It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

...but it wasn't Sergeant Pepper asking the band to play---it was James E. Hansen telling the U.S. Congress to get serious about global heating, because he was 90% sure it was happening, and it threatened the future.

Dr. Hansen was a climate scientist at NASA. As anniversary stories today in the Washington Post and NY Times recall, June 23, 1988 was a very hot day in Washington--the Post says it was 98-- during a sweltering summer in the eastern half of the U.S. Counting that year, five of the previous 9 years broke records as the hottest years ever recorded for the planet. So people paid attention when Hansen said, “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

Global heating wasn't a new idea among scientists and others. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned it to Arthur Miller in the 1960s. But Hansen had more facts, more authority and a dramatic moment. And for awhile, it seemed that humanity might even be up to the challenge. By 1990, books were sounding a general alarm (Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, Dead Heat by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle among them) and released internationally was what remains for me the best television production with the widest context, James Burke's brilliant After the Warming.

That TV production, and books like Dead Heat, lamented that crucial time had been lost but that bold action on a large scale might avert the worst. But it was a long-term, slow motion crisis, and present changes were distant enough to ignore and incremental enough in the weather to be absorbed as the latest normal. Now global heating records are broken every month, every year, and it barely gets a mention.

Perhaps the science wasn't settled enough, the politics not easy enough, or the nature of the crisis just too challenging emotionally and conceptually. But mostly it was that dealing with it meant shifting power and money away from those who felt entitled to it, and who had the power and money to effectively oppose any threat to their dominion. And for 20 years there has been lots of hot air, and very little action.

So on June 23, 2008, twenty years later, James Hansen is a senior scientist at NASA and probably the most respected voice in the scientific community on the topic of global heating. And he's back before Congress, with the same damn message, only more so. Hansen summarized his message at Huffington Post, comparing that day 20 years ago and today:

"Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.

Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. But the changes have been blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits, who hold sway in Washington and other capitals.

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible.

It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year."

In twenty years, the science has become more precise, the effects of global heating more obvious, and political leaders as well as the public around the world understand the Climate Crisis better, and the urgency to address it.

But we don't have another twenty years to fool around. We have 2009. If the U.S. doesn't undertake the mission to lead a global effort, beginning with a national transformation, then the future of the planet is dire, perhaps beyond even our most active apocalyptic imaginings.

Though a few years ago I determined to make hope a moral position, and to enact that hope for the future by advocacy in the present, I wouldn't have bet on the likelihood of the necessary change. But now the economic constraints just beginning are clearly related even in the public mind to fossil fuels and the society centered on them. There's a recognition of the need to change.

We also have an emerging leader with a good chance of becoming President, who has the intelligence and the vision and the ability to inspire that could start us through this. Electing Barack Obama, and using the power of the people he insists is central to his vision to keep his attention on what needs to be done to address the Climate Crisis, seems like our last best hope. What's amazing is that at this late date, that hope is real.