This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

I'm Greg Dalton.

Behind the facts and figures that shape the climate narrative are scientists and others who pay a severe personal price for bringing that information to light.

There was a dead rat on the doorstep.

My son slept with this wooden sword after that.

My marriage failed.

Ben Santor authored one of the most important sentences in the history of climate science.

Written in 1995, it was one of the first to identify that humans were driving global heating.

He's now a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and concerned about the future funding of his work.

Today we'll hear Ben's story. It's the first in a series as part of covering climate now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage

of climate causes and solutions.

We begin in 1995 in a conference room in Madrid.

Representatives from around the world are haggling over sentences and words to be included

in the IPCC's second summary of the State of Climate Science.

Ben Santor is the convening lead author of a

chapter that will change his life and kick off a fierce offensive from the fossil fuel industry.

In the plenary in Madrid, much of the discussion focused on these 12 words, the balance of evidence

suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.

That was essentially the bottom line finding of our chapter that when we looked at the available evidence back in 1995, most of it was pointing in one direction.

Humans were active agents of change in the climate system, no longer

innocent bystanders.

And that really was the first time that the international scientific community spoke with one voice

...