The scare began in Washington, DC, on this day in 1988 when testimony by a then little-known scientist called James Hansen before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources caught headlines across the world.
Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, declared that the four hottest years ever recorded had all been in the 1980s, rising to a peak in 1987, and that 1988 would be hotter still – “the warmest year on record.”
This triggered the first of many thousands of headlines over three decades warning that “man-made global warming” – “climate change” as it later became known – was the most urgent crisis of the age.
But – like the scare itself – the claims were dishonest, hysterical, misleading, unscientific, needlessly alarmist, and cynically stage-managed.
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