Among those who have left a personal stamp on the current attention to climate issues, the most important is undoubtedly the American climatologist James Hansen. For that reason, he is known to some people as the father of climate change . Without actually naming

Hansen, Frits B ttcher refers to an incident that he witnessed in the early 1970s during a conference on Big Science (costly space projects, particle accelerators and the like) in the framework of international science policy. To his amazement, climate research was also placed on the agenda even though it was not regarded as part of this category of science at the time. But an American climatologist explained at this conference that this situation would change rapidly because one of his Russian counterparts, Mikhael Budyko, had injected new life into an old theory dating from 1898. This related to the hypothesis that increased burning of fossil fuels could lead to global warming due to an intensification of the natural greenhouse effect. In his publication, Budyko predicted that the erstwhile Soviet Union would have a better climate. By contrast, the wheat belt in the USA would be transformed into a desert and part of Florida would be submerged. The American continued by saying that this message was exactly what was needed in order finally to secure hundreds of millions of dollars for purchase of a supercomputer. There was only one recipe for this: Scare them to death! And this recipe proved to be successful. According...