ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 addresses the issue of climate change in the White House and Congress up to and including the administration of President Reagan. Government interest in the science of climate change had grown indirectly out of the research on the atomic bomb and the Cold War, and one government agency particularly played a supportive role – the Office of Naval Research. The coming to Washington of leading climate experts to testify in congressional hearings started in the mid-1950s. After the first decades of scientific testimony, Washington appeared to be taking climate change seriously but that came to an abrupt halt when Ronald Reagan came to office. While even President Reagan was mentioning climate change at the end of his term this was just to help George H. W. Bush get elected. A tragic paradigm shift in the political history of climate change occurred over the Reagan and Bush administrations.
