The threat of climate change made the front page of The New York Times for the first time in August 1981, and the headline was in all-caps: “STUDY FINDS WARMING TREND THAT COULD RAISE SEA LEVELS.” The study was led by NASA’s James Hansen, and it predicted virtually everything now coming to pass. The catch, in 1981, was that its effects were not yet visible. In other words, it was the Lucretius Problem: the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally.
