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Origins
Tue Jul 12, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Starting a century ago, scientists suspected that we might be altering nature's own greenhouse effect by burning coal, oil, and gas. But it was 17 years ago, on June 23, that the phrase "global warming" hit the front page of many U.S. papers. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook's special weekly segment on global climate change.
The summer of 1988 was blasting the country like a blowtorch. The Mississippi River hit record low levels, and much of Yellowstone burned to cinders. In Washington, then-congressman Tim Wirth sponsored a hearing on global climate change. He invited Jim Hansen, a NASA scientist.
Hansen took the stand on June 23, as downtown DC set a record high of 98 degrees. With his brief testimony, Hansen caused a sensation. He didn't actually blame the day’s heat wave and drought on global warming, but he did say he was confident the earth was warming and that this likely was related to an enhanced greenhouse effect.
Since that hot day in the nation's capitol, a lot more has happened.
The Kyoto Protocols, a global pact to limit carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases, is still waiting for signatures, notably from the United States. And temperatures have continued to climb; the ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change convened in 1988, and now predicts a rise of between 1.5 and nearly 6 degrees in the next century.
That's certainly well above anything we saw back in 1988, when the words of one scientist set Washington—and the world--on fire.
Thanks today to meteorologist and contributing writer Bob Henson of Boulder, Colorado. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, online at www.mountwashington.org. Our show if funded by Subaru of America, with special support for our Climate Change series from Environmental Defense.
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