Was still on the mega-roadtrip last Wednesday, so I couldn’t rerun this ten-year-old column.
Enjoy!
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On June 23, 1988, a physicist told the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that due to the buildup of certain manmade gasses in the atmosphere, he was “99 percent” confident of a “real warming trend.”
“The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now,” testified James Hansen, then the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
It was the debut of global-warming hysteria. For 25 years, consumers and taxpayers in every nation have been dealing with the consequences.
In 1986, the Los Angeles Times reported that “almost all scientists” agreed that the greenhouse effect would “happen, given present trends,” but they weren’t certain when: “Pessimistic estimates say 40 years or so; other estimates are for much later in the 21st Century.” It was the pre-“consensus” era, and global warming needed a boost. The Hansen hearing provided one, in a spectacular fashion.
Some theatrics helped. Two decades later, Sen. Timothy Wirth (D-CO) admitted his role in manipulating the event’s “optics”: “We called the Weather Bureau [sic] and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. … So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington or close to it.” Not content with playing the percentages, Wirth engineered indoor climate change: “What we did is that we went in the night beforehand and opened all the windows . . . so the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”
Hansen’s sweaty certainty, offered before a dais of fedpols and gaggle of reporters, garnered global warming the solemnity it had long sought. And in case there was any doubt about the implications of the “science,” a fellow panelist spooked senators with a grim analog. Global warming, the Woods Hole Research Center’s George M. Woodwell intoned, “has the potential for turning the world into a form of chaos not greatly different from that produced by global war.”
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