Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen & the Truth of Global Warming by Mark Bowen

Chapter 1: The Cardinal Rule

One sweltering June afternoon in 1988, an understated Iowan named James Hansen turned global warming into an international issue with one sentence. He told a group of reporters in a hearing room, just after testifying to a Senate committee, “It’s time to stop waffling … and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now.”

At first, it seemed that our policy makers got the message. Two months after the hearing, the senior atmospheric scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, Michael Oppenheimer, told The New York Times, “I’ve never seen an environmental issue mature so quickly, shifting from science to the policy realm almost overnight.” By the end of the year, thirty-two climate-related bills had been introduced in Congress. More than a decade after that, however, in April 2001, Oppenheimer conceded that he had been wrong. None of the bills had gone anywhere, and the prospects for an effective policy response were looking increasingly dim. After less than two months in office, the new president, George W. Bush, had announced that he would abandon a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants, our greatest contributors to the greenhouse effect, and then swiftly pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, the first binding international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. As Christine Todd Whitman, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, later put it, this “was the equivalent to ‘flipping the bird,’ frankly, to the rest of the world.”

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