The distinguished climatologist James Hansen (b. 1941) is an example of a leading scientist who has had the moral courage to speak out against politicians’ failure to act effectively against global warming. He was trained in astrophysics and became an authority on planetary atmospherics, working for NASA for many years. He developed global circulation models that have been used to analyse greenhouse effects and the human role in rising temperatures (pioneering work used by the IPCC). From about 2007 he has been a robust critic of the coal industry and of politicians who accepted money from fossil-fuel interests and encouraged climate change denial. He was arrested in 1911 and 1913 for joining protests outside the White House against the Keystone pipeline plan to bring oil from Canada to the lower US. He eventually left NASA because (he claimed) they tried to gag his more political statements and has since worked for the Earth Institute at Columbia. He has courageous continued his activism against climate change despite being demonised in many quarters.

Showing what one person can do, American climatologist James Hansen testified before a Senate committee in June 1988 warning about global warming and the greenhouse effect, alerting the public to the perils of climate change and was a turning point in the public debate. As Roger Pielke said Hansen’s “call to action.. elevated the subject of global warming and the specter of associated impacts such as more hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, to unprecedented levels of attention from the public, media, and policy makers”.

I’m getting interested in Guy Stewart Callendar, an English/Canadian meteorologist who demonstrated global warming as early as 1938. He collected data from world weather stations to show that temperatures had risen by over 0.3 degrees in the previous 50 years, and he correctly explained this as due largely to the burning of fossil fuels. which had concentrated carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Although this spurred more research, sadly it was ignored at large until the 1960s and 70s when anxiety about future climate change began to figure in public opinion, and politicians were the last to act.

Wells wrote these disillusioned words in 1945, just before Hiroshima:

“The old men behave for the most part meanly and disgustingly, and the young are spasmodic, foolish and all too easily misled”

“Mind at the End of its Tether”

When C. S. Lewis first encountered Wagner’s Ring opera he was engulfed by a Sense of Joy. He felt “that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single unendurable sense of desire and loss… And at once I knew that to “have it again” was the supreme and only important object of desire”:

Autobiography 1955.