{"id":35262,"date":"2018-06-19T19:03:57","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T00:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35262"},"modified":"2018-06-19T19:03:57","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T00:03:57","slug":"30-years-ago-global-warming-became-front-page-news-and-both-republicans-and-democrats-took-it-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35262","title":{"rendered":"30 Years Ago Global Warming Became Front-Page News \u2013 and Both Republicans and Democrats Took It Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"

30 Years Ago Global Warming Became Front-Page News \u2013 and Both Republicans and Democrats Took It Seriously<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\"James<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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June 23, 1988 marked the date on which climate change became a national\u00a0issue.<\/p>\n

In landmark testimony<\/a> before the U.S.<\/span> Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Dr. James Hansen, then director of NASA<\/span>\u2019s Institute for Space Studies, stated that \u201cGlobal warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming \u2026 In my opinion, the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate\u00a0now.\u201d<\/p>\n

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New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hansen\u2019s testimony made clear the threats posed by climate change and attributed the phenomenon to human exploitation of carbon energy sources. Its impact was dramatic, capturing headlines in The New York Times<\/a> and other major newspapers. As politicians, corporations and environmental organizations acknowledged and began to address this issue, climate change entered into the political arena in a largely nonpartisan\u00a0fashion.<\/p>\n

Yet despite decades of public education on climate change and international negotiations to address it, progress continues to stall.\u00a0Why?<\/p>\n

One reason for the political inaction is the gaping divide in public opinion that resulted from a deliberate \u2014 and still controversial \u2014 misinformation campaign to redirect the public discussion on climate change in the years following Hansen\u2019s\u00a0testimony.<\/p>\n

Just as\u00a0Predicted<\/strong><\/p>\n

Four years after Hansen testified to Congress, 165 nations signed an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They committed themselves to reducing carbon emissions to avoid dangerous disruption of the Earth\u2019s climate system, defined as limiting future temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius. The signatories have now held 25 annual UNFCCC<\/span> conferences dedicated to developing goals, timetables and methods for mitigating climate change, the most consequential of which are encompassed in the Paris Agreement of\u00a02015.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Years Ago Global Warming Became Front-Page News \u2013 and Both Republicans and Democrats Took It Seriously June 23, 1988 marked the date on which climate change became a national\u00a0issue. In landmark testimony before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Dr. James Hansen, then director of NASA\u2019s Institute for Space Studies, stated that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,5317,20574,20575,929,20573],"class_list":["post-35262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-desmog-blog","tag-dr-james","tag-hanson","tag-nasa","tag-robert-brulle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35263,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35262\/revisions\/35263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}