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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 cameras and tape recorders. Senator Wirth, sensing the need to get this startling news to more people, asked what time of the year was likely to be the hottest for Washington, D.C.. Hansen, who was not a weatherman, suggested June.

My book was well in progress by that June day in 1988, and I was sitting quietly in the very hot visitor gallery, watching it all unfold. Twenty years later, the producers of the PBS series Frontline described the scene.

DAVID BRINKLEY, ABC News: Is this summer’s terrible heat just temporary freakish weather, or is there a change in the atmosphere caused by our pollution?

DEBORAH AMOS, Correspondent: [voice-over] Climate change became a national issue for Americans in 1988. They could feel it. The temperatures climbed all spring, with an unusual number of floods and forest fires.

NEWSCASTER: It’s said that this drought has the potential to be a nationwide disaster.

FARMER: [giving tour to Pres. George H.W. Bush] Fifty miles south of here, you get to the same situation.

DEBORAH AMOS: Farmers lost crops in the withering heat. 1988 was the hottest year on record all over the planet. Even the Amazon was on fire. A growing number of scientists saw convincing evidence that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were warming the earth’s atmosphere. Dr. James Hansen, a top climatologist at NASA, decided it was time to speak out.

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JAMES HANSEN, Ph.D., Dir., NASA Goddard Institute: I decided I was going to say it was time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate.

Sen. TIMOTHY WIRTH (D-CO), 1987–1993: We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.

***

DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?

TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the… when the hearing occurred, there was not only bright light, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot.

Returning to my narrative from Climate in Crisis:

The hearing room was jammed to overflowing. Flashbulbs popped.

TV lights glared. Hansen spoke.

“The first five months of 1988 are so warm globally that we conclude that 1988 will be the warmest year on record unless there is a remarkable, improbable cooling in the remainder of the year,” he said. It was an almost unqualified prediction. Then the other shoe fell. “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”

Hansen concluded, “It is not possible to blame a specific heat-wave/drought on the greenhouse effect. However, there is evidence that the greenhouse effect increases the likelihood of such events — our climate model simulations for the late 1980s and 1990s indicate a tendency for an increase of heat-wave/drought situations in the Southeast and Midwest United States.” His detailed analyses were lost to most of the reporters in the room. The headlines of the evening editions screamed: “THE HEAT IS ON!,” “GLOBAL WARMING HAS BEGUN,” and “TOP SCIENTIST: EARTH OVER-HEATING.”

The flush of sudden realization lasted through the summer and into the fall of 1988. Stephen Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said he could tell that public interest had reached a new plateau by the sudden increase in the number of phone calls he received daily. He graphed his calls against increasing atmospheric carbon and called it, tongue in cheek, the Schneider Index.

The granularity of the background is because
Climate in Crisis was the first book ever mass-printed on
100% recycled paper with the inks not bleached with chlorine.
Yet, in public opinion as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hansen’s statements generated a backlash among the scientific community that challenged his 99 percent confidence and criticized his methods. “They (NASA) have been coupling their atmospheric model to a pretty hokey ocean (model),” said Schneider, “we all have. But you have to have less confidence because of that.”

Hansen’s staff worked out their climate model on a 1975-vintage “super”-computer. Even to get access to that, the group had to book time late at night and on weekends. Given the resources presently at the disposal of most climatologists, it will certainly be decades before global climate models become sophisticated enough to accurately predict changes in ocean and air currents and to confirm what most people — including most of the scientific skeptics — strongly suspect is going on. The problem is, we don’t have decades to study the problem before we must decide how to react.

Frontline continued:

TIMOTHY WIRTH: I mean, this was a very, very brave statement. I mean, he was on the edge of the science. He’s working for the federal government, and certainly, this was not cleared, you know, far up the line, what he had to say. So the summary of what Jim Hansen had to say that year, plus the fact that it had gotten so much attention- but I thought we were going to move a lot more rapidly than we did.

DEBORAH AMOS: [voice-over] As it turned out, the country had more immediate concerns. In 1991, the first President Bush launched the first Gulf war. Then global warming seemed to stop- briefly.

ANDREW REVKIN, The New York Times: Well, in 1991, Mount Pinatubo blew in the Philippines and sent a huge cloud of sulfate particles high into the stratosphere and cooled the world’s climate, which is kind of a drag if you’re trying to build impetus toward cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases.

***

ANNOUNCER: [Competitive Enterprise Institute video] There’s something in these pictures you can’t see. It’s essential to life…

DEBORAH AMOS: And there was another factor in the national debate, a media campaign funded by the energy industry and designed to raise public doubts about global warming.

ANNOUNCER: It isn’t smog or smoke, it’s what we breathe out and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.

ANDREW REVKIN, The New York Times: There was a concerted campaign by lobbyists and communicators for industry and scientists who had partnerships or relationships with either libertarian think tanks or with industry directly to cast doubt- basically, to focus everyone on the uncertainties.

DEBORAH AMOS: A coalition of coal companies produced a film that suggested more carbon dioxide might be a good thing.

[Western Fuels Association, “The Greening of Planet Earth”]:

Dr. SHERWOOD IDSO: A doubling of CO2 content of the atmosphere will produce a tremendous greening of planet earth.

Dr. HERMAN MAYEUX: -a better world, a more productive world-

Dr. MARY BRAKKE: For citrus, it would be a very, very positive thing.

Dr. KENNETH BOOTE: In terms of plant growth, it’s nothing but beneficial.

***

DEBORAH AMOS: It turned out the energy industry also funded the research of some of these scientists.

ROSS GELBSPAN, Author, Boiling Point: And I found out that about three of these skeptics had received about a million dollars over a three-year period, and that was never publicly disclosed until we wrote about it.

DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] And the money came from?

ROSS GELBSPAN: And the money basically came from coal interests, from mining interests, from some oil companies.

The Oil Lobby also got to work, electing a future President of United States from among their own. Soon after George W. Bush took office, Vice President Dick Cheney assembled an energy task force, meeting in secret with the oil, gas and coal industries. Up for discussion: was the shadow president committed to the mandatory carbon caps under the Kyoto Protocol negotiated by Cheney’s immediate predecessor, Al Gore?

Hansen was called into a closed meeting at the White House. Apparently thinking he was speaking to fellow scientists, he delivered a briefing that put everyone in the room to sleep. After leaving, he was told that he would have to clear all his public statements in advance. He left the government, attended protests, got arrested several times, and eventually became an expert witness for cases challenging climate change inaction in court.

In a world where the tides of change are as relentless as the waves crashing against the shores of Vanuatu, a group of six young, determined law students have embarked on an audacious journey to petition the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion that could redefine how nations face climate change.

In March 2023, Vanuatu — an archipelago of about 80 islands nestled in the South Pacific — was battered by two category-four cyclones within 72 hours. The students understand that their future is at stake; they are not merely fighting for themselves but for generations.

Their petition to the ICJ does not seek to directly sue countries for their environmental transgressions. Instead, they are asking the court to clarify what legal obligations states have under international law regarding climate action. An ICJ advisory opinion would serve as a powerful statement urging meaningful steps toward mitigating climate change.

Wealthy nations, which have historically contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions, adopt a different interpretation of obligations towards climate action compared to smaller nations like Vanuatu. The high-energy, high-pollution countries insist that the norms of international law do not apply to the climate; that nations are obligated only by treaties such as Kyoto or Paris, overlooking that they are far from compliance with any of those treaties. The students’ petition highlights this injustice, framing inaction by larger emitting countries as a violation of human rights — a poignant reminder that climate change is not just an environmental issue but a matter of fundamental human dignity.

Standing before the Court, the representative of the United States proclaimed that the US was on track to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and reach Net Zero by 2050. He lied. The US is producing and exporting oil and gas at an all-time high and expanding. Its methane emissions are off the charts. It is not even remotely close to meeting its Paris commitment. It is racing in the opposite direction as fast as it possibly can. But then, the US has no respect for the ICJ, as is evident from its funding of genocide in the Middle East and refusal to arrest the architects.

A European court recently heard a case brought by young activists in Portugal, demonstrating that young people across the globe are rising up against inaction on climate issues. Similar cases in other regions — particularly in the United States — have not fared well. As these six law students from Vanuatu navigate this complex legal landscape, they embody hope and resilience in an age where such qualities can feel scarce. They stand at a crossroads where youthful idealism meets stark reality — a reality shaped by older generations who have prioritized short-term gains over long-term vision.

The moral underpinning this narrative is clear: young people are the only hope for a human future. They are stepping up when many older individuals seem content to sit back and watch. Today in the Hague, Hansen is testifying because he recognizes it as part of a larger tapestry woven from threads of activism and hope across generations.

Thirty-five years ago, I concluded my chapter:

Complacency is the greatest obstacle. It takes decades for the climate to change once greenhouse gases have been altered. It takes centuries or millennia before the process can be reversed and the Earth can start to cool once more. We can suddenly decide to stop our warming ways but we cannot suddenly stop the warming or return to the cooler planet that we knew. Time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the longer and more difficult will be the Earth’s recovery.

There is only one message in this book. That message is that we should be frightened for the survival of life on Earth. Our physical strength as a species may be exceeding our ability to think collectively and do the right thing. We must begin to communicate among ourselves more effectively. We have a problem that is serious, immediate, growing quickly, and is potentially devastating. We have uncertainties about the pace and distribution of the warming, but we already know enough to justify swift response.

We need to wake up!

When my book reached stores in January, 1990, the world population collectively leaned over and hit the snooze alarm.

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