Global Warming: Has Complacency (Finally) Yielded to Panic?

• Edwin S. Rubenstein
• May 21, 2019
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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Global Warming: Has Complacency (Finally) Yielded to Panic?

An NPG Forum Paper
by Edwin S. Rubenstein

The summer of 2018 was a moment when the ecological future became our present reality. A heatwave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. In Europe, nuclear power plants shut down because river water that cools their reactors was too warm. The most destructive wildfires in California’s history turned more than a million acres to ash, while a study in the journal PLOS Medicine projected a five-fold rise in heat-related deaths in the U.S. by 2080.1

In October the United Nations released what came to be known as the “Doomsday report,” described by one U.N. official as “a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” – detailing climate effects of 1.5 to two degrees Celsius on global warming. “If we don’t take action,” a BBC environmental consultant warned, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Climate scientists have felt this way for decades, but they rarely talk about it. Why are they so cool with global warming? Other emergencies have elicited immediate outcries from professionals in those fields:

• Public health experts had no problem screaming about the cancer risk posed by cigarettes after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report confirmed the relationship. The result: cancer rates fell as Americans kicked the habit in record numbers.
• Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the public to the harm done to wildlife by the pesticide DDT, and the role of the chemical industry in spreading false assurances of safety. The result: in 1972 EPA banned DDT.
• The partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 was the most serious accident in the U.S. nuclear power industry. Although little radiation escaped, public confidence was shaken to near-panic levels. The result: the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. was halted for 30 years.

Nearly everything we know about global warming today was known in 1979.3 By that year data confirmed what had long been suspected: Human beings have altered the Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. As the 1980s began the scientific consensus grew – but for nearly a decade climate scientists were reluctant to sound the alarm.

Finally, nearly a decade later, one did.

On June 23,1988 James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, became the first professional to present evidence implicating human activity in global warming. In Senate testimony he said: “The signal has emerged…” that the warming trend is not a natural variation but can be attributed to carbon dioxide emissions “with 99 percent confidence.” Interviewed after the hearing, Dr. Hansen added, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’’

Hansen’s testimony went viral – or whatever the comparable term was in those pre-internet days – prompting headlines in dozens of newspapers, including The New York Times, which splashed a headline over the top of its front page announcing “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

Four days later, at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere – an event one reporter described as “Woodstock for climate change” – 300 scientists joined Hansen to sign a resolution stating that atmospheric changes from human activity “represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe,” and declared that by 2005 the world should push its emissions some 20%
below the 1988 level…

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