The heat was on: the same policy recommendations for stemming climate change that looked sound 20 years ago still look sound.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher

Re-reading the article I wrote for the November/December 1988 issue of World Watch was startling--and discouraging.

The article, titled "The Heat Is On," was written just a few months after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate, reporting that for the first time there was clear scientific evidence of global warming--and that it was most likely caused by human activity.

I wrote at the time, "Only rarely are public policy turning points so clearly marked. Scientists had accumulated empirical evidence for a phenomenon with the potential to fundamentally alter life on Earth." I devoted much of the remainder of the article to laying out a strategy for dealing with climate change.

Twenty years later, Hansen's testimony still looks like a turning point for climate science, but not the kind of turning point for climate policy that I anticipated. In the years since, there's been a lot of heat--but sadly, not a lot of action.

What happened to the bright hopes of 1988? Optimists at the time pointed to the relatively rapid response to the threat of ozone depletion. In the face of clear scientific evidence of a threat--and with cooperation from the most affected industries--the international community had come together in just a few years to sign an agreement to phase out the worst ozone-damaging chemicals. Climate change is a far larger threat, and as with ozone, scientific evidence pointed to a clear need to act. But the economic scale of the needed transition was vastly larger in the case of climate, and those who felt they would be disadvantaged were quickly mobilized.

A political war over climate change was soon under way, with fossil fuel lobbyists and a handful of "climate skeptics" working hard to convince the public that climate change was not the scientific reality that most scientists had concluded it was. Dr. Hansen, who is a government employee, found his reports edited by a White House lawyer with no scientific credentials but with an impressive employment history--with the oil industry.

Climate legislation was considered by the U.S. Congress soon after Hansen's 1988 testimony, but none of the proposed bills was ever enacted. At the international level, diplomats soon began work on the Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted by world leaders at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. That agreement and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that followed are just now beginning to have an impact on greenhouse gas...