[continued from previous message]

There was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon
Johnson,
MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we
exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.

In the decade since then, MacDonald had been alarmed to see humankind begin in earnest to weaponize weather — not out of malice, but unwittingly. During the
spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035.
The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase
by an average of two
to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of
North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most
ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles.
Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.

The Jasons sent the report to dozens of scientists in the United States and abroad; to industry groups like the National Coal Association and the Electric Power Research Institute; and within the government, to the National Academy of
Sciences, the
Commerce Department, the E.P.A., NASA, the Pentagon, the N.S.A., every branch of the military, the National Security Council and the White House.

Pomerance read about the atmospheric crisis in a state of shock that swelled briskly into outrage. “This,” he told Betsy Agle, “is the whole banana.”

Gordon MacDonald worked at the federally funded Mitre Corporation, a think tank
that works with agencies throughout the government. His title was senior research analyst, which was another way of saying senior science adviser to the
national-intelligence
community. After a single phone call, Pomerance, a former Vietnam War protester
and conscientious objector, drove several miles on the Beltway to a group of anonymous white office buildings that more closely resembled the headquarters of a regional
banking firm than the solar plexus of the American military-industrial complex.
He was shown into the office of a brawny, soft-spoken man in blocky, horn-rimmed frames, who extended a hand like a bear’s paw.

“I’m glad you’re interested in this,” MacDonald said, sizing up the young activist.

“How could I not be?” Pomerance said. “How could anyone not be?”

MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy:
In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to
the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the
environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.

MacDonald spoke for two hours. Pomerance was appalled. “If I set up briefings
with some people on the Hill,” he asked MacDonald, “will you tell them what
you just told me?”

Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring
of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy
Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging. The men settled into
a routine, with MacDonald explaining the science and Pomerance adding the exclamation points. They
were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top
scientist, Frank Press.

Press’s office was in the Old Executive Office Building, the granite fortress
that stands on the White House grounds just paces away from the West Wing. Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be
the entire
senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed
the character of a high-
level national-security meeting. He decided to let MacDonald do all the talking. There was no need to emphasize to Press and his lieutenants that this was an issue of profound national significance. The hushed mood in the office told him that this was
already understood.

To explain what the carbon-dioxide problem meant for the future, MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and
died after being
accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future
Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.

Consumption increased beyond anything the Swedish chemist could have imagined. Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in
recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.

MacDonald’s voice was calm but authoritative, his powerful, heavy hands conveying the force of his argument. He was a geophysicist trapped in the body of an offensive lineman — he had turned down a football scholarship to Rice in order to attend
Harvard — and seemed miscast as a preacher of atmospheric physics and existential doom. His audience listened in bowed silence. Pomerance couldn’t read them. Political bureaucrats were skilled at hiding their opinions. Pomerance wasn’t. He shifted
restlessly in his chair, glancing between MacDonald and the government suits, trying to see whether they grasped the shape of the behemoth that MacDonald was
describing.

MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close
colleague of MacDonald and
Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced
in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural
laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions. A young geochemist named Charles David Keeling charted the data. Keeling’s graph came to be known as the Keeling curve, though it more closely resembled a jagged lightning
bolt hurled toward
the firmament. MacDonald had a habit of tracing the Keeling curve in the air, his thick forefinger jabbing toward the ceiling.

After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the
atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the
rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters —
changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.

In 1974, the C.I.A. issued a classified report on the carbon-dioxide problem. It concluded that climate change had begun around 1960 and had “already caused major economic problems throughout the world.” The future economic and
political impacts
would be “almost beyond comprehension.” Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production,
the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.

“What would you have us do?” Press asked.

The president’s plan, in the wake of the Saudi oil crisis, to promote solar energy — he had gone so far as to install 32 photovoltaic panels on the roof of the White House to heat his family’s water — was a good start, MacDonald
thought. But
Carter’s plan to stimulate production of synthetic fuels — gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands — was a dangerous idea. Nuclear power, despite the recent tragedy at Three Mile Island, should be expanded. But
even natural gas and
ethanol were preferable to coal. There was no way around it: Coal production would ultimately have to end.

The president’s advisers asked respectful questions, but Pomerance couldn’t
tell whether they were persuaded. The men all stood and shook hands, and Press led MacDonald and Pomerance out of his office. After they emerged from the Old Executive Office
Building onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Pomerance asked MacDonald what he thought would happen.

Knowing Frank as I do, MacDonald said, I really couldn’t tell you.

In the days that followed, Pomerance grew uneasy. Until this point, he had fixated on the science of the carbon-dioxide issue and its possible political ramifications. But now that his meetings on Capitol Hill had concluded, he began to question what all
this might mean for his own future. His wife, Lenore, was eight months pregnant; was it ethical, he wondered, to bring a child onto a planet that before much longer could become inhospitable to life? And he wondered why it had fallen to him, a 32-year-
old lobbyist without scientific training, to bring greater attention to this crisis.

Finally, weeks later, MacDonald called to tell him that Press had taken up the issue. On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy
of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father
of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

Pomerance was amazed by how much momentum had built in such a short time. Scientists at the highest levels of government had known about the dangers of fossil-fuel combustion for decades. Yet they had produced little besides journal articles, academic
symposiums, technical reports. Nor had any politician, journalist or activist championed the issue. That, Pomerance figured, was about to change. If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careening toward an existential crisis, the president
would be forced to act.

.

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

[continued from previous message]

Hansen did not disclose to Gore’s staff that, in late November, he received a
letter from Koomanoff declining to fund his climate-modeling research despite a
promise from Koomanoff’s predecessor. Koomanoff left open the possibility of funding other
carbon-dioxide research, but Hansen was not optimistic, and when his funding lapsed, he had to release five employees, half his staff. Koomanoff, it seemed,
would not be moved. But the hearing would give Hansen the chance to appeal directly to the
congressmen who oversaw Koomanoff’s budget.


Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-
dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as
the basis for legislative policy. Bob Shamansky, a Democrat from Ohio, objected
to the use of the term “greenhouse effect” for such a horrifying phenomenon, because he had always enjoyed visiting greenhouses. “Everything,” he said, “seems to
flourish in there.” He suggested that they call it the “microwave oven” effect, “because we are not flourishing too well under this; apparently, we are getting cooked.”

There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “
we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had
failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research
is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”

Gore disagreed: A higher degree of certainty was required, he believed, in order to persuade a majority of Congress to restrict the use of fossil fuels. The reforms required were of such magnitude and sweep that they “would challenge the political will
of our civilization.”

Yet the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “
You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”

Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain
English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather
stations, he found
that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of
a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s. Most disturbing of all,
century-old glass astronomy plates had revealed a new problem: Some of the more
obscure greenhouse gases — especially chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a class of man-made substances used in refrigerators and spray cans — had proliferated wildly in
recent years. “We may already have in the pipeline a larger amount of climate
change than people generally realize,” Hansen told the nearly empty room.

Gore asked when the planet would reach a point of no return — a “trigger point,” after which temperatures would spike. “I want to know,” Gore said, “whether I am going to face it or my kids are going to face it.”

“Your kids are likely to face it,” Calvin replied. “I don’t know whether you will or not. You look pretty young.”

It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless
in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.

“Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.”

James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had
predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we
are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.”

“Yes,” Hansen said.

How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy
production?

Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no
hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions.

“That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally.

“My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone.

“It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”

***

Last year, the California fire season was the most destructive in the state’s
history, culminating in a series of wine-country blazes that killed 40 people and leveled more than 8,000 homes and other buildings. That winter had been one
of California’
s rainiest, which caused grass to grow in areas it normally doesn’t; in the summer those grasses dried out, adding kindling to an already fire-prone state.
“The day before the Santa Rosa fires,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the
University of California, Los Angeles, “the vegetation was at record-high values for dryness, and just weeks before, the vegetation was at a record high for the century. This was following the hottest summer on record.” He added: “There’s this
component of vegetation dryness that matters. It affects how intense the burn is and how receptive the fuels are to embers.”

***

8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ - 1982
From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great
sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for
protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.

But Hansen did not get new funding for his carbon-dioxide research. He wondered
whether he had been doomed by his testimony or by his conclusion, in the Science paper, that full exploitation of coal resources — a stated goal of Reagan’s energy policy
— was “undesirable.” Whatever the cause, he found himself alone. He knew he had done nothing wrong — he had only done diligent research and reported his findings, first to his peers, then to the American people. But now it seemed as if he was
being punished for it.

Anniek could read his disappointment, but she was not entirely displeased. Jim cut down on his work hours, leaving the Goddard Institute at 5 o’clock each day, which allowed him to coach his children’s basketball and baseball teams.
(He was a patient,
committed coach, detail-oriented, if a touch too competitive for his wife’s liking.) At home, Jim spoke only about the teams and their fortunes, keeping to
himself his musings — whether he would be able to secure federal funding for his climate
experiments, whether the institute would be forced to move its office to Maryland to cut costs.

But perhaps there were other ways forward. Not long after Hansen laid off five of his assistants, a major symposium he was helping to organize received overtures from a funding partner far wealthier and less ideologically blinkered
than the Reagan
administration: Exxon. Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the
most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to
fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.

As an indication of the seriousness with which Exxon took the issue, Shaw sent Edward David Jr., the president of the research division and the former science
adviser to Nixon. Hansen was glad for the support. He figured that Exxon’s contributions
might go well beyond picking up the bill for travel expenses, lodging and a dinner for dozens of scientists at the colonial-style Clinton Inn in Tenafly, N.J. As a gesture of appreciation, David was invited to give the keynote address.

There were moments in David’s speech in which he seemed to channel Rafe Pomerance. David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s
blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even
if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that
Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.

Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn�
��t be hostile to Exxon.

It seemed that something was beginning to turn. With the carbon-dioxide problem
as with other environmental crises, the Reagan administration had alienated many of its own supporters. The early demonstrations of autocratic force had retreated into
compromise and deference. By the end of 1982, multiple congressional committees
were investigating Anne Gorsuch for her indifference to enforcing the cleanup of Superfund sites, and the House voted to hold her in contempt of Congress; Republicans in
Congress turned on James Watt after he eliminated thousands of acres of land from consideration for wilderness designation. Each cabinet member would resign
within a year.

The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story. This prospect would have
alarmed Hansen
several years earlier; it still made him uneasy. But he was beginning to understand that politics offered freedoms that the rigors of the scientific ethic denied. The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel
reality that crudely
mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of
gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to
understand that too.

.

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

[continued from previous message]

Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with
homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the
greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent.

At the end of the sulfurous summer, several months after Gore ended his candidacy, global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that
coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to
Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do
anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.” His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to
the issue at the
vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a
George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”


This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil
& Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist”
candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had
moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”

By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global
Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit
to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A
lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually
pass significant legislation after Bush took office.

The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special
commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was
inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions. The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize
emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax; and Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural
habitat to cope�
� and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”

It was at this time — at a moment when the environmental movement was, in the
words of one energy lobbyist, “on a tear” — that the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United
Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy. One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international
treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration.
James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate
change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.” Much of Congress agreed: On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the
United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the
White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.

***

Shark Bay, an 8,500-square-mile Unesco World Heritage Site, is home to the largest sea-grass meadows in the world. These subtropical forests are home to thousands of large sharks, fish, sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins and dugongs, a mammal related to
the manatee. In 2011, during an extreme, prolonged heat wave, shallow waters in
the bay reached 93 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature ever recorded there; an estimated 22 percent of the sea grass disappeared, leaving bare sands
in vast areas. “
The water was four degrees Celsius warmer than usual for that time of year — everything cooked,” said Elizabeth Sinclair, a senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia. “The sea grass is like a rain forest. They provide the
habitat and food for a lot of species. If you take away the home and food, there’s nothing left but a complete collapse of an ecosystem.” The 8,000-year-old sea-grass meadows also stored carbon dioxide; when they died, they released up to the
equivalent of what two coal-fired power plants or 1.6 million cars emit into the atmosphere each year.

***

8.
‘You Never Beat The White House’
April 1989
After Jim Baker gave his boisterous address to the I.P.C.C. working group at the State Department, he received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. Leave the science to the scientists, Sununu told Baker. Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect
nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff, didn’t speak about the subject again. He later told the White House that he was recusing himself from energy-policy issues, on account of his previous career as a Houston oil-and-gas lawyer.

Sununu, an enthusiastic contrarian, delighted in defying any lazy characterizations of himself. His father was a Lebanese exporter from Boston, and his mother was a Salvadoran of Greek ancestry; he was born in Havana. In his three terms as governor of
New Hampshire, he had come, in the epithets of national political columnists, to embody Yankee conservatism: pragmatic, business-friendly, technocratic, “no-nonsense.” He had fought angrily against local environmentalists to open a nuclear power
plant, but he had also signed the nation’s first acid-rain legislation and lobbied Reagan directly for a reduction of sulfur-dioxide pollution by 50 percent, the target sought by the Audubon Society. He was perceived as more conservative than the
president, a budget hawk who had turned a $44 million state deficit into a surplus without raising taxes, and openly insulted Republican politicians and the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when they drifted, however tentatively, from his anti-
tax doctrinairism. Yet he increased spending on mental health care and public-land preservation in New Hampshire, and in the White House he would help
negotiate a tax increase and secure the Supreme Court nomination of David Souter.


Bush had chosen Sununu for his political instincts — he was credited with having won Bush the New Hampshire primary, after Bush came in third in Iowa, all but securing him the nomination. But despite his reputation as a political wolf, he still thought
of himself as a scientist — an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. decades earlier. He lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the
class of elite government scientists. Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population
Bomb,” which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world took no step to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an
organization of European scientists, heads of state and economists, which similarly warned that
the world would run out of natural resources; and as recently as the mid-’70s, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s most celebrated scientists — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider and Ichtiaque Rasool —
that a new ice age was
dawning, thanks to the proliferation of man-made aerosols. All were theories of
questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress.

Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on
the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Unless the peoples of
the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” Mead wrote, “the whole planet may become endangered.” Her conclusions were stark, immediate and absent the caveats that hobbled
the scientific literature. Or as Sununu saw it, she showed her hand: “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” Mead wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned
with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.” When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

In April, the director of the O.M.B., Richard Darman, a close ally of Sununu’s, mentioned that the NASA scientist James Hansen, who had forced the issue of global warming onto the national agenda the previous summer, was going
to testify again — this
time at a hearing called by Al Gore. Darman had the testimony and described it.
Sununu was appalled: Hansen’s language seemed extreme, based on scientific arguments that he considered, as he later put it, like “technical garbage.”

While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was
the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

Sununu disagreed. It would be foolish, he said, to let the nation stumble into a binding agreement on questionable scientific merits, especially as it would compel some unknown quantity of economic pain. They went back and forth. Reilly
didn’t want to
cede leadership on the issue to the European powers; after all, the first high-level diplomatic meeting on climate change, to which Reilly was invited, would take place just a few months later in the Netherlands. Statements of caution would make the “
environmental president” look like a hypocrite and hurt the United States’ leverage in a negotiation. But Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American
delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the
exchange to the press.

Sununu, blaming Reilly, was furious. When accounts of his argument with Reilly appeared in The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post ahead of the Geneva I.P.C.C. meeting, they made the White House look as if it didn’t know what it
was doing.

A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker,
who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”

.

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

[continued from previous message]

On the second day, Pomerance and Becker met an official from Kiribati, an island nation of 33 atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. They asked if he was Kiribati’s environmental minister.

Kiribati is a very small place, the man said. I do everything. I’m the environmental minister. I’m the science minister. I’m everything. If the sea rises, he said, my entire nation will be underwater.

Pomerance and Becker exchanged a look. “If we set up a news conference,” Pomerance asked, “will you tell them what you just told us?”

Within minutes, they had assembled a couple dozen journalists.

There is no place on Kiribati taller than my head, began the minister, who seemed barely more than five feet tall. So when we talk about one-foot sea-level rise, that means the water is up to my shin.

He pointed to his shin.

Two feet, he said, that’s my thigh.

He pointed to his thigh.

Three feet, that’s my waist.

He pointed to his waist.

Am I making myself clear?

Pomerance and Becker were ecstatic. The minister came over to them. Is that what you had in mind? he asked.

It was a good start, and necessary too — Pomerance had the sinking feeling that the momentum of the previous year was beginning to flag. The censoring of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were ominous signs.
So were the findings of a report Pomerance had commissioned, published in September by the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse-gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world�
�s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every
other country. Bush’s indecision, or perhaps inattention, had already managed
to delay the negotiation of a global climate treaty until 1990 at the earliest,
perhaps even
1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.

The one meeting to which Pomerance’s atmospheric delegation could not gain admittance was the only one that mattered: the final negotiation. The scientists and I.P.C.C. staff members were asked to leave; just the environmental ministers remained.
Pomerance and the other activists haunted the carpeted hallway outside the conference room, waiting and thinking. A decade earlier, Pomerance helped warn the White House of the dangers posed by fossil-fuel combustion; nine years earlier, at a fairy-tale
castle on the Gulf of Mexico, he tried to persuade Congress to write climate legislation, reshape American energy policy and demand that the United States lead an international process to arrest climate change. Just one year ago, he devised the first
emissions target to be proposed at a major international conference. Now, at the end of the decade, senior diplomats from all over the world were debating the merits of a binding climate treaty. Only he was powerless to participate. He could only trust,
as he stared at the wall separating him from the diplomats and their muffled debate, that all his work had been enough.

The meeting began in the morning and continued into the night, much longer than
expected; most of the delegates had come to the conference ready to sign the Dutch proposal. Each time the doors opened and a minister headed to the bathroom at the other end
of the hall, the activists leapt up, asking for an update. The ministers maintained a studied silence, but as the negotiations went past midnight, their
aggravation was recorded in their stricken faces and opened collars.

“What’s happening?” Becker shouted, for the hundredth time, as the Swedish minister surfaced.

“Your government,” the minister said, “is fucking this thing up!”

When the beaten delegates finally emerged from the conference room, Becker and Pomerance learned what happened. Bromley, at the urging of John Sununu and with
the acquiescence of Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union, had forced the conference to abandon
the commitment to freeze emissions. The final statement noted only that “many” nations supported stabilizing emissions — but did not indicate which nations or at what emissions level. And with that, a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating
progress turned to air.

The environmentalists spent the morning giving interviews and writing news releases. “You must conclude the conference is a failure,” Becker said, calling the dissenting nations “the skunks at the garden party.” Greenpeace
called it a “disaster.
” Timothy Wirth, in Washington, said the outcome was proof that the United States was “not a leader but a delinquent partner.”

Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated.
“There are some good
building blocks here,” Pomerance said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol
on CFCs wasn’t perfect at first, either — it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could
happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced
upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an
emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress.

Before leaving the Netherlands, he joined the other activists for a final round
of drinks and commiseration. He would have to return to Washington the next day
and start all over again. The I.P.C.C.’s next policy-group meeting would take
place in
Edinburgh in two months, and there was concern that the Noordwijk failure might
influence the group members into lowering their expectations for a treaty. But Pomerance refused to be dejected — there was no point to it. His companions, though more
openly disappointed, shared his determination. One of them, Daniel Becker, had just found out that his wife was pregnant with their first child.

She had traveled with Becker to the Netherlands to visit friends before the conference started. One day, their hosts took them on a day trip to Zeeland, a southwestern province where three rivers emptied into the sea. All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn�
��t stop talking about what he had seen in Zeeland. After a flood in 1953, when
the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than 2,000 people, the Dutch
began to build the Delta Works, a vast concrete-and-steel fortress of movable barriers, dams
and sluice gates — a masterpiece of human engineering. The whole system could
be locked into place within 90 minutes, defending the land against storm surge.
It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 700 kilometers, Becker explained. The United
States coastline was about 153,000 kilometers long. How long, he asked, was the
entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world was going to need this. In Zeeland, he said, he had seen the future.

.

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

[continued from previous message]

Hansen’s most recent paper, published last year, announced that Earth is now as warm as it was before the last ice age, 115,000 years ago, when the seas were more than six meters higher than they are today. He and his team have concluded that the only
way to avoid dangerous levels of warming is to bend the emissions arc below the
x-axis. We must, in other words, find our way to “negative emissions,” extracting more carbon dioxide from the air than we contribute to it. If emissions, by miracle, do
rapidly decline, most of the necessary carbon absorption could be handled by replanting forests and improving agricultural practices. If not, “massive technological CO₂ extraction,” using some combination of technologies as yet unperfected or
uninvented, will be required. Hansen estimates that this will incur costs of $89 trillion to $535 trillion this century, and may even be impossible at the necessary scale. He is not optimistic.

Jim Hansen with his wife, Anniek, and one of their granddaughters, Sophie Kivlehan. Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
Like Hansen, Rafe Pomerance is close to his granddaughter. When he feels low, he wears a bracelet she made for him. He finds it difficult to explain the future to her. During the Clinton administration, Pomerance worked on environmental issues for the
State Department; he is now a consultant for Rethink Energy Florida, which hopes to alert the state to the threat of rising seas, and the chairman of Arctic 21, a network of scientists and research organizations that hope “to communicate the ongoing
unraveling of the Arctic.” Every two months, he has lunch with fellow veterans of the climate wars — E.P.A. officials, congressional staff members and colleagues from the World Resources Institute. They bemoan the lost opportunities, the false starts,
the strategic blunders. But they also remember their achievements. In a single
decade, they turned a crisis that was studied by no more than several dozen scientists into the subject of Senate hearings, front-page headlines and the largest diplomatic
negotiation in world history. They helped summon into being the world’s climate watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and initiated the negotiations for a treaty signed by nearly all of the world’s nations.

It is true that much of the damage that might have been avoided is now inevitable. And Pomerance is not the romantic he once was. But he still believes that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it. Human nature has
brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It
is also human nature, after all, to hope.

.

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