by Donna Laframboise, 25 June 2018 in BigPictureNews

SPOTLIGHT: Competing accounts of an historic climate hearing.

BIG PICTURE: June 23rd, 1988 is considered the day the climate crusade hit the jackpot. Thirty years ago, a sea of television cameras recorded NASA’s James Hansen testifying before a US Senate committee.

The “greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” he said. There was “99 percent confidence” that human-caused global warming was underway.

The person chairing the committee was Democratic Senator Timothy Wirth. Nine years later, when interviewed by PBS’s Frontline, he cheerfully revealed that the date of the hearing had been specially chosen.