Climate change was no longer an “academic” issue, said James Hansen, an atmospheric physicist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. A leading climate modeler, Hansen had already become prominent as one of the most apocalyptic in his predictions. And now, wiping the sweat from his forehead in the sweltering room made even hotter by the television lights, Hansen told the senators, the long-awaited “signal” on climate change was now here. Temperatures were indeed rising, just as his computer models had predicted. “We can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming, he said. Afterward he summarized his testimcny to the New York Times more simply: “It is time to stop waffling.” The story about his testimony and the hearing ran on the Times’ front page.* As another witness, Syukuro Manabe, one of the fathers of climate modeling, recalled, “They weren’t too impressed by this Japanese guy who had this accent; whereas Jim Hansen made a bombshell impression.” The hearing “became a huge event,’ said Wirth. “A lot of people had never seen anything like this before. It got an inordinate amount of attention for a Senate hearing.” One scientist summed up the impact this way: “I’ve never seen an environmental issue move so quickly, shifting from science to the policy realm almost overnight.”

Daniel Yergin, The quest: Energy, security and the remaking of the modern world, New York, 2011, p. 484