The Politics of Dissent - Behind the Curve - page 127

summer of 1988, environmental organizations— and their constituents—
were ready to act.
inside the federal Bureaucracy
The fight over funding for CO 2 research extended beyond the halls of
Congress; government scientists also fought to maintain control over cli-
mate research within the federal bureaucracy itself. Again, discussions
about CO 2 provided a platform for criticizing Reagan's energy and envi-
ronmental policies, but in this arena the results were more mixed. If the
Reagan administration did one thing well, it was controlling the federal
bureaucracy.
The first important conflict between the administration and its own
scientists occurred at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, headed
by James Hansen, and not surprisingly it again involved a dispute over
DOE funding. A taciturn Iowan and at that time the picture of a careful,
plodding scientist, Hansen had spent much of the late 1970s helping to
design a new general circulation model that would reveal the long-term,
average characteristics of climate independent of the short-term, ampli-
tudinal characteristics of weather. 50 Funded by an internal NASA grant
under the Carter administration, Hansen's group used the model— called
Model Zero until 1981, when GISS updated and renamed it Model II— to
explore the earth's climatic response to a doubling of atmospheric CO 2
given a variety of feedback processes and systemic sensitivities. Unlike
with other, higher-resolution GCMs, Hansen's group could run the new
model multiple times relatively quickly, allowing them to establish high-
and low-end boundaries for the potential impacts of certain poorly under-
stood characteristics of the oceans on the overall climate prediction. 51
Using historical climate data from as early as 1880, the model reliably pro-
duced results “roughly consistent” with measured reality. 52
When Hansen finally published the Model II results in Science in 1981,
his conclusions did not go over well with an administration bent on down-
playing the CO 2 issue. “The global warming projected for next century is
of almost unprecedented magnitude,” Hansen and his colleagues wrote. 53
The warming could lead, among other things, to the relatively rapid col-
lapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, producing an overall sea-level rise of
up to six meters— enough to “flood 25 percent of Florida and Louisiana, 10