James Hansen 30 Years Later: "I'm Sorry We're Leaving Such A Fucking Mess"
On June 23, 1988—a blisteringly hot day in Washington, D.C.—James Hansen told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” At the time, Hansen was the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and though his testimony was certainly not the first official warning about the “greenhouse effect”—a report to President Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, predicted “measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” in the decades to follow—it was the first to receive national news coverage. The Times ran the story at the top of the front page, with a graph showing a long-term rise in average global temperatures.
EDIT
Back in 1988, just about the only information available on climate change was written in the dry-as-standard-deviations style of academic science. The following year, Bill McKibben published the first book on the subject aimed at a popular audience, “The End of Nature.” Since then, more generally accessible books have been written on the climate than even the most avid reader could possibly keep up with; these include kids’ books, comic books, and even a coloring book. Meanwhile, countless newspaper and magazine articles, television specials, and documentaries have appeared on the topic. Above all, climate change has become obvious. You don’t need to read or watch or hear about it; in many parts of the world, all you have to do is look around. The southwestern United States, for instance, is currently experiencing such a severe drought that water restrictions are in place and many national forests are closed. “Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” Deke Arndt, the chief of climate monitoring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration center in Asheville, North Carolina, recently told the A.P. “The train is in our living room now.”
Instead of using this anniversary to lament the failures of climate scientists, I’d like to propose that we use it to celebrate—well, “celebrate” probably isn’t quite the right word, but maybe recognize—their successes. Three decades ago, led by Hansen, they made a series of predictions; for the most part these have proved to be spectacularly accurate. That we, the general public, have failed to act on these predictions says a lot more about us than it does about them.
I happened to interview Hansen last year, for a video project. I asked him if he had a message for young people. “The simple thing is, I’m sorry we’re leaving such a fucking mess,” he said. Could the message be any clearer than that?
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/listening-to-james-hansen-on-climate-change-thirty-years-ago-and-now
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