Hansen vs The World: A Turning Point (Part 2)

The Testimony That Changed Everything

Dec 30, 2024

Dr James Hansen. Image Source: Anne Meador on Flickr

The summer of 1988 was the hottest and the driest summer in the United States’ history. Extensive wildfires were ranging across the county. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. In Alaska alone more than 2 million acres were burned (UPI Archives, 1988). Yellowstone National Park experienced a wildfire season unparalleled in its history, with 1.2 million acres reduced to ash. Smoke from the fires was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.[1] (National Park Service, 1989), (Repanshek, 1988). Meanwhile, New York City boiled. For 44 consecutive days, starting on the Fourth of July, the city baked under a relentless heatwave (Opie, 1992). It didn’t feel like just another hot summer. It felt like a warning.

The Testimony That Changed Everything

The summer of 1988 wasn’t just hot - it changed everything. Climate change stepped out of scientific journals and into the national spotlight. On June 23, Dr James Hansen testified before Congress and made it official: the planet was warming, and humans were the cause. (Hansen, et al., 1988) “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” he said to the journalists after the hearing. His urgent warning made the next day’s headlines and James Hansen emerged as one of the most prominent voices on climate change

But Hansen didn’t have time to dwell on any of this. As soon as he got home to New York, his wife, Anniek told him she thought she had breast cancer. She had found out two weeks earlier, but she didn’t tell him so to avoid upsetting him before the Senate hearing. Hansen’s priorities shifted and in the following days, while the entire world tried to learn about James Hansen, he tried to learn about Anniek’s illness. Even when the crisis was over and life reverted to normal, Hansen tried to focus on his research, avoiding the distractions of media and politics.

That was easier said than done, however. Climate change was beginning to become more visible in the political discourse and received media attention. In the same year Hansen testified, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established, marking the first concerted global effort to address climate change. Politicians, like Al Gore, were also bringing attention to the issue, holding Congressional hearings as early as 1976.

By the late 1980s, environmental issues like acid rain, pollution, and deforestation were making headlines, but climate change was not yet a mainstream concern for most Americans. Al Gore tried to change that. In 1988, he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination drawing attention to climate change, an issue that no one else was discussing at all. As he later recalled, ( Germond & Witcover, 1989)

“I made hundreds of speeches about the greenhouse effect, the ozone problem, that were almost never reported at all. There were several occasions where I prepared the ground in advance, released advanced texts, chose the place for the speech with symbolic care — and then nothing, nothing.”

Al Gore warned the Americans that the future generations would inhabit a planet much different and worse than their own: More extreme weather like hurricanes, floods and wildfires; massive refugee crises; and a breakdown in the economy as vital resources become more scarce.

It was a message ahead of its time. Al Gore lost the presidential nomination to Michael Dukakis, who ultimately lost to Republican George H.W. Bush. The world might have been a better place if Gore had won that nomination.

The Whitehouse Effect

Recognising the growing concerns about the environment, Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush made environmental policy a priority. In a speech in Michigan on 31 August 1988, he pledged to be ‘the environmental president.’ “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the White House effect. As President, I intend to do something about it.” (Schneider, 1991) (George H. Bush 1988 Environmental Policy Speech 1988. )

Bush’s rhetoric raised expectations, but his appointment of John Sununu as chief of staff complicated matters. The MIT-educated engineer John Sununu, was an intelligent and pragmatic politician, a very successful three-term Governor of New Hampshire. During his term, he managed to turn a budget deficit into a surplus without raising taxes. His environmental record was also strong. Sununu championed public land preservation, increasing funding to protect natural resources. He signed the nation’s first acid-rain legislation, setting a precedent for proactive environmental governance. Moreover, he lobbied President Reagan to adopt a bold national target: a 50 percent reduction in sulphur emissions, aligning with the goals of leading environmental groups like the Audubon Society. Yet he was deeply skeptical of climate change This skepticism would soon put Hansen and the White House on a collision course.

The Censorship

In April 1989, Al Gore had planned another hearing to explore the latest climate science. However, this was postponed when Gore’s six-year-old son was struck by a car after a Baltimore Orioles game, sustaining life-threatening injuries. The senator spent a month at his son’s bedside, delaying the hearing until May 8.

James Hansen was invited to testify again about his research on global climate models, how they work, what process they include and the conclusions we can draw from them. His findings painted a troubling picture. His research predicted that as the planet warms, dry regions would become drier, wet areas wetter and subtropical areas like the southern United States, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, hotter and drier. Climate change would probably fuel more powerful storms, while rising sea levels, would threaten the world’s coastal cities, where populations and infrastructure were rapidly expanding.

But just days before the hearing, on May 5, Hansen received an unexpected phone call from NASA Headquarters. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had requested changes to his submitted testimony. The OMB’s director Richard Darman, a close ally of John Sununu, had flagged Hansen’s testimony as “too extreme.” (Rich N. , 2018)

Hansen's concerns about the dangers of global warming—the link between rising temperatures and extreme weather events—had been watered down to mere “evolving estimates.” More troubling, the OMB had inserted language suggesting that climate change might result from “natural processes” and that any legislation should prioritise economic benefits over environmental ones.

Frustrated, Hansen decided he would not stay silent. He wrote directly to Senator Al Gore, explaining the censorship and the compromises it demanded of his science. Gore, equally outraged brought the issue to the press. The next day, on May 8, 1989, The New York Times ran the explosive headline “Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His Testimony.” (Shabecoff, Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His Testimony, 1989) Before Hansen even stepped foot in Congress, his testimony was already front-page news.

During the hearing, Hansen didn’t let the edits stop him. Using a simple Christmas tree bulb as a visual aid, he explained how fossil fuel combustion was warming the planet. (Excerpt of “Climate Surprises” the May 8, 1989 Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the Committee on Commerce)

Now, this small light bulb which I have here which I took off our Christmas string at home has a power of 1.1 watts. So, the heating of the earth due to the gases added in the past 30 years is equivalent to having a bulb like this shining down on every square meter of the earth’s surface, day and night, year after year and getting brighter each year.

Now, at first glance, it is not obvious whether this heating is important. But consider that the earth absorbs 238 watts per meter squared. So, just the gases added in the last 30 years are one half of 1 percent of the energy that we get from the sun, and in 50 years it will be 2 percent of the energy we get from the sun if we continue along a path of business as usual for trace gas growth rates.

This amount of heating is important. It affects the temperature on the surface, the evaporation from the ground and the temperature and evaporation on a global scale affect the winds, the cloud cover and the rainfall and in turn these affect the oceans—the ocean circulation. That is why we need global models, because we need to analyze the interactions and feedbacks of the entire climate system._ James Hansen (1989)

While Hansen’s official statement mostly adhered to the OMB’s edits, Al Gore used his questions to expose the truth. “Why do you directly contradict yourself?” he asked, pretending confusion. Hansen clarified that the contradictions were imposed on him, and Gore did not hold back: “If they forced you to change a scientific conclusion, it is a form of science fraud.” (Rich N. , 2018)

And just like that climate change wasn’t just a scientific issue anymore. It became a political battleground.

The Aftermath

The fallout was immediate. White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that the OMB had made changes to Dr. Hansen's testimony. He claimed that the revisions were meant to ensure that the testimony accurately reflected the scientific consensus and the administration's policies on climate change. He also pledged that there would be no retaliation against Hansen. Critics, however, saw this as an attempt to downplay the urgency of global warming and soften the conclusions to shield the administration from pressure to act. (Shabecoff, White House Admits Censoring Testimony, 1989)

Behind closed doors, though tensions simmered. In his article “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, Nathaniel Rich writes that the day after the hearing, OMB Director Richard Darman visited alone Gore to apologise. “Something about his apology — the effusiveness, the mortified tone or perhaps the fact that he had come by himself, as if in secret — left Gore with the impression that the idea to censor Hansen didn’t come from someone five levels down from the top, or even below Darman.

For Hansen, the controversy was both a setback and a turning point. While he had been thrust into an unwelcome spotlight, the attempted censorship ultimately amplified his message far beyond the hearing room. By the end of 1989, public awareness of climate change had become a real concern and the stage was set for more contentious debates over global climate policy.

So, what began as a scientific inquiry was turning into a political story. Hansen was probably starting to realise that the political realm is a kind of “Mirror World,” a place where truth is often bent to fit agendas and clarity gives way to distortion. The thing with this Mirror World however is that if applied enough pressure, it can be reshaped to reveal a different future. James Hansen seemed he was beginning to understand that. Once reluctant to engage with politics, he was starting to see its necessity. Science alone couldn’t fix the problem—he needed to fight for it.

James Hansen arrested during a protest outside the White House on August 29, 2011. Source: Wikipedia

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Notes

1] The White House announced the establishment of the Interagency Drought Policy Committee on June 15, 1988, consisting of the Departments of Agriculture, Army, and Energy Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of the Vice President

Sources:

Germond , J. W., & Witcover, J. (1989). Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars: The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency, 1988. Grand Central Pub.
Excerpt of “Climate Surprises” the May 8, 1989 Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the Committee on Commerce. (n.d.). Retrieved from Pulitzer Center: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/may_8_1989_senate_hearing_0.pdf?
George H. Bush 1988 Environmental Policy Speech 1988. . (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4777288/user-clip-george-bush-1988-environmental-policy-speech-1988
National Park Service . (1989). "The Greater Yellowstone Fires of 1988" (PDF). National Park Service. January 25, 1989. Retrieved June 13, 2022. National Park Service. Retrieved December 13, 2024, from https://npshistory.com/publications/yell/1988-fire-qa.pdf
Opie, J. (1992). The Drought of 1988, the Global Warming Experiment, and Its Challenge to Irrigation in the Old Dust Bowl Region. Agricultural History, 66(2), 279-306. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3743858?
Repanshek, K. J. (1988, July 26 ). Fires Ravage Yellowstone National Park. The Associated Press.
Rich, N. (2018, August 1). Losing Earth: the decade we almost stopped climate change. The New York Times , pp. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html#main.
Rich, N. (2018, August 1). Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change," published in The New York Times Magazine on August 1, 2018. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
Schneider, K. (1991, August 25). The Nation; The Environmental Impact of President Bush. The New York Times. doi:https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/25/weekinreview/the-nation-the-environmental-impact-of-president-bush.html?searchResultPosition=1
Shabecoff, P. (1989, 8 May). Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His Tesimony. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/08/us/scientist-says-budget-office-altered-his-testimony.html
Shabecoff, P. (1989, May 9). White House Admits Censoring Testimony. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/09/science/white-house-admits-censoring-testimony.html
UPI Archives . (1988, July 17). More than 1,300 firefighters struggled in blistering heat Sunday... Retrieved from UPI: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/07/17/More-than-1300-firefighters-struggled-in-blistering-heat-Sunday/3450585115200/?