The article was based on an interview with Dr. James Hansen, both then and still, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on “the greenhouse effect” had just begun to create controversy. Hansen, a skier, made several cautiously worded observations, among them: The computer model used at Goddard “predicts a temperature level in the next 15 years which has not existed on earth in the last 100,000 years. . . We expect to see a significant level of warming by the middle 1990s.” He went on to comment that the greenhouse warming is greater in winter than it is in summer.
The national reaction ranged from skepticism to scorn. Our industry was no exception: an NSAA convention speaker had his audience rolling in the aisles as he ridiculed it all.
Fast forward to August of this year and an update on the subject in the New York Times, which started, “The year 1998 may be remembered as the time when weird weather became the norm.” It went on to report that “8 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have been in the last decade; the first six months of 1998 rank as the world’s hottest months on record.”
We have neither the knowledge nor the inclination to debate the merits of the model for global warming, but we do feel strongly that an industry as weather-sensitive as ours should minimally try to understand the issue and its implications. After all, as the 1986 SAM piece pointed out, the model suggests we might be the beneficiaries of the increased precipitation that would fall as snow in the higher elevations.
This is not a quixotic call to reverse climatic shifts; it is just a suggestion we open our minds at least a crack and try to understand the implications of what could be in store for us.
