Merchants of Doubt by Erik M. Conway

Author:Erik M. Conway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Meeting the “Greenhouse Effect”

with the “White House Effect”

Two crucial developments during the presidential campaign year of 1988 changed climate science forever. The first was the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The second was the announcement by climate modeler James E. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that anthropogenic global warming had begun. An organized campaign of denial began the following year, and soon ensnared the entire climate science community.

In November 1987 Colorado senator Tim Wirth had sponsored a hearing on climate in which Hansen had testified, but it had been widely ignored by the nation’s media establishment.54 A drought was setting in across the United States, however, and by the following summer, the nation was in crisis. The year 1988 proved to be one of the hottest and driest in U.S. history. As 40 percent of the nation’s counties were affected, and as crops failed, livestock died, and food prices rose, people were beginning to wonder if perhaps global warming was not so far off after all. Popular and media interest in climate soared. In June, Wirth tried again. Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana delivered the opening statement of the hearing:

Today, as we experience 101°[F] temperatures in Washington, DC, and the soil moisture across the midwest is ruining the soybean crops, the corn crops, the cotton crops, when we’re having emergency meetings of the Members of the Congress in order to figure out how to deal with this emergency, then the words of Dr. Manabe and other witnesses who told us about the greenhouse effect are becoming not just concern, but alarm.55

Hansen was the star of the show. He testified about some new research at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, showing that there had been a warming since 1980 of just about half a degree Celsius—or one degree Fahrenheit—relative to the 1950–1980 average. The probability that this could be explained by natural events was only 1 percent. “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect,” Hansen told the committee.56

His team had also modeled the increase of carbon dioxide and other trace gases according to three “emissions scenarios.” The scenarios were not intended to be predictions of the actual course of human carbon emissions; they were what-if scenarios bracketing likely rates of future emissions and their consequences. One scenario imagined rapid reduction of fossil fuel use after 2000, which reduced future warming. The other two—more realistic scenarios—raised the Earth’s global mean temperature rapidly. Within twenty years, it would be higher than at any time since the warmest previous interglacial period then known, which ended about 120,000 years ago.57

This time, major newspapers across the country covered the hearings. The New York Times put Hansen’s testimony on the front page; suddenly he was the leading advocate for doing something about the global warming.58 Some colleagues, uncomfortable with all the media attention—and maybe a bit jealous, too—attacked Hansen for going too far, thinking he had discounted the significant uncertainties that still remained.

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