From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
By Nathaniel Rich

AUG. 1, 2018

http://tinyurl.com/y74nfxx2

Editor’s Note
This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series
of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group
of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to
solving it. Jake Silverstein

Prologue
The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The
odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of
several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription
for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming
is the realistic minimum. Four
degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh
claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree
warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within
several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer
than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By
that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before
the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the
indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic
engineering, the “greenhouse effect” — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced
to a simple axiom: The
more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the
machinations of industry
lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas
companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder
the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding
decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in
judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the
E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no
more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of
the decade, at
which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the
human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the “American way of life” in order to drastically increase global carbon
emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that “the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will
maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division.” If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20
percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at
the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously
that it was “urgently necessary” to act. Four months later, at the Group of
7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world’s seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic
meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders,
the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing
against long odds.
But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what
failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change’s second chapter — call it The
Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to
warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming.
Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is
their story, and ours.

Part One
1979–1982


1. ‘This Is the Whole Banana’ Spring 1979
The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal, bound in a coal-black cover with
beige lettering — one of many such reports that lay in uneven piles around Pomerance’s windowless office on the first floor of the Capitol Hill townhouse that, in the late 1970s, served as the Washington headquarters of Friends of the Earth. In the
final paragraph of a chapter on environmental regulation, the coal report’s authors noted that the continued use of fossil fuels might, within two or three
decades, bring about “significant and damaging” changes to the global atmosphere.

Pomerance paused, startled, over the orphaned paragraph. It seemed to have come
out of nowhere. He reread it. It made no sense to him. Pomerance was not a scientist; he graduated from Cornell 11 years earlier with a degree in history.
He had the tweedy
appearance of an undernourished doctoral student emerging at dawn from the stacks. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thickish mustache that wilted disapprovingly over the corners of his mouth, though his defining characteristic was his gratuitous height,
6 feet 4 inches, which seemed to embarrass him; he stooped over to accommodate his interlocutors. He had an active face prone to breaking out in wide, even maniacal grins, but in composure, as when he read the coal pamphlet, it projected concern. He
struggled with technical reports. He proceeded as a historian might: cautiously, scrutinizing the source material, reading between the lines. When that failed, he made phone calls, often to the authors of the reports, who tended to be surprised to hear
from him. Scientists, he had found, were not in the habit of fielding questions
from political lobbyists. They were not in the habit of thinking about politics.

The reporting and photography for this project were supported by a major grant from the Pulitzer Center, which has also created lesson plans to bring the climate issue to students everywhere.

Pomerance had one big question about the coal report. If the burning of coal, oil and natural gas could invite global catastrophe, why had nobody told him about it? If anyone in Washington — if anyone in the United States — should
have been aware of
such a danger, it was Pomerance. As the deputy legislative director of Friends of the Earth, the wily, pugnacious nonprofit that David Brower helped found after resigning from the Sierra Club a decade earlier, Pomerance was one of the
nation’s most
connected environmental activists. That he was as easily accepted in the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building as at Earth Day rallies might have had something to do with the fact that he was a Morgenthau — the great-grandson of Henry Sr.,
Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; great-nephew of Henry Jr.,
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary; second cousin to Robert, district
attorney for Manhattan. Or perhaps it was just his charisma — voluble, energetic and
obsessive, he seemed to be everywhere, speaking with everyone, in a very loud voice, at once. His chief obsession was air. After working as an organizer for welfare rights, he spent the second half of his 20s laboring to protect and expand the Clean Air
Act, the comprehensive law regulating air pollution. That led him to the problem of acid rain, and the coal report.

He showed the unsettling paragraph to his office mate, Betsy Agle. Had she ever
heard of the “greenhouse effect”? Was it really possible that human beings were overheating the planet?

Agle shrugged. She hadn’t heard about it, either.

That might have been the end of it, had Agle not greeted Pomerance in the office a few mornings later holding a copy of a newspaper forwarded by Friends of the Earth’s Denver office. Isn’t this what you were talking about the other day? she asked.

Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged. Pomerance hadn’t
heard of MacDonald, but he
knew all about the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to
national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats. The Jasons’ activities had been a secret until the publication of the Pentagon
Papers, which exposed their plan to festoon the Ho Chi Minh Trail with motion sensors that signaled to bombers. After the furor that followed — protesters set MacDonald’s garage on fire — the Jasons began to use their powers for peace instead of
war.


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

***
2. The Whimsies of The Invisible World - Spring 1979
There was a brown velvet love seat in the living room of James and Anniek Hansen, under a bright window looking out on Morningside Park in Manhattan, that nobody ever sat in. Erik, their 2-year-old son, was forbidden to go near it. The ceiling above the
couch sagged ominously, as if pregnant with some alien life form, and the bulge
grew with each passing week. Jim promised Anniek that he would fix it, which was only fair, because it had been on his insistence that they gave up the prospect of a prewar
apartment in Spuyten Duyvil overlooking the Hudson and moved from Riverdale to this two-story walk-up with crumbling walls, police-siren lullabies and gravid ceiling. Jim had resented the 45-minute commute to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
in Manhattan and complained that such a gross waste of his time would soon be unsustainable, once the Pioneer spacecraft reached Venus and began to beam back
data. But even after the Hansens moved within a few blocks of the institute, Jim couldn’t make
time for the ceiling, and after four months it finally burst, releasing a confetti of browned pipes and splintered wood.

Jim repeated his vow to fix the ceiling as soon as he had a moment free from work. Anniek held him to his word, though it required her to live with a hole in her ceiling until Thanksgiving — seven months of plaster dust powdering the love seat.

Another promise Jim made to Anniek: He would make it home for dinner every night by 7 p.m. By 8:30, however, he was back at his calculations. Anniek did not begrudge him his deep commitment to his work; it was one of the things she loved about him. Still,
it baffled her that the subject of his obsession should be the atmospheric conditions of a planet more than 24 million miles away. It baffled Jim, too. His voyage to Venus from Denison, Iowa, the fifth child of a diner waitress and
an itinerant farmer
turned bartender, had been a series of bizarre twists of fate over which he claimed no agency. It was just something that happened to him.

Hansen figured he was the only scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who, as a child, did not dream of outer space. He dreamed only of baseball. On clear nights, his transistor radio picked up the broadcast of the Kansas City
Blues, the New York Yankees’ AAA affiliate. Every morning, he cut out the box
scores, pasted them into a notebook and tallied statistics. Hansen found comfort in numbers and equations. He majored in math and physics at the University of Iowa, but he
never would have taken an interest in celestial matters were it not for the unlikely coincidence of two events during the year he graduated: the eruption of a volcano in Bali and a total eclipse of the moon.

On the night of Dec. 30, 1963 — whipping wind, 12 degrees below zero — Hansen accompanied his astronomy professor to a cornfield far from town. They set a telescope in an old corncrib and, between 2 and 8 in the morning, made continuous photoelectric
recordings of the eclipse, pausing only when the extension cord froze and when they dashed to the car for a few minutes to avoid frostbite.

During an eclipse, the moon resembles a tangerine or, if the eclipse is total, a drop of blood. But this night, the moon vanished altogether. Hansen made the mystery the subject of his master’s thesis, concluding that the moon had been
obscured by the
dust erupted into the atmosphere by Mount Agung, on the other side of the planet from his corncrib, six months earlier. The discovery led to his fascination with the influence of invisible particles on the visible world. You
could not make sense of the
visible world until you understood the whimsies of the invisible one.

One of the leading authorities on the invisible world happened to be teaching then at Iowa: James Van Allen made the first major discovery of the space age, identifying the two doughnut-shaped regions of convulsing particles that circle
Earth, now known
as the Van Allen belts. At Van Allen’s prodding, Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet
satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though
once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began
to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-
perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about
900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.

Anniek expected Jim’s professional life to resume some semblance of normality
once the data from Venus had been collected and analyzed. But shortly after Pioneer entered Venus’s atmosphere, Hansen came home from the office in an uncharacteristic
fervor — with an apology. The prospect of two or three more years of intense work had sprung up before him. NASA was expanding its study of Earth’s atmospheric conditions. Hansen had already done some work on Earth’s atmosphere for Jule Charney at
the Goddard Institute, helping to develop computerized weather models. Now Hansen would have an opportunity to apply to Earth the lessons he had learned from Venus.

Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology. From the M.I.T. Museum
We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that
mimicked our own. These
digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped
forward to reveal the
future.

Anniek’s disappointment — another several years of distraction, stress, time spent apart from family — was tempered, if only slightly, by the high strain of Jim’s enthusiasm. She thought she understood it. Does this mean, she asked, that you’ll
able to predict weather more accurately?

Yes, Jim said. Something like that.

3. Between Catastrophe and Chaos - July 1979
The scientists summoned by Jule Charney to judge the fate of civilization arrived on July 23, 1979, with their wives, children and weekend bags at a three-story mansion in Woods Hole, on the southwestern spur of Cape Cod. They would review all the
available science and decide whether the White House should take seriously Gordon MacDonald’s prediction of a climate apocalypse. The Jasons had predicted a warming of two or three degrees Celsius by the middle of the 21st century, but like Roger
Revelle before them, they emphasized their reasons for uncertainty. Charney’s
scientists were asked to quantify that uncertainty. They had to get it right: Their conclusion would be delivered to the president. But first they would hold
a clambake.

They gathered with their families on a bluff overlooking Quissett Harbor and took turns tossing mesh produce bags stuffed with lobster, clams and corn into a bubbling caldron. While the children scrambled across the rolling lawn, the scientists mingled
with a claque of visiting dignitaries, whose status lay somewhere between chaperone and client — men from the Departments of State, Energy, Defense and
Agriculture; the E.P.A.; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They exchanged
pleasantries and took in the sunset. It was a hot day, high 80s, but the harbor
breeze was salty and cool. It didn’t look like the dawning of an apocalypse. The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress
their awe of
the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three
decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.

The hierarchy was made visible during the workshop sessions, held in the carriage house next door: The scientists sat at tables arranged in a rectangle,
while their federal observers sat along the room’s perimeter, taking in the action as at a theater
in the round. The first two days of meetings didn’t make very good theater, however, as the scientists reviewed the basic principles of the carbon cycle, ocean circulation, radiative transfer. On the third day, Charney introduced a new prop: a black
speaker, attached to a telephone. He dialed, and Jim Hansen answered.

Charney called Hansen because he had grasped that in order to determine the exact range of future warming, his group would have to venture into the realm of the Mirror Worlds. Jule Charney himself had used a general circulation model
to revolutionize
weather prediction. But Hansen was one of just a few modelers who had studied the effects of carbon emissions. When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase
of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two
predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius
— was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.

In the carriage house, the disembodied voice of Jim Hansen explained, in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, how his model weighed the influences of clouds, oceans and snow on warming. The older scientists interrupted, shouting questions; when they did not
transmit through the telephone, Charney repeated them in a bellow. The questions kept coming, often before their younger respondent could finish his answers, and Hansen wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier for him to drive
the five hours and meet
with them in person.

Among Charney’s group was Akio Arakawa, a pioneer of computer modeling. On the final night at Woods Hole, Arakawa stayed up in his motel room with printouts from the models by Hansen and Manabe blanketing his double bed. The discrepancy between the
models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly
before dawn, Arakawa
concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in
2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.

The publication of Jule Charney’s report, “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,” several months later was not accompanied by a banquet, a parade or even a news conference. Yet within the highest levels of the federal government, the
scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the
summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single
number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius. The last time the world
was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when
beech trees grew in
Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.

The Charney report left Jim Hansen with more urgent questions. Three degrees would be nightmarish, and unless carbon emissions ceased suddenly, three degrees would be only the beginning. The real question was whether the warming trend could be reversed.
Was there time to act? And how would a global commitment to cease burning fossil fuels come about, exactly? Who had the power to make such a thing happen? Hansen didn’t know how to begin to answer these questions. But he would learn.

4. ‘A Very Aggressive Defensive Program’ - Summer 1979-Summer 1980
After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern
itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much
of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.

A senior researcher named Henry Shaw had argued that the company needed a deeper understanding of the issue in order to influence future legislation that
might restrict carbon-dioxide emissions. “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive
program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”

Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker
predicted that
fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker
to tell them the
bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.



[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

The Antarctic Peninsula, where about three million pairs of penguins breed, is one of the most quickly warming areas on the planet; its average temperature has increased by five degrees Fahrenheit over the past 75 years. Many scientists believe that this
warming will endanger some penguin colonies in two ways: dwindling food and loss of nesting habitats. On the rocky shores of Deception Island, where the penguins breed, they need cold, dry land for their eggs to survive, but rising temperatures have
introduced rain and pools of water to nesting sites. And because of the rapid loss of sea ice, krill — the tiny crustaceans that serve as penguins’ main source of food — can’t sustain the large colonies they need to thrive. The penguin population
of Baily Head, in the northern part of Antarctica, seems to have dropped from 85,000 breeding pairs in 2003 to 52,000 seven years later, a decline of almost 40 percent. Scientists fear that as warm water shifts farther south along other
coastal regions,
larger populations of penguins could face a similar decline.

***

6. ‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ - November 1980-September 1981
The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And Rafe Pomerance soon found himself wondering whether what had seemed to have been a beginning had actually been the end.

After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public
lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-
regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about
a quarter. In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and
disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.

At the Pink Palace, Anthony Scoville had said that the problem was not atmospheric but political. That was only half right, Pomerance thought. For behind every political problem, there lay a publicity problem. And the climate crisis had a publicity
nightmare. The Florida meeting had failed to prepare a coherent statement, let alone legislation, and now everything was going backward. Even Pomerance couldn’t devote much time to climate change; Friends of the Earth was busier than ever. The
campaigns to defeat the nominations of James Watt and Anne Gorsuch were just the beginning; there were also efforts to block mining in wilderness areas, maintain the Clean Air Act’s standards for air pollutants and preserve funding for renewable energy
(Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before
undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

Reagan’s violence to environmental regulations alarmed even members of his own party. Senator Robert Stafford, a Vermont Republican and chairman of the committee that held confirmation hearings on Gorsuch, took the unusual step of lecturing her from
the dais about her moral obligation to protect the nation’s air and water. Watt’s plan to open the waters off California for oil drilling was denounced by the state’s Republican senator, and Reagan’s proposal to eliminate the position of science
adviser was roundly derided by the scientists and engineers who advised him during his presidential campaign. When Reagan considered closing the Council on
Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president
and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.”
Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer
federal subsidies?

Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna
and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming
Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’ ” People magazine had profiled
Gordon MacDonald, photographing him standing on the steps of the Capitol and pointing above his head to the level the water would reach when the polar ice caps melted. “If
Gordon MacDonald is wrong, they’ll laugh,” the article read. “Otherwise, they’ll gurgle.”

But Pomerance understood that in order to sustain major coverage, you needed major events. Studies were fine; speeches were good; news conferences were better. Hearings, however, were best. The ritual’s theatrical trappings — the members of Congress
holding forth on the dais, their aides decorously passing notes, the witnesses sipping nervously from their water glasses, the audience transfixed in the gallery — offered antagonists, dramatic tension, narrative. But you couldn’t have a hearing
without a scandal, or at least a scientific breakthrough. And two years after the Charney group met at Woods Hole, it seemed there was no more science to break through.


It was with a shiver of optimism, then, that Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by
a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past
century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all,
the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.

Pomerance called Hansen to ask for a meeting. He explained to Hansen that he wanted to make sure he understood the paper’s conclusions. But more than that, he wanted to understand James Hansen.

At the Goddard Institute, Pomerance entered Hansen’s office, maneuvering through some 30 piles of documents arrayed across the floor like the skyscrapers of a model city, some as high as his waist. On top of many of the stacks lay a scrap of cardboard
on which had been scrawled words like Trace Gases, Ocean, Jupiter, Venus. At the desk, Pomerance found, hidden behind another paper metropolis, a quiet, composed man with a heavy brow and implacable green eyes. Hansen’s speech was
soft, equable,
deliberate to the point of halting. He would have no trouble passing for a small-town accountant, insurance-claims manager or actuary. In a sense he held all of those jobs, only his client was the global atmosphere. Pomerance’s political sensitivities
sparked. He liked what he saw.

As Hansen spoke, Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic
findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite
of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English. Though he
was something of a
wunderkind — at 40, he was about to be named director of the Goddard Institute — he spoke with the plain-spoken Midwestern forthrightness that played on Capitol Hill. He presented like a heartland voter, the kind of man interviewed on the evening
news about the state of the American dream or photographed in the dying sun against a blurry agricultural landscape in a campaign ad. And unlike most scientists in the field, he was not afraid to follow his research to its policy
implications. He was
perfect.

“What you have to say needs to be heard,” Pomerance said. “Are you willing to be a witness?”

***

Mauritania is one of the regions in Africa most vulnerable to recurrent drought. Winds sweep desert sands and dust over formerly arable land, creating dunes that blanket roads and demolish homes. Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, was designed to
accommodate 15,000 people. Today, more than one million people live there, because decades of severe drought and extreme weather have driven farmers to the area. “The capital city is on the seaside, and the sand covered the city in a very short period
of time,” said Cheikh Kane, a climate-resilience policy adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. The country, he said, is suffering “chronic food insecurity and environmental degradation.”

***

7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ - March 1982
Though few people other than Rafe Pomerance seemed to have noticed amid Reagan’s environmental blitzkrieg, another hearing on the greenhouse effect was held several weeks earlier, on July 31, 1981. It was led by Representative James Scheuer, a New York
Democrat — who lived at sea level on the Rockaway Peninsula, in a neighborhood no more than four blocks wide, sandwiched between two beaches — and a canny, 33-year-old congressman named Albert Gore Jr.

Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate
at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s
rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this? He had no memory of hearing it from his father, a three-term senator from Tennessee who later served as
chairman of an Ohio coal company. Once in office, Gore figured that if Revelle gave Congress the same lecture, his colleagues would be moved to act. Or at least that the hearing would get picked up by one of the three major national news broadcasts.

Gore’s hearing was part of a larger campaign he had designed with his staff director, Tom Grumbly. After winning his third term in 1980, Gore was granted his first leadership position, albeit a modest one: chairman of an oversight subcommittee within
the Committee on Science and Technology — a subcommittee that he had lobbied to create. Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which
had no legislative
authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as
narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted
to hold a hearing every week.

It was like storyboarding episodes of a weekly procedural drama. Grumbly assembled a list of subjects that possessed the necessary dramatic elements: a Massachusetts cancer researcher who faked his results, the dangers of excessive
salt in the American
diet, the disappearance of an airplane on Long Island. All fit Gore’s template; all had sizzle. But Gore wondered why Grumbly hadn’t included the greenhouse effect.

There are no villains, Grumbly said. Besides, who’s your victim?

If we don’t do something, Gore replied, we’re all going to be the victims.

He didn’t say: If we don’t do something, we’ll be the villains too.


Representative Albert Gore Jr. in 1982. John Dustaira/Associated Press
The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was
lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester
Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an
existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that
we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.” That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.

But Gore soon found another opening. Congressional staff members on the science
committee heard that the White House planned to eliminate the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program. If they could put a hearing together quickly enough, they could
shame the White House before it could go through with its plan. The Times article about Hansen’s paper had proved that there was a national audience for the carbon-dioxide problem — it just had to be framed correctly. Hansen could occupy the role of
hero: a mild-mannered scientist who had seen the future and now sought to rouse
the world to action. A villain was emerging, too: Fred Koomanoff, Reagan’s new director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, a Bronx native with the manner
of a sergeant major and an unconstrained passion for budget-cutting. Each man would testify.


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ - Summer 1988
It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost four million acres. Smoke was
visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.

In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the
dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert. “The dang heat,” said a farmer in Grinnell. “Farming has so many perils, but climate is 99 percent of it.” In parts of Wisconsin, where Gov. Tommy
Thompson banned fireworks and smoking cigarettes outdoors, the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers evaporated completely. “At that point,” said an official from the Department of Natural Resources, “we must just sit back and watch the fish die.”

Harvard University, for the first time, closed because of heat. New York City’s streets melted, its mosquito population quadrupled and its murder rate
reached a record high. “It’s a chore just to walk,” a former hostage negotiator told a reporter.
“You want to be left alone.” The 28th floor of Los Angeles’s second-tallest building burst into flames; the cause, the Fire Department concluded, was spontaneous combustion. Ducks fled the continental United States
in search of wetlands, many
ending up in Alaska, swelling the pintail population there to 1.5 million from 100,000. “How do you spell relief?” asked a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “If you are a duck from America’s parched prairies, this year you may spell it
A-L-A-S-K-A.”

Nineteen Miss Indiana contestants, outfitted with raincoats and umbrellas, sang
“Come Rain or Come Shine,” but it did not rain. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Democratic presidential candidate, stood in an Illinois cornfield and prayed for rain, but it
did not rain. Cliff Doebel, the owner of a gardening store in Clyde, Ohio, paid
$2,000 to import Leonard Crow Dog, a Sioux Indian medicine man from Rosebud, S.D. Crow Dog claimed to have performed 127 rain dances, all successful. “You
will see things
that you shall believe,” he told the townspeople of Clyde. “You will feel there is a chance for us all.” After three days of dancing, it rained less than a quarter of an inch.


Texas farmers fed their cattle cactus. Stretches of the Mississippi River flowed at less than one-fifth of normal capacity. Roughly 1,700 barges beached at Greenville, Miss.; an additional 2,000 were marooned at St. Louis and Memphis. The on-field
thermometer at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, where the Phillies were hosting the Chicago Cubs for a matinee, read 130 degrees. During a pitching change, every player, coach and umpire, save the catcher and the entering reliever, Todd Frohwirth, fled
into the dugouts. (Frohwirth would earn the victory.) In the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood on June 21, yet another record-smasher, a roofer working with 600-degree tar exclaimed, “Will this madness ever end?”

On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth.

“I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.

This amused Pomerance. He was the one who tended to worry about press; Hansen usually claimed indifference to such vulgar considerations. “Why’s that?”
Pomerance asked.

Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched
the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise.

“I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.

***

In March, Geophysical Research Letters reported that the western part of Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 450 years. Some scientists believe that the Arctic hasn’t seen ice melt like this in 5,000 years. If the ice
sheet melts entirely, sea levels would rise 20 feet, leaving Lower Manhattan underwater. Jason Gulley, a geologist, and Celia Trunz, a Ph.D. student in geology, have been conducting meltwater research by releasing a fluorescent red
dye to determine how
and why more rivers form on the surface of the ice sheet and what will happen as a result of these new and turbulent flows. So far, they have found that the rivers lubricate the ice slab, making the sheets move faster toward the coasts,
which could cause
even more icebergs to calve into the ocean. Video by George Steinmetz for The New York Times.

***

6.
‘The Signal Has Emerged’
June 1988
The night before the hearing, Hansen flew to Washington to give himself enough time to prepare his oral testimony in his hotel room. But he couldn’t focus — the ballgame was on the radio. The slumping Yankees, who had fallen behind the Tigers for
first place, were trying to avoid a sweep in Detroit, and the game went to extra innings. Hansen fell asleep without finishing his statement. He awoke to bright sunlight, high humidity, choking heat. It was signal weather in Washington: the hottest June
23 in history.

Before going to the Capitol, he attended a meeting at NASA headquarters. One of
his early champions at the agency, Ichtiaque Rasool, was announcing the creation of a new carbon-dioxide program. Hansen, sitting in a room with dozens
of scientists,
continued to scribble his testimony under the table, barely listening. But he heard Rasool say that the goal of the new program was to determine when a warming signal might emerge. As you all know, Rasool said, no respectable scientist would say that you
already have a signal.

Hansen interrupted.


“I don’t know if he’s respectable or not,” he said, “but I do know one scientist who is about to tell the U.S. Senate that the signal has emerged.”

The other scientists looked up in surprise, but Rasool ignored Hansen and continued his presentation. Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-
effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so
much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and
it is changing our climate now.”

By 2:10 p.m., when the session began, it was 98 degrees, and not much cooler in
Room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, thanks to the two rows of television-camera lights. Timothy Wirth’s office had told reporters that the plain-spoken NASA
scientist was going to make a major statement. After the staff members saw the cameras, even those senators who hadn’t planned to attend appeared at the dais, hastily reviewing the remarks their aides had drafted for them. Half an hour before the
hearing, Wirth pulled Hansen aside. He wanted to change the order of speakers, placing Hansen first. The senator wanted to make sure that Hansen’s statement
got the proper amount of attention. Hansen agreed.

“We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw
it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the
carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed
Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary
precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”

Wirth asked those standing in the gallery to claim the few remaining seats available. “There is no point in standing up through this on a hot day,” he
said, happy for the occasion to emphasize the historical heat. Then he introduced the star witness.

Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he
said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the
hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which
announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.�
�


The front page of The New York Times on June 24, 1988.
But Hansen had no time to dwell on any of this. As soon as he got home to New York, Anniek told him she had breast cancer. She had found out two weeks earlier, but she didn’t want to upset him before the hearing. In the following days, while the entire
world tried to learn about James Hansen, he tried to learn about Anniek’s illness. After he absorbed the initial shock and made a truce with the fear —
his grandmother died from the disease — he dedicated himself to his wife’s treatment with all
the rigor of his profession. As they weighed treatment options and analyzed medical data, Anniek noticed him begin to change. The frustration of the last year began to fall away. It yielded, in those doctor’s offices, to a steady coolness, an obsession
for detail, a dogged optimism. He began to look like himself again.

7.
‘Woodstock For Climate Change’
June 1988-April 1989
In the immediate flush of optimism after the Wirth hearing — henceforth known
as the Hansen hearing — Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the
young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to
finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon
emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk
might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just
four days after
Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an
event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”

Pomerance hastily arranged a meeting with, among others, David Harwood, the architect of Wirth’s climate legislation; Roger Dower in the Congressional Budget Office, who was calculating the plausibility of a national carbon tax; and Irving Mintzer, a
colleague at the World Resources Institute who had a deep knowledge of energy economics. Wirth was scheduled to give the keynote address at Toronto — Harwood would write it — and could propose a number then. But which one?

Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000.


Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000
was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.

What really mattered wasn’t the number itself, Dower said, but simply that they settle on one. He agreed that a hard target was the only way to push the issue forward. Though his job at the C.B.O. required him to come up with precise estimates of
speculative, complex policy, there wasn’t time for yet another academic study
to arrive at the exact right number. Pomerance’s unscientific suggestion sounded fine to him.

Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best
practices. Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of
the renewable
technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous
scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage
it with the knowledge and technology we already had.

Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.

In Toronto a few days later, Pomerance talked up his idea with everyone he met — environmental ministers, scientists, journalists. Nobody thought it sounded
crazy. He took that as an encouraging sign. Other delegates soon proposed the number to him
independently, as if they had come up with it themselves. That was an even better sign.

Wirth, in his keynote on June 27, called for the world to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2000, with an eventual reduction of 50 percent. Other speakers likened the ramifications of climate change to a global nuclear war, but it was
the emissions
target that was heard in Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow. The conference’s
final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005.
Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

Part Two 1983–1989

1.
‘Caution, Not Panic’
1983-1984
From a stray comment in an obscure coal report to portentous front-page headlines in the national press and hearings on Capitol Hill — in just three years, Rafe Pomerance had watched as an issue considered esoteric even within the scientific community
rose nearly to the level of action, the level at which congressmen made statements like, “It is up to us now to summon the political will.” Then, overnight, it died. Pomerance knew, from tired experience, that politics didn’t move in a straight
line, but jaggedly, like the Keeling curve — a slow progression interrupted by sharp seasonal declines. But in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to
change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.

After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of
scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences
of global warming for the world order and propose remedies. Then Reagan won the
White House.

For the next three years, as the commission continued its work — drawing upon
the help of about 70 experts from the fields of atmospheric chemistry, economics and political science, including veterans of the Charney group and the Manhattan Project —
the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan
administration, the
warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.


On Oct. 19, 1983, the commission finally announced its findings at a formal gala, preceded by cocktails and dinner in the academy’s cruciform Great Hall,
a secular Sistine Chapel, with vaulted ceilings soaring to a dome painted as the sun. An
inscription encircling the sun honored science as the “pilot of industry,” and the academy had invited the nation’s foremost pilots of industry: Andrew Callegari, the head of Exxon’s carbon-dioxide research program, and vice presidents from
Peabody Coal, General Motors and the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. They were eager to learn how the United States planned to act, so they could prepare for the inevitable policy debates. Rafe Pomerance was eager, too. But he wasn’t invited.

He did manage, however, to get into a crowded press briefing earlier that day, where he grabbed a copy of the 500-page report, “Changing Climate,” and scanned its contents. Its scope was impressive: It was the first study to encompass the causes,
effects and geopolitical consequences of climate change. But as he flipped through, Pomerance surmised that it offered no significant new findings — nothing that wasn’t in the Charney report or the blue-ribbon studies that had
been published since. �
�We are deeply concerned about environmental changes of this magnitude,” read
the executive summary. “We may get into trouble in ways that we have barely imagined.”

The authors did try to imagine some of them: an ice-free Arctic, for instance, and Boston sinking into its harbor, Beacon Hill an island two miles off the coast. There was speculation about political revolution, trade wars and a long quotation from “A
Distant Mirror,” a medieval history written by Pomerance’s aunt, Barbara Tuchman, describing how climate changes in the 14th century led to “people eating their own children” and “feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet.” The
committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with
certainty, or else it would be too late.

That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative
speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the
atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see. Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately,
might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future
generations would be better equipped to change with it.

As Pomerance listened at the briefing to the commission’s appeasements, he glanced, baffled, around the room. The reporters and staff members listened politely to the presentation and took dutiful notes, as at any technical briefing. Government
officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global
war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace
and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide.
Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views —
optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government
regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.

Pomerance, who came of age during the Vietnam War and the birth of the environmental movement, shared none of Nierenberg’s Procrustean faith in American ingenuity. He worried about the dark undertow of industrial advancement, the way every new
technological superpower carried within it unintended consequences that, if unchecked over time, eroded the foundations of society. New technologies had not solved the clean-air and clean-water crises of the 1970s. Activism and organization, leading to
robust government regulation, had. Listening to the commission’s equivocations, Pomerance shook his head, rolled his eyes, groaned. He felt that
he was the only sane person in a briefing room gone mad. It was wrong. A colleague told him to calm down.

The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put
it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming
of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.” The effusiveness of Nierenberg’s reassurances invited
derision. On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a
cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word,
was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.”

On its front page, The New York Times published its most prominent piece on global warming to date, under the headline “Haste on Global Warming Trend Is Opposed.” Although the paper included an excerpt from “Changing Climate” that detailed some
of the report’s gloomier predictions, the article itself gave the greatest weight to a statement, heavily workshopped by the White House’s senior staff,
from George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as
reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no
actions recommended
other than continued research.”


Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a
CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest? Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science
that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide
research program, too.

A few months after the publication of “Changing Climate,” Pomerance announced his resignation from Friends of the Earth. He had various reasons: He
had struggled with the politics of managing a staff and a board, and the environmental movement from
which the organization had emerged in the early ’70s was in crisis. It lacked
a unifying cause. Climate change, Pomerance believed, could be that cause. But its insubstantiality made it difficult to rally the older activists, whose strategic model
relied on protests at sites of horrific degradation — Love Canal, Hetch Hetchy, Three Mile Island. How did you protest when the toxic waste dump was the entire planet or, worse, its invisible atmosphere?

Observing her husband, Lenore Pomerance was reminded of an old Philadelphia Bulletin ad campaign: “In Philadelphia — nearly everyone reads The Bulletin.” On a crowded beach, all the sunbathers have their faces buried in their newspapers, except for
one man, who stares off into the distance. Here the scenario was reversed: Rafe, the loner, was staring down the world’s largest problem while everyone else was distracted by the minutiae of daily life. Pomerance acted cheerful at home, fooling his
kids. But he couldn’t fool Lenore. She worried about his health. Near the end
of his tenure at Friends of the Earth, a doctor found that he had an abnormally
high heart rate.

Pomerance planned to take a couple of months to reflect on what he wanted to do
with the rest of his life. Two months stretched to about a year. He brooded; he
checked out. He spent weeks at a time at an old farmhouse that he and Lenore owned in West
Virginia, near Seneca Rocks. When they bought it in the early ’70s, the house
had a wood-burning stove and no running water. To make a phone call on a private line, you had drive to the operator’s house and hope she was in. Pomerance sat in the cold
house and thought.

The winter took him back to his childhood in Greenwich. He had a vivid memory of being taught by his mother to ice skate on a frozen pond a short walk from their home. He remembered the muffled hush of twilight, the snow dusting the ice, the ghostly
clearing encircled by a wood darker than the night. Their house was designed by
his father, an architect whose glass-enveloped buildings mocked the vanity of humankind’s efforts to improve on nature; the windows invited the elements inside, the trees
and the ice and, in the rattling of the broad panes, the wind. Winter, Pomerance believed, was part of his soul. When he thought about the future, he worried about the loss of ice, the loss of the spiky Connecticut January mornings. He worried about the
loss of some irreplaceable part of himself.

He wanted to recommit himself to the fight but couldn’t figure out how. If science, industry and the press could not move the government to act, then who could? He didn’t see what was left for him, or anyone else, to do. He didn’t see that the
answer was at that moment floating over his head, about 10 miles above his West
Virginian farmhouse, just above the highest clouds in the sky.

***

By the end of the 21st century, scientists predict that Switzerland could face a temperature increase of five degrees Fahrenheit because of climate change; by
then, a majority of central Switzerland’s glaciers will have disappeared. Twenty years ago,
there was no lake in this location — the flat tongue of Trift Glacier filled the basin completely, and mountaineers were able to walk across it to get to the other side of the valley. “Global warming will most likely eliminate most
of the glacier ice
in the Alps within a few decades,” said Wilfried Haeberli, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich. “We are now looking at the tipping of the first domino piece — glaciers — in a complex system of domino pieces, natural systems on earth. And
we are losing options for action. It is too late to save the glaciers.”

***

2.
‘You Scientists Win’
1985
It was as if, without warning, the sky opened and the sun burst through in all its irradiating, blinding fury. The mental image was of a pin stuck through a balloon, a chink in an eggshell, a crack in the ceiling — Armageddon descending from above. It
was a sudden global emergency: There was a hole in the ozone layer.


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ - May 1989
In the first week of May 1989, when Hansen received his proposed testimony back
from the O.M.B., it was disfigured by deletions and, more incredible, additions. Gore had called the hearing to increase the pressure on Bush to sign
major climate
legislation; Hansen had wanted to use the occasion to clarify one major point that, in the hubbub following the 1988 hearing, had been misunderstood. Global warming would not only cause more heat waves and droughts like those of the previous summer but
would also lead to more extreme rain events. This was crucial — he didn’t want the public to conclude, the next time there was a mild summer, that global
warming wasn’t real.

But the edited text was a mess. For a couple of days, Hansen played along, accepting the more innocuous edits. But he couldn’t accept some of the howlers proposed by the O.M.B. With the hearing only two days away, he gave up.
He told NASA’s
congressional liaison to stop fighting. Let the White House have its way, he said.

But Hansen would have his way, too. As soon as he hung up, he drafted a letter to Gore. He explained that the O.M.B. wanted him to demote his own scientific findings to “estimates” from models that were “evolving” and unreliable. His anonymous
censor wanted him to say that the causes of global warming were “scientifically unknown” and might be attributable to “natural processes,” caveats that would not only render his testimony meaningless but make him sound like a moron. The most
bizarre addition, however, was a statement of a different kind. He was asked to
argue that Congress should only pass climate legislation that immediately benefited the economy, “independent of concerns about an increasing greenhouse effect” — a
sentence that no scientist would ever utter, unless perhaps he were employed by
the American Petroleum Institute. Hansen faxed his letter to Gore and left the office.


When he arrived home, Anniek told him Gore had called. Would it be all right, Gore asked when Hansen spoke with him, if I tell a couple of reporters about this?

The New York Times’s Philip Shabecoff called the next morning. “I should be
allowed to say what is my scientific position,” Hansen told him. “I can understand changing policy, but not science.”

On Monday, May 8, the morning of the hearing, he left early for his flight to Washington and did not see the newspaper until he arrived at Dirksen, where Gore showed it to him. The front-page headline read: “Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His
Testimony.” They agreed that Hansen would give his testimony as planned, after which Gore would ask about the passages that the O.M.B. had rewritten.

Gore stopped at the door. “We better go separately,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll be able to get both of us with one hand grenade.”

In the crowded hearing room, the cameras fixed on Hansen. He held his statement
in one hand and a single Christmas tree bulb in the other — a prop to help explain, however shakily, that the warming already created by fossil-fuel combustion was
equivalent to placing a Christmas light over every square meter of Earth’s surface. After Hansen read his sanitized testimony, Gore pounced. He was puzzled by inconsistencies in the distinguished scientist’s presentation, he said in a tone thick with
mock confusion. “Why do you directly contradict yourself?”

Hansen explained that he had not written those contradictory statements. “The
Bush administration is acting as if it is scared of the truth,” Gore said. “If they forced you to change a scientific conclusion, it is a form of science fraud.”

Another government scientist testifying at the hearing, Jerry Mahlman from NOAA, acknowledged that the White House had previously tried to change his conclusions too. Mahlman had managed to deflect the worst of it, however — “objectionable and also
unscientific” recommendations, he said, that would have been “severely embarrassing to me in the face of my scientific colleagues.”

Gore called it “an outrage of the first order of magnitude.” The 1988 hearing had created a hero out of Jim Hansen. Now Gore had a real villain, one far more treacherous than Fred Koomanoff — a nameless censor in the White House, hiding behind O.M.
B. letterhead.

The cameras followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore focused on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other
scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”

10. The White House Effect - Fall 1989
The censorship did more to publicize Hansen’s testimony and the dangers of global warming than anything he could have possibly said. At the White House briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Hansen’s statement had
been changed. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation. Hansen, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”

The Los Angeles Times called the censorship “an outrageous assault.” The Chicago Tribune said it was the beginning of “a cold war on global warming,” and The New York Times warned that the White House’s “heavy-handed intervention sends the
signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem.”

The day after the hearing, Gore received an unannounced visit from the O.M.B. director, Richard Darman. He came alone, without aides. He said he wanted to apologize to Gore in person. He was sorry, and he wanted Gore to know it; the O.M.B. would not try
to censor anyone again. Gore, stunned, thanked Darman. Something about his apology — the effusiveness, the mortified tone or perhaps the fact that he had come by himself, as if in secret — left Gore with the impression that the
idea to censor Hansen
didn’t come from someone five levels down from the top, or even below Darman.
It had come from someone above Darman.

Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to
ask if he had any ideas. We could start, Reilly said, by recommitting to a global climate treaty. The
United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.

Sununu sent a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great
that it is essential for the U.S. to
exercise leadership.” He proposed an international workshop to improve the accuracy of the science and calculate the economic costs of emissions reductions. Sununu signed the telegram himself. A day later, the president pledged to host a climate
workshop at the White House. Rafe Pomerance was unconvinced, telling the press that this belated effort to save face was a “waffle” that fell short of real action: “We should be able to complete a treaty by the end of 1990,” he said, “not be
starting one.” But the general response from the press was relief and praise.

Still, Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to study more deeply the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided
that the models promoted by Jim Hansen were a lot of bunk. They were horribly imprecise in scale and underestimated the ocean’s ability to mitigate warming. Sununu complained about Hansen to D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale who, at
Sununu’s recommendation, was named Bush’s science adviser. Hansen’s findings were “technical poppycock” that didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements that “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be
attributed to global warming, let alone serve as the basis for national economic policy.

When a junior staff member in the Energy Department, in a meeting at the White House with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil-fuel use, Sununu interrupted her. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” he
asked. “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied.

“I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background
using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the
basis of newspaper headlines.” After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staff member in the hallway. She was shaken. Don’t take it personally, Reilly
told her. Sununu might have been looking at you, but that was directed at me.

Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly, Sununu thought, was a creature of the environmental lobby. He was trying to impress his friends at the E.P.A. without having a basic grasp of the science himself. Most unforgivable of
all was what Sununu saw as Reilly’s propensity to leak to the press. Whenever
Reilly sent the White House names of candidates he wanted to hire for openings at the E.P.A., Sununu vetoed them. When it came time for the high-level diplomatic meeting in
November, a gathering of environmental ministers in the Netherlands, Sununu didn’t trust Reilly to negotiate on behalf of the White House. So he sent Allan Bromley to accompany him.

Reilly, for his part, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on
the prospect of a climate treaty. The president had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by nonscientists. Bush had brought up
the subject on the campaign trail, in his speech about the White House effect, after leafing through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might generate some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to
Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, he said. Let me know when you decide. But by the time Reilly got to the Noordwijk Ministerial Conference in the Netherlands, he suspected that it was already too late.

***

Last year’s monsoons, which typically run from June through September, were the worst in 40 years, and more than eight million Bangladeshis were affected by the devastation. At least 145 people died, an estimated 307,000 people were forced into
emergency shelters, 700,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and about a third of Bangladesh was submerged. Areas along the Bay of Bengal, long prone to chronic flooding, have become increasingly uninhabitable. Scientists believe that a sharp rise in the
bay’s surface temperature is why Bangladesh has suffered some of the fastest sea-level rises in the world. Some project a five-foot rise by 2100, which could displace 50 million people.

***

11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ - November 1989
Rafe Pomerance awoke at sunlight and stole out of his hotel, making for the flagpoles. It was nearly freezing — Nov. 6, 1989, on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk — but the wind had yet to rise and the photographer was
waiting. More than 60 flags lined the strand between the hotel and the beach, one for each nation in attendance at the first major diplomatic meeting on global warming. The delegations would review the progress made by the I.P.C.C. and decide whether to
endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would, at minimum, agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch environmental minister, more modest than the Toronto number: a freezing of greenhouse-
gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Some believed that if the meeting was a success, it would encourage the I.P.C.C. to accelerate its negotiations and reach a decision about a treaty sooner. But at the very least, the world’s environmental ministers
should sign a statement endorsing a hard, binding target of emissions reductions. The mood among the delegates was electric, nearly giddy — after more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they could finally sign
an agreement that meant
something.

Pomerance had not been among the 400 delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists — Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden
Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth — he had
formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was
the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target
proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest global target yet proposed.

The activists booked their own travel and doubled up in rooms at a beat-up motel down the beach. They managed to secure all-access credentials from the Dutch environmental ministry’s press secretary. He was inclined to be sympathetic toward the
activists because it had been rumored that Allan Bromley, one of the United States’ lead delegates, would try to persuade the delegates from Japan and the Soviet Union to join him in resisting the idea of a binding agreement, despite the fact that Bush
had again claimed just earlier that week that the United States would “play a
leadership role in global warming.” The Dutch were especially concerned about
this development, as even a minor rise in sea level would swamp much of their nation.

The activists planned to stage a stunt each day to embarrass Bromley and galvanize support for a hard treaty. The first took place at the flagpoles, where they met a photographer from Agence France-Presse at dawn. Performing for
the photographer, Boyle
and Becker lowered the Japanese, Soviet and American flags to half-staff. Becker gave a reporter an outraged statement, accusing the three nations of conspiring to block the one action necessary to save the planet. The article appeared on front pages
across Europe.


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

Epilogue

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been
no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; estimates solidify into observational data. Where there have been inaccuracies, they have tended to
be in the direction of understatement. Caldeira and a colleague recently published a paper in Nature finding that the world is warming more quickly than
most climate models predict. The toughest emissions reductions now being proposed, even by the most
committed nations, will probably fail to achieve “any given global temperature stabilization target.”

More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind burned more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By
2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every
action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that
counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly, except
in its particulars. Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has
failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.

The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that
the oil-and-gas industry always operated thus; while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they
did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would. It was James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 that, for the first
time since the “Changing Climate” report, made oil-and-gas executives begin
to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits. Exxon, as ever, led the field. Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy
development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of
the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own.

The American Petroleum Institute, after holding a series of internal briefings on the subject in the fall and winter of 1988, including one for the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, took a similar, if slightly more diplomatic,
line. It set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy — about $100,000, a fraction of the millions it was spending on the health effects of benzene, but enough to establish a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of
newspeak, the Global
Climate Coalition. It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries. The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed
regulations, but on a whim, it added a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly
by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed skepticism about global warming. The A.P.I.’s
payment for an original op-ed was $2,000.

The chance to enact meaningful measures to prevent climate change was vanishing, but the industry had just begun. In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a
convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear
in articles on climate change.

Cheap and useful, G.C.C.-like groups started to proliferate, but it was not until international negotiations in preparation for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit began that investments in persuasion peddling rose to the level of a line item.
At Rio, George H.W.
Bush refused to commit to specific emissions reductions. The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign.
Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won
control of both houses in 40 years. The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad
campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The
Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.

The G.C.C. disbanded in 2002 after the defection of various members who were embarrassed by its tactics. But Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) continued its disinformation campaign for another half decade. This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable
target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to
global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly since 1979 — the assignment of blame.

A major lawsuit has targeted the federal government. A consortium of 21 American children and young adults — one of whom, Sophie Kivlehan of Allentown, Pa., is Jim Hansen’s granddaughter — claims that the government,
by “creating a national
energy system that causes climate change,” has violated its duty to protect the natural resources to which all Americans are entitled.

In 2015, after reports by the website InsideClimate News and The Los Angeles Times documented the climate studies performed by Exxon for decades, the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York began fraud investigations. The
Securities and Exchange
Commission separately started to investigate whether Exxon Mobil’s valuation depended on the burning of all its known oil-and-gas reserves. (Exxon Mobil has
denied any wrongdoing and stands by its valuation method.)

The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is “Exxon Knew.” It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of
climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis
and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.

The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy.
Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been
tracking the crisis even longer.

Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, “The Bell Science Hour” — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired “The Unchained Goddess,” a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a
dozen years removed from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” warning that “man may
be unwittingly changing the world’s climate” through the release of carbon dioxide. “A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,”
says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. “An inland sea
would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed
boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical
water.”
Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.

Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of
civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean
nothing to us.

Could it have been any other way? In the late 1970s, a small group of philosophers, economists and political scientists began to debate, largely among themselves, whether a human solution to this human problem was even possible. They did not trouble
themselves about the details of warming, taking the worst-case scenario as a given. They asked instead whether humankind, when presented with this particular existential crisis, was willing to prevent it. We worry about the future. But how much, exactly?

The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the
perfect economic disaster. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, a member of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in the 1970s that the most appropriate remedy was a global carbon tax. But that required an international agreement,
which Nordhaus didn’t think was likely. Michael Glantz, a political scientist
who was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time, argued in 1979 that democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate
problem. The competition for resources means that no single crisis can ever command the public interest for long, yet climate change requires sustained, disciplined efforts over decades. And the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich argued that
any global agreement would inevitably favor the most minimal action. Adaptation, Meyer-Abich concluded, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed
on future
generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have
happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious
resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

If human beings really were able to take the long view — to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths — we
would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So
we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over
the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.

Like most human questions, the carbon-dioxide question will come down to fear. At some point, the fears of young people will overwhelm the fears of the old. Some time after that, the young will amass enough power to act. It will be too late to avoid some
catastrophes, but perhaps not others. Humankind is nothing if not optimistic, even to the point of blindness. We are also an adaptable species. That will help.

The distant perils of climate change are no longer very distant, however. Many have already begun to occur. We are capable of good works, altruism and wisdom,
and a growing number of people have devoted their lives to helping civilization
avoid the worst.
We have a solution in hand: carbon taxes, increased investment in renewable and nuclear energy and decarbonization technology. As Jim Hansen told me, “From a technology and economics standpoint, it is still readily possible to stay under two degrees
Celsius.” We can trust the technology and the economics. It’s harder to trust human nature. Keeping the planet to two degrees of warming, let alone 1.5
degrees, would require transformative action. It will take more than good works
and voluntary
commitments; it will take a revolution. But in order to become a revolutionary,
you need first to suffer.


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)