Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and displaced millions of people in Bangladesh; and droughts in China
and the Soviet Union threatened food supplies around the world.
50
Before
these events, in 1986, Andrew Maguire of the World Resources Institute
had testified before a Senate subcommittee that “mankind's activities are
changing the atmosphere in ways that could profoundly affect the habit-
ability of the Earth,” and his comments echoed a chorus of similar senti-
ments from scientists and politicians.
51
In the midst of one of the warmest
and wildest weather years on record, the media began to ask whether those
profound changes had arrived.
52
With the help of Colorado senator Tim Wirth, James Hansen of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies— the same James Hansen
whose research funding had been cut by the Reagan administration seven
years before— took advantage of the weird weather to add urgency to a
growing public concern. Wirth scheduled a hearing on global warming
for June 23, 1988, in the heart of the summer and at a characteristically
slow time for Congress. He invited Hansen and Sukiro Manabe of the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to testify. The temperature in
Washington, D.C. reached 101ºF.
53
Hansen told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—
and the media— that he was 99 percent sure that the world was warming;
that scientists could ascribe that warming to the greenhouse effect, and,
implicitly, to fossil fuels, with a “high degree of confidence”; and, perhaps
most controversially among scientists, that the impacts of global warming
could already be detected.
54
Hansen made it clear that no single warm day
or heat wave, or even series of heat waves, proved the larger, longer-term
phenomenon of global warming; but alongside colleagues Manabe, George
Woodwell, and Michael Oppenheimer, he suggested that the unpredict-
able weather and frequent severe storms of 1987 and 1988 foretold the con-
ditions of the climatic regime to come.
55
As Hansen most famously told
Phillip Shabecoff of the
New York Times
, “It's time to stop waffling so much
and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here
and is affecting our climate now.”
56
The media response helped turn global warming— and the environ-
ment more broadly— into a major political issue in the 1988 presidential
election. Over the next year, climate change appeared on the front page
of nearly every major newspaper, and magazines like
Time, Newsweek,
and
even
Sports Illustrated
ran cover stories on global environmental problems.
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