Vanuatans in Wonderland

For a vanishing people, it is sue or swim.

What goes around comes around. Thirty-five years ago, I wrote this passage in my book, Climate in Crisis:

On a cold day in November, 1987, United States Senator Tim Wirth convened a hearing on the greenhouse effect. Present to testify was James Hansen, a climate modeler with NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. What Hansen had to say, in the quiet demeanor of a well-respected scientist, was that the Earth was getting warmer, there was a high degree of probability that the warming was associated with human-induced augmentation of the greenhouse effect, and that the effects of the change would likely become very pronounced in the 1990s and thereafter.

Hansen’s statements created a hush in the hearing room. It was a break in the ranks of the government science community, whose first law is never to draw a conclusion, but if you must, draw it tentatively, sprinkled with abundant qualifiers and caveats about the need for more study. Hansen said he could state his three points with “99 percent certainty.”

The trouble was, the only people there to listen were a few Senators, some congressional aides, and one or two tourists who wandered into the committee room by chance. There were no television lights, no print reporters madly scrawling on notepads, no…