Wave, Greenhouse Effect Part I,” Garrick Utley, Robert Hager, June 23, 1988.
Associated Press put the number about three times higher: Two dozen cities setting heat records.
Polly Anderson, “Citizens Sweltering As Sahara-Like Weather Bakes Much Of Nation,” Associated Press, June 23, 1988.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had it at 25 cities. Post-Intelligencer News Services, “Parched Farm Belt Seeks Federal Help,” June 24, 1988.
153 Senator Wirth’s staff: Ronald D. Brunner, Amanda H. Lynch, Adaptive Governance and Climate Change, American Meteorological Society 2010. Chapter One, “Clarifying the Problem,” 9.
153 the evening before: Sharon Begley, “The Truth About Denial,” Newsweek, August 13, 2007.
A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
153 This let the heat gust in: Frontline, “Hot Politics,” PBS, April 24, 2007.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/wirth.html
Accessed 11-12-22.
And did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot.
So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony.
In his introductory remarks, Wirth of course opened with the heat.
Before we begin, there are about eight or nine seats down here. Maybe those of you who are standing up behind the table over here might want to come down. There is no point in standing up through this on a hot day.
As did the hearing chair, Louisiana Senator Bennett Johnston. The lawmaker noted the improved political conditions of summer versus November. “Last November, we had introductory hearings on the question of global warming,” the chairperson said. “Today, as we experience 101° temperatures in Washington, D.C. . . . The fact of our mistreating this planet by burning too much fossil fuel and putting too much CO2 in the atmosphere and thereby causing this greenhouse effect is now a major concern of Members of Congress and people everywhere.”
Senator Wirth had told journalists to expect a “major statement” from Jim Hansen. As a final bit of stagecraft, Senator Wirth flipped the witness order. Plans had taken shape right down to the gavel, Wirth reading the room.
“Half an hour before the hearing, Wirth pulled Hansen aside,” writes Nathaniel Rich in Losing Earth. Wirth “wanted to change the order of speakers, placing Hansen first. The senator wanted to make sure that his statement got sufficient attention.”
Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth. Chapter 15, “Signal Weather: June 1988,” 131.
William K. Stevens makes the thinking plain in The Change in the Weather.
Wirth told Hansen that he was shifting the order of testimony so that Hansen could go first, in case the television cameras left early.
Stevens, The Change In the Weather, 132. That is, Senator Wirth is one of the day’s heroes too.
153 By the time Hansen sat down: David A. Fahrenthold, “Turning Up the Heat on Climate Issue; 20 Years Ago, a 98-Degree Day Illustrated Scientist’s Warning,” The Washington Post, June 23, 2008.
There have been hotter days on Capitol Hill, but few where the heat itself became a kind of congressional exhibit. It was 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, and the warmth leaked in through the three big windows in Dirksen 366, overpowered the air conditioner, and left the crowd sweating and in shirt sleeves . . . In 1988, however, Hansen was just a government scientist, and his cause was almost equally obscure. He told the sweltering senators that 1988 was shaping up to be the warmest year in recorded history.
153 Senator Wirth had tipped reporters: Senator Wirth had told journalists to expect a “major” Hansen statement.
Rich, Losing Earth. 131.
Remember, this is the Senator Wirth who shared with PBS Frontline a private definition of great happiness: “bliss, which is television cameras in double figures.” Frontline, “Hot Politics.” PBS, April 24, 2007.
153 Coats came off: NBC Evening News, “Drought, Greenhouse Effect Part II,” Garrick Utley, Robert Hager, June 24, 1988.
In the video, you can see reporters and spectators with their jackets removed, sleeves rolled. One Senate aide patiently fans herself with a fistful of briefing papers.
Nathaniel Rich, in Losing Earth: “By 2:10 p.m., when the session began, it was 98 degrees,” he writes, “and not much cooler in Room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which was being irradiated by two banks of television-camera lights.” (Rich, Losing Earth, 130, 132.) And as per plan, Hansen’s major statement led the news, made the evening broadcasts.
“This week there has been considerable attention paid to what scientists call the Greenhouse Effect—that is, a warming trend throughout the world caused by air pollution,” explained NBC’s Garrick Utley, before throwing to correspondent Robert Hager. “Experts warn again and again that the warmth could melt the polar ice caps, raise sea levels, and destroy crops.”
Hager reported, “The carbon dioxide pollution believed mostly responsible for trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing long-term global warming is caused by things basic to modern society.”
And then our familiar montage: smokestacks, hard hats, cars. “The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas—that powers our factories, generates our electricity, heats our homes, and fuels our cars. How could we cut back?”
It’s one of those sly edits in a film: when the flashback catches up with a little shiver to the present action—the moment, three and a half decades later, we still inhabit now.
153 “The politician,” Revelle said: Patti Hagan, “Ideas & Trends: A Convention of Scientists Is Headier Than Most,” The New York Times, February 2, 1975.
154 “versus the costs of not talking”: Robert Pool, “Struggling to Do Science for Society,” Science, Vol. 248, May 11, 1990. Pool adds, “The costs of not talking seemed higher.”
154 “I think you just have to”: Karen Wright, “Heating the Global Warming Debate,” The New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1991.
154 “and it is changing our climate now”: Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change: Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, 100th Congress, First Session, June 23, 1988, Part Two. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988.
154 “It is time to stop waffling”: Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate: Sharp Cut in Burning of Fossil Fuels Is Urged to Battle Shift in Climate” The New York Times, June 24, 1988.
154 “that the greenhouse effect is here”: Philip Shabecoff is the Times writer whose byline ran under the page one Hansen testimony story. The first sentences are what scientists and environmentalists had awaited, and politicians dreaded.
The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.
Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ‘‘greenhouse effect.’’ But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.
Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate: Sharp Cut in Burning of Fossil Fuels Is Urged To Battle Shift in Climate” The New York Times, June 24, 1988.
Next century, Shabecoff could address the results. “During the long, very hot summer of 1988,” he writes, “Dr. James E. Hansen of NASA told a Senate committee that the greenhouse effect was probably already upon us.” The challenge—Africa, Asia, America—was clearly worldwide. “Only then did political leaders slowly develop an interest in environmental threats and begin to respond to them.”
While perhaps less dramatic than the end of the Cold War and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the sudden intense attention given to environmental concerns by world leaders seemed at the time to be an equally significant turning point in the history of nations. Until the late 1980s, ecological issues had been on the periphery of international politics. Almost overnight, global warming, acid rain, the ozone shield, biological diversity, and other environmental issues had moved to the center of the diplomatic stage.
Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement, Island Press | Center for Resource Economics 2003. Chapter Nine, “The Search for Pax Gaia,” 187.
154 “Shy Rights—Why Not Pretty Soon?”: Mordecai Richler, Editor, The Best of Modern Humor, Knopf, 1983. Garrison Keillor, “Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?”, 502-7.
Also published, appropriately enough, in the environmentalist magazine Mother Earth News. Garrison Keillor, “Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?”, Mother Earth News, May/June 1985.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment/shy-people-zmaz85mjzraw
Accessed 11-18-22.
154 Vice President George Bush: Federal News Service, “Candidate and Election Related Interviews and Debates,” August 31, 1988.
Moshin Ali, “Candidates Lock Horns on Environment: U.S. Presidential Election,” The Times (London), September 2, 1988.
Asked if he was trying to show that he was stronger on the environment than President Reagan, Mr. Bush said, “Those are George Bush’s policies. This is what I will do as President.”
154 “Those who think”: The famous quote was included in an environmental policy speech, August 31, 1988, a lovely Michigan autumn day.
The New York Times, “GEORGE BUSH: From the text of a speech delivered Aug. 31 in Erie Metropark, Mich.,” September 24, 1988.
John Balzar, “Bush Vows ‘Zero Tolerance’ of Environmental Polluters,” The Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1988.
Such a sure-fire line it was re-delivered—in his capacity as GOP campaign surrogate—by the blank-faced martial artist Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris, “Face Off: Bush Will Protect Our Environment,” USA Today, November 1, 1988. (Whoever did the writing work for Norris included stitching and tailoring too: “With a man in the White House fighting to maintain the natural beauty we all depend upon, we can’t go wrong.”)
154 Hansen’s testimony: The effect was immediate. Times science writer William K. Stevens has a wonderful few paragraphs on how fast the story moved.
Hansen’s statement was brief. He told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—and the world—that four of the warmest years in 130 years of measuring the average global surface temperature had occurred in the 1980s. He noted that the first five months of 1988 had brought the highest global temperatures yet. He said it could now be asserted with 99 percent confidence that the earth was warming and that it was a real change, not a temporary, chaotic fluctuation . . .
Finer distinctions and considerations of probability were lost in the immediate reaction to Hansen’s testimony. Also lost in the sensational event in the Senate was the role of a conventional, natural blocking high-pressure system, possibly assisted by La Niña, in holding the summer’s heat and dryness in place. No matter: Millions of people now believed that global warming was responsible for the drought and heat wave. Environmentalists were ecstatic, and Hansen became an instant hero to them. Many of his colleagues were less than thrilled and in fact criticized him harshly for, as they saw it, going too far—and, worse, doing it in a way guaranteed to gain maximum attention.
That it did. In one dramatic stroke, Hansen infused the question of climate change with palpable immediacy, propelling it out of the laboratory and into the public arena. Suddenly it was on the front burner of international politics . . . For two centuries, people had been spewing heat-trapping waste industrial gases, mainly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. For a century and a half, a succession of scientists had been investigating what this might mean. For almost no time had anyone considered what, if anything, the world ought to do about it. Now all three streams of activity—industrial, scientific, and political—had converged as never before, and the outlines of a historic debate had suddenly popped into clear focus.
William K. Stevens, The Change In the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate, Delacorte 1999. Chapter Eight, “The Greenhouse Experiment,” 132-33.
And there’s Newsweek’s very quick, “Now the greenhouse effect has taken its rightful place on the public agenda.”
Sharon Begley, Mark Miller, Mary Hager, “The Endless Summer?”, Newsweek, July 11, 1988.
154 “weatherman to the World”: Sharon Begley, Daniel Glick, Adam Rogers, “He’s Not Full of Hot Air,” Newsweek, January 22, 1996.
Senator Tim Wirth (later Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs; the lawmaker responsible for climate negotiation) called Hansen “whistleblower for the planet.” Noisier but less catchy. Eric Pooley, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, Hyperion 2010. Chapter 30, “The Gardener,” 270.
154 A journalist once described Hansen: Karen Wright, “Heating the Global Warming Debate,” The New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1991.
154–55 the town slogan is: Robert H. Boyle, “Global Warming: You’re Getting Warmer . . .”, Audubon Magazine, November/December 1999.
155 “in various screenplays”: The Donna Reed Suite, The “Historic” Park Motel, Denison, IA. (Quotation marks theirs.)
https://www.theparkmotel.com/donna_reed.asp
Accessed 11-20-22.
155 His childhood was a mix: James Hansen, Sophie’s Planet: A Search for Truth About Our Remarkable Planet and Its Future, Bloomsbury 2023. Chapter One, “Ancestry,” 10. “Denison was a wonderful place to grow up. Our mother told us many times how lucky we were, and she was right.”
This excerpt is available at Dr. Hansen’s Columbia University website.
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2018/PrefaceSophiePlanet.pdf
Accessed 11-20-22.
155 the fifth of seven children: Robert H. Boyle, “Global Warming: You’re Getting Warmer . . .”, Audubon Magazine, November/December 1999.
Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 November 27, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-2
Accessed 11-12-22.
155 His father was a tenant farmer: Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 November 27, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-2
Accessed 11-12-22.
155 “shambling, gee-whiz”: For example, Bill McKibben, “Getting Warmer,” Outside, May 1993. Karen Wright points out another aspect of the Hansen uprightness. “No cuss words or histrionics here — this is the man who once asked a writer paraphrasing his thoughts to change ‘damn’ to ‘darned.’” Karen Wright, “Heating the Global Warming Debate,” The New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1991.
155 product of the taprooms and arguments: Hansen told Spencer Weart in November 2000 his father had not been educated beyond the eighth grade. Farming at the time had become “un-economic.”
So we moved into town, actually bought a little house and moved it onto a piece of land near Denison, and lived there for many years. But [my father] was a bartender in town for five or eight years, something like that, and then became a janitor. That was his last profession. In the meantime, while he was a bartender, we had a pretty big family with seven kids, so it was a little hard to support that based on just his earnings, so my mother got a job as a waitress, and continued to work at that.
Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 October 23, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-1
Accessed 11-20-22.
155 He played sandlot baseball: Karen Wright, “Heating the Global Warming Debate,” The New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1991.
In Losing Earth, Nathaniel Rich calls it a “childhood of deprivation and meagerness.” Which is how it might sound to a New York City person (I’m from there, too). It’s interesting to hear Hansen’s take. “Our mother told us many times how lucky we were,” the scientist writes in Sophie’s Planet. “And she was right.”
155 University of Iowa: Bruce E. Johansen, “The Paul Revere of Global Warming,” The Progressive, Vol. 70, August 2006.
155 graduated summa cum laude: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, 146. He graduated a double major, physics and mathematics.
A big change—what the STEM graduates would call nonlinear. Hansen told Karen Wright of the Times Magazine that he’d “almost never cracked a book he didn’t have to until he got to the University of Iowa, where he met James Van Allen, then chairman of the physics and astronomy department. Van Allen discovered and gave his name to the belts of radiation that circle the earth; he is something of a legend and, according to Hansen, he ran the kind of program that can change the course of a student’s life.”
155 December of his senior year: James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Bloomsbury 2009. Preface, xiii.
My career in science, my first step into science research, was born one evening in December 1963. The day before, fellow student Andy Lacis and I had swept leaves, cobwebs, and mice out of a little domed building on a hill in a cornfield just outside Iowa City. The next night, within that dome, an older graduate student, John Zink, helped us use a small telescope to observe a lunar eclipse. When the moon went into eclipse, passing into Earth’s shadow, we were surprised that we saw nothing—just a black area in the sky, without stars, in the spot where we had just seen a full moon; the moon had become invisible to the naked eye. This is not usually the case with an eclipse. Normally, the moon is dimmed but still obvious, because sunlight is refracted by Earth’s atmosphere into the shadow region. However, nine months earlier, in March 1963, there had been a large volcanic eruption, of Mount Agung on the island of Bali, which injected sulfur dioxide gas and dust into Earth’s stratosphere. The sulfur dioxide gas combined with oxygen and water to form a sulfuric acid haze, and the resulting particles in the stratosphere blocked most of the sunlight that normally is refracted into Earth’s shadow.
His fellow astronomy student, Andy Lacis, would later become a NASA colleague; the two worked together from lecture hall to gold watch.
Hansen told Spencer Weart their astronomy professor, Satoshi Matsushima, came out too. “It must have been one of the coldest days on record there. It was like 25 degrees below zero on this hill outside of Iowa City.” So, another irony: that record cold would inspire the great American recorder of warming.
Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 October 23, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-1
Accessed 11-19-22.
155 An Indonesian volcano: This was Mount Agung, Bali. Which in Hansen’s senior year—1963—went up twice. First eruption March 17, then sixty days later, May 16. Hansen told Spencer Weart, “Mount Agung had gone off six months earlier,” so it’s the spring lava he was thinking of. The eclipse was scheduled for just before New Years.
Otto Kneuth, “Moon Eclipse May Be Seen Here December 30,” Des Moines Register, December 22, 1963.
The story has a subhead: “Dust From Bali”—“It is possible that the Dec. 30 eclipse will produce an unusually red room because of large quantities of dust thrown into the atmosphere by the great volcanic eruptions on the island of Bali early this year.”
In Losing Earth, Nathaniel Rich writes, “Hansen made the mystery the subject of his master’s thesis, concluding that the moon had been obscured by the dust erupted into the atmosphere . . . The discovery stirred in him a fascination with the influence of invisible particles on the visible world.” Rich goes on, “You could not make sense of the visible world, he realized, until you understood the whimsies of the invisible one.” Rich, Losing Earth, Chapter Two, “Mirror Worlds: Spring 1979,” 29–30.
155 “I was so shy”: Bruce E. Johansen, “The Paul Revere of Global Warming,” The Progressive, Vol. 70, August 2006.
155 “Not aggressive at all”: Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 October 23, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-1
Accessed 11-20-22.
155 “without stopping to sleep”: Karen Wright, “Heating the Global Warming Debate,” The New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1991.
156 the same building: Karen Wright, in the Times Magazine, says of the location, “Hansen is lord of a modest manor.” She [could have] had no way of knowing this would be a famous line—“Lord of the manor”—from “The Contest,” the single most famous Seinfeld episode.
156 he was principal investigator: James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren, Chapter Six, “The Faustian Bargain: Humanity’s Own Trap,” 97.
156 “The earth has an intermediate amount”: Robert H. Boyle, “Global Warming: You’re Getting Warmer . . .”, Audubon Magazine, November/December 1999.
As Jonathan Weiner writes, he was among the American scientists “radicalized” via interplanetary study.
“Climate experts William Kellogg and James Hansen and the astronomer Carl Sagan were among the first scientists to look into the Venusian inferno. Each of them later became outspoken about the greenhouse effect on Earth. In part they were radicalized by Venus.”
Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years, Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 64.
156 “until I was captivated”: Bruce E. Johansen, “The Paul Revere of Global Warming,” The Progressive, Vol. 70, August 2006.
156 “to study a planetary atmosphere”: Bruce E. Johansen, “The Paul Revere of Global Warming,” The Progressive, Vol. 70, August 2006.
156 “And also of practical importance”: People, given the same cue, will tend to deliver the same line. The way Hansen expressed this to pioneer climate writer Bill McKibben was, “It’s interesting to try and understand what’s on another planet, but if our own planet is changing, that’s even more interesting.”
Stevens, Change In the Weather, 147.
156 “It does help to be right”: Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Truthteller,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2009.
From early on, the significance of Hansen’s insights was recognized by the scientific community. “The work that he did in the seventies, eighties, and nineties was absolutely groundbreaking,” Spencer Weart, a physicist turned historian who has studied the efforts to understand climate change, told me. He added, “It does help to be right.”
156 That August: James Hansen, Andrew Lacis, et al., “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Science, Vol. 213, August 28, 1981.
Note the second name: Like Hansen, from that Iowa observatory to NASA.
156 “almost unprecedented magnitude”: Hansen, Lacis, et al, “Climate Impact of Increasing Carbon Dioxide”. “The global warming projected for the next century is of almost unprecedented magnitude.”
157 Who ran them on page one: Walter Sullivan, “Study Finds Warming Trend That Could Raise Sea Levels,” The New York Times, August 22, 1981.
A team of federal scientists says it has detected an overall warming trend in the earth’s atmosphere extending back to the year 1880. They regard this as evidence of the validity of the ‘‘greenhouse’’ effect in which increasing amounts of carbon dioxide cause steady temperature increases.
157 “original sin”: Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, Dutton 2008. Chapter Eight, “The Veil of Venus,” 212.
157 Moon Palace: Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, Dutton 2008. Chapter Eight, “The Veil of Venus,” 211–12.
157 Five people: Stevens, Change In the Weather, 150.
Bowen, Censoring Science, 212.
157 He repeated the same warnings: The New York Times, “Warming of World’s Climate Expected to Begin in the 80’s,” January 7, 1982. “Mankind’s activities in increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and other chemicals in the atmosphere can be expected to have a substantial warming effect on climate, with the first clear signs of the trend becoming evident within this decade, a scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said here today. . . Dr. James Hansen of the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York . . .”
157 He testified in November 1987: Hansen told Spencer Weart it was very near to the June 1988 presentation. Just that telling difference of weather and media—of cultural weather. “It [1987] even had the maps that I showed in 1988 testimony.”
Interview of James Hansen by Spencer Weart on 2000 November 27, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/24309-2
Accessed 11-20-22.
157 “a stunning impact on political thinking”: John Noble Wilford, “His Bold Statement Transforms The Debate On Greenhouse Effect,” The New York Times, August 23, 1988.
For example, in immediate newsmagazine terms. “Newsweek’s cover story of 11 July, ‘The Greenhouse Effect’, was pegged on the drought and Hansen’s assertions.” Mazur, Lee, “Sounding the Global Alarm,” Social Studies of Science, November 1993.
And at last non-scientists became familiar with the idea; this was the year of its branding. “The ‘greenhouse effect’ — the trapping of solar heat by pollutant gases in the atmosphere — became a household phrase.”
Malcolm W. Browne, “Ideas & Trends; Was That a Greenhouse Effect? It Depends on Your Theory,” The New York Times, September 4, 1988.
157 Climate change went national: “The testimony,” the Washington Post reported next decade, “launched the issue politically in this country.”
Susan Cohen, “The Warm Zone; Admit It: You Don’t Know What to Believe About Global Warming,” The Washington Post, July 16, 1995.
157 international: This is from Spencer Weart’s history; the historian expands on the same point.
“Up to this point, the summer of 1988, global warming had been generally below the threshold of public attention. The reports that the 1980s were the hottest years on record had barely made it into the inside pages of newspapers. A majority of people were not even aware of the problem. Those who had heard about global warming mostly saw it as a gradual matter, something that the next generation might or might not need to worry about.” After the drought summer and Jim Hansen’s testimony:
The story was no longer a scientific abstraction about an atmospheric phenomenon: it was about a present danger to everyone, from elderly people struck down by heat to the owners of beach houses. Images of blasted crops and burning forests seemed like a warning signal, a visible preview for what the future might hold.
The media coverage was so extensive that, according to a 1989 poll, 79 percent of Americans recalled having heard or read about the greenhouse effect. This was a big jump from the 38 percent who had heard about it in 1981, and an extraordinarily high level of public awareness for any scientific phenomenon. Most of these citizens recognized that “greenhouse effect” meant the threat of global warming, and most thought they would live to experience climate changes.
Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003. Chapter Seven, “Breaking into Politics,” 155-6.
157 “I’ve never seen”: Wilford, “His Bold Statement,” New York Times.
157 “‘but he never tried to make it clear’”: Frontline, “Hot Politics,” PBS, April 24, 2007.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/hansen.html#3
Accessed 11-18-22.
