It was just over twenty years ago, on June 23 1988, that Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a U.S. Senate committee that the year’s record temperatures were not the result of natural variation. As a result global warming irrevocably became part of official political discourse.

Last year Hansen said that a global tipping point will be reached by 2016 if the human population is unable to reduce greenhouse gases. He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for future sea level rise do not take into account ice sheet disintegration, which could cause several meters of sea level rise during the next century.

It is important to remember that even before his 1988 testimony Hansen was sounding the alarm. In 1981 he and a team of scientists at Goddard had reached the conclusion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming sooner than previously predicted. While other climatologists had already predicted that a trend would be apparent by 2020, Hansen predicted, in a paper published in Science, that the change was already occurring and that there would be record high temperatures as early as 1990. He also predicted that it would be difficult to convince politicians and the public to react.

The history of Hansen is instructive for what it says about the American government’s ability to deal with a real global threat. After decades of even acknowledging there could be a problem it then switched to minimizing the dangers. When even that became impossible it switched to suppressing information about it.

In 2005 and 2006, Hansen stated in interviews that NASA administrators tried to influence his public statements about the causes of climate change. He claimed that NASA public relations staff was ordered to review his public statements and interviews after a December 2005 lecture at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

He also appeared on 60 Minutes stating that the White House edited climate-related press releases reported by federal agencies to make global warming seem less threatening. He claimed that he was unable to speak “freely”, without the backlash of other government officials. “In my more than three decades in the government I’ve never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public.”

On June 23 Hansen, returned to testify before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. This time he essentially offered a final warning on the subject. Unless the U.S. begins to act soon, he pointed out, “it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control.”

In his latest paper, Dr. Hansen calls for deep reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, beginning almost immediately, with a focus on phasing out the uncontrolled combustion of coal by 2030.

The world has now had at least two decades of ever increasing coverage on the impact and dangers of global warming. For example, last fall, two think tanks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), jointly released a study, “The Age of Consequences,” predicting that rising temperatures and sea levels are likely to set off mass migrations involving “perhaps billions of people” over the next century.

So it says something sad that the global warming only appears to get traction when it is framed as a national security issue, instead of the international danger it truly is.

As this new TomDispatch commentary points out:

An office of the Pentagon, war-gaming climate change back in 2004, wrote up a hair-raising, spine-tingling end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it report on a future planet in eternal conflict amid every kind of weather disaster; and only this week, the U.S. Intelligence Community, the official 16 agencies gathering the stuff for the government, chimed in with a grim new report, “The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change Through 2030.”

As “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” a 2007 report from the military-allied research organization, the CNA Corporation, indicated, admirals and generals galore have been worrying about the subject for a while. Think, for instance, of those low-lying U.S. bases, like the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, that might just go under. Could climate change not only send millions fleeing from flooding or salinating lowlands, or out of areas of conflict over ever scarcer resources, but start the process of de-garrisoning the globe for the Pentagon? (“Climate change could compromise some of [our] bases…[T]he loss of some forward bases would require longer range lift and strike capabilities and would increase the military’s energy needs.”) It’s enough to set a military-minded group to worrying.

Sadly, it does not appear that either of the two U.S. presidential candidates is prepared to do much. Sen. Barrack Obama’s presidential website has a scant two paragraphs on the subject, saying he would:

Create New Forum of Largest Greenhouse Gas Emitters: Obama will create a Global Energy Forum — that includes all G-8 members plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa –the largest energy consuming nations from both the developed and developing world. The forum would focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues.

Re-Engage with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change: The UNFCCC process is the main international forum dedicated to addressing the climate problem and an Obama administration will work constructively within it.

Thus he would create more forums for talking about the threat, instead of actually doing something about it.

Sen. McCain has more detailed recommendations but they seem constrained by the need to not offend his politically conservative base; thus the emphasis on using market-based cap and trade mechanisms for carbon dioxide emissions.

It is really quite pathetic. In presidential elections candidates always talk about making the world a better place for their children and grandchildren. But when it comes to global climate change they seem resolutely clueless.

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