atmospheres of Mars or Venus ensured that life in any form that humans would recognize was most unlikely. Mars, with a very thin atmosphere, was freezingly cold. Venus, with an atmosphere super rich in CO2, was hellishly hot—almost 900°F on the surface. This space research informed understanding of the earth’s climate. “Clearly a great deal stands to be gained by simultaneous studies of the earth’s climate and the climate on other planets,” Hansen and colleagues had written in 1978. Indeed, he was to say decades later, the differences in Mars’s and Venus’s atmospheres “provided the best proof at the time of the reality of the greenhouse effect.” Venus came to play an even more direct role. It became, because of its CO2-soggy atmosphere and burningly hot temperatures on the ground, the metaphor for an irreversible “runaway greenhouse effect,” what Hansen would dub the “Venus Syndrome.” It would prove to be a metaphor of great—and persuasive—power.10
THE HOT SUMMER OF 1988 AND THE “WHITE HOUSE EFFECT”
Just a few days after the Wirth hearings, the World Conference on a Changing Atmosphere convened in Toronto. It was the first time that large numbers of scientists, policymakers, politicians, and activists had gotten together to discuss climate change, and they did so with great urgency and sense of mission. The conference called for the world community to adopt coordinated policies to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions.11
The hot weather led to much greater attention to the Toronto conference, as with the Wirth hearings, than would otherwise have been the case.
Although climate change was a longer-term phenomenon, the signal that James Hansen had identified seemed to reverberate over the rest of the summer of 1988 in an almost Biblical unfolding of weather-related plagues: intense heat waves, widespread droughts, impaired harvests, blazing forest fires in the West, navigation troubles on rivers as water levels fell. The electricity supply was balanced precariously, straining to meet the surging demand for air-conditioning.
All of this contributed to an increasingly pervasive anxiety that the environment was degrading.
That anxiety was captured in Boston Harbor on the first day of September. The Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, was well ahead in the polls against Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1988 race to succeed Ronald Reagan. Dukakis was campaigning as an environmentalist, and Bush wanted to take him on in his home territory and on his core issues. So Bush boarded an excursion boat to cruise around Boston Harbor. Accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and cameras, he delighted in pointing out the vast amount of garbage floating in the harbor, which he attributed to the lapses of Dukakis’s governorship. (Dukakis would reply that the garbage was the fault of the Reagan administration for foot dragging on promised cleanup funds.) Presenting himself as a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” Bush promised to be an Environmental President. Among his pledges was the noteworthy statement that “those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about ‘the White House effect.’” And the president added, “I intend to do something about it.” For the first time, a potential president had made greenhouse gases and climate change a campaign issue—and he had promised international collaboration to address it.12
The heat was headline news. But then heat waves and droughts had always been news. Time magazine, August 1923: “Another heat wave has struck Europe. So hot has it been in the Alps that the great glaciers have been melting and causing avalanches.” Time, June 1934: “Down upon a third of the U.S. poured a blistering sun . . . broiling, baking, burning... Not only was the Midwest as hot as the hinges of Hell. It was also tinder dry.” Time, June 1939: “It was so hot” in London “that ten extra waiters were engaged to serve cooling drinks to perspiring legislator in the House of Commons terrace restaurant . . . The asphalt on Berlin’s Via Triumphalis was so soft that no tanks or cars with caterpillar treads were allowed on the avenue.” Time, August 1955: “In the Eastern U.S., the dreadful summer of 1955 will be remembered for a long time to come . . . the region was withered by drought and a heat wave, the worst on record.”13
But now, from the late 1980s onward, when people wrote about heat waves and droughts, it was not only about their severity and the disruptions and distress they caused, but also about links to carbon dioxide and climate change, and as alarm bells for global warming.