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The klaxon was rung by a team of British government scientists, until then little known in the field, who made regular visits to research stations in Antarctica — one on the Argentine Islands, the other on a sheet of ice floating into the sea at the
rate of a quarter mile per year. At each site, the scientists had set up a machine invented in the 1920s called the Dobson spectrophotometer, which resembled a large slide projector turned with its eye staring straight up. After several years of results
so alarming that they disbelieved their own evidence, the British scientists at
last reported their discovery in an article published in May 1985 by Nature. “The spring values of total O₃ in Antarctica have now fallen considerably,” the abstract
read. But by the time the news filtered into national headlines and television broadcasts several months later, it had transfigured into something far more terrifying: a substantial increase in skin cancer, a sharp decline in the global agricultural
yield and the mass death of fish larva, near the base of the marine food chain.
Later came fears of atrophied immune systems and blindness.

The urgency of the alarm seemed to have everything to do with the phrase “a hole in the ozone layer,” which, charitably put, was a mixed metaphor. For there was no hole, and there was no layer. Ozone, which shielded Earth from ultraviolet radiation,
was distributed throughout the atmosphere, settling mostly in the middle stratosphere and never in a concentration higher than 15 parts per million. As for the “hole” — while the amount of ozone over Antarctica had declined drastically, the
depletion was a temporary phenomenon, lasting about two months a year. In satellite images colorized to show ozone density, however, the darker region appeared to depict a void. When F.Sherwood Rowland, one of the chemists who identified the problem in
1974, spoke of the “ozone hole” in a university slide lecture in November 1985, the crisis found its catchphrase. The New York Times used it that same day in its article about the British team’s findings, and while scientific journals initially
refused to use the term, within a year it was unavoidable. The ozone crisis had
its signal, which was also a symbol: a hole.


It was already understood, thanks to the work of Rowland and his colleague Mario Molina, that the damage was largely caused by the man-made CFCs used in refrigerators, spray bottles and plastic foams, which escaped into the stratosphere and devoured
ozone molecules. It was also understood that the ozone problem and the greenhouse-gas problem were linked. CFCs were unusually potent greenhouse gases. Though CFCs had been mass-produced only since the 1930s, they were already responsible, by Jim Hansen�
�s calculation, for nearly half of Earth’s warming during the 1970s. But nobody was worried about CFCs because of their warming potential. They were worried about getting skin cancer.

The United Nations, through two of its intergovernmental agencies — the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization — had in 1977 established a World Plan of Action on the Ozone Layer. In 1985,
UNEP adopted a
framework for a global treaty, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. The negotiators failed to agree upon any specific CFC regulations in Vienna, but after the British scientists reported their findings from the Antarctic two
months later, the Reagan administration proposed a reduction in CFC emissions of 95 percent. The speed of the reversal was all the more remarkable because CFC regulation faced virulent opposition. Dozens of American businesses with the word “
refrigeration” in their names, together with hundreds involved in the production, manufacture and consumption of chemicals, plastics, paper goods and
frozen food — around 500 companies in total, from DuPont and the American Petroleum Institute to Mrs.
Smith’s Frozen Food Company of Pottstown, Pa. — had united in 1980 as the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy. The alliance hounded the E.P.A., members of Congress and Reagan himself, insisting that ozone science was uncertain. The
few concessions
the alliance won, like forcing the E.P.A. to withdraw a plan to regulate CFCs, were swiftly overturned by lawsuits, and once the public discovered the “ozone hole,” every relevant government agency and every sitting United States senator urged the
president to endorse the United Nations’ plans for a treaty. When Reagan finally submitted the Vienna Convention to the Senate for ratification, he praised the “leading role” played by the United States, fooling nobody.

Senior members of the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, including Bert Bolin, a veteran of the Charney group, began to wonder whether they could do for the carbon-dioxide problem what they had done for ozone
policy. The organizations had been holding semiannual conferences on global warming since the early 1970s. But in 1985, just several months after the bad news from the Antarctic, at an otherwise sleepy meeting in Villach, Austria, the assembled 89
scientists from 29 countries began to discuss a subject that fell wildly outside their discipline: politics.

An Irish hydrology expert asked if his country should reconsider the location of its dams. A Dutch seacoast engineer questioned the wisdom of rebuilding dikes that had been destroyed by recent floods. And the conference’s chairman, James Bruce, an
unassuming, pragmatic hydrometeorologist from Ontario, posed a question that shocked his audience.

Bruce was a minister of the Canadian environmental agency, a position that conferred him the esteem that his American counterparts had forfeited when Reagan won the White House. Just before leaving for Villach, he met with provincial dam and hydropower
managers. O.K., one of them said, you scientists win. You’ve convinced me that the climate is changing. Well, tell me how it’s changing. In 20 years, will the rain be falling somewhere else?

Bruce took this challenge to Villach: You’re the experts. What am I supposed to tell him? People are hearing the message, and they want to hear more. So how
do we, in the scientific world, begin a dialogue with the world of action?

The world of action. For a room of scientists who prided themselves as belonging to a specialized guild of monkish austerity, this was a startling provocation. On a bus tour of the countryside, commissioned by their Austrian hosts, Bruce sat with Roger
Revelle, ignoring the Alps, speaking animatedly about the need for scientists to demand political remedies in times of existential crisis.

The formal report ratified at Villach contained the most forceful warnings yet issued by a scientific body. Most major economic decisions undertaken by nations, it pointed out, were based on the assumption that past climate conditions were a reliable
guide to the future. But the future would not look like the past. Though some warming was inevitable, the scientists wrote, the extent of the disaster could be “profoundly affected” by aggressive, coordinated government policies. Fortunately there
was a new model in place to achieve just that. The balloon could be patched, the eggshell bandaged, the ceiling replastered. There was still time.

***

Thirty years ago, the waters of Lake Tai, China’s third-largest lake, were clear of algae. But the lake is surrounded by several high-density cities, including Shanghai, Suzhou and Changzhou, metropolitan areas that have grown rapidly in the past few
decades. Rampant sewer dumping and livestock drainage, combined with shifting agricultural practices, allowed the algae blooms to flourish, and now human mismanagement and global warming have entrenched them. “They love warm, stagnant, nutrient-rich
conditions,” said Hans Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Over the past decade, the blooms have significantly expanded, and their season has grown longer. In 2007, the “pea soup”
conditions of the lake were so bad, Paerl said, that the cities surrounding the basin “had green slime coming out of their faucets, and the central government had to bring in drinking water.” At least two million people were without fresh water.

***

3.
The Size of The Human Imagination
Spring-Summer 1986
It was the spring of 1986, and Curtis Moore, a Republican staff member on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, was telling Rafe Pomerance that the greenhouse effect wasn’t a problem.

With his last ounce of patience, Pomerance begged to disagree.

Yes, Moore clarified — of course, it was an existential problem, the fate of the civilization depended on it, the oceans would boil, all of that. But it wasn’t a political problem. Know how you could tell? Political problems had solutions. And the
climate issue had none. Without a solution — an obvious, attainable one — any policy could only fail. No elected politician desired to come within shouting distance of failure. So when it came to the dangers of despoiling our planet beyond the range
of habitability, most politicians didn’t see a problem. Which meant that Pomerance had a very big problem indeed.


He had followed the rapid ascension of the ozone issue with the rueful admiration of a competitor. He was thrilled for its success — however inadvertently, the treaty would serve as the world’s first action to delay climate change. But it offered an
especially acute challenge for Pomerance, who after his yearlong hiatus had become, as far as he knew, the nation’s first, and only, full-time global-warming lobbyist. At the suggestion of Gordon MacDonald, Pomerance joined the World Resources
Institute, a nonprofit begun by Gus Speth, a senior environmental official in Jimmy Carter’s White House and a founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Unlike Friends of the Earth, W.R.I. was not an activist organization; it occupied the
nebulous intersection of politics, international relations and energy policy. Its mission was expansive enough to allow Pomerance to work without interference. Yet the only thing that anyone on Capitol Hill wanted to talk about was ozone.

That was Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole
had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems
were related, sure:
Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t
see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.

Moore came through. At his suggestion, Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986. F.Sherwood
Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the
Charney group, would testify about climate change. As soon as the first witness
appeared, Pomerance realized that Moore’s instincts had been right. The ozone
gang was good.

Robert Watson dimmed the lights in the hearing room. On a flimsy screen, he projected footage with the staticky, low-budget quality of a slasher flick. It showed a bird’s-eye view of the Antarctic, partly obscured by spiraling clouds. The footage was
so convincing that Chafee had to ask whether it was an actual satellite image. Watson acknowledged that though created by satellite data, it was, in fact, a simulation. An animation, to be precise. The three-minute video showed every day of October —
the month during which the ozone thinned most drastically — for seven consecutive years. (The other months, conveniently, were omitted.) A canny filmmaker had colored the “ozone hole” pink. As the years sped forward, the
polar vortex madly
gyroscoping, the hole expanded until it obscured most of Antarctica. The smudge
turned mauve, representing an even thinner density of ozone, and then the dark purple of a hemorrhaging wound. The data represented in the video wasn’t new,
but nobody had
thought to represent it in this medium. If F.Sherwood Rowland’s earlier colorized images were crime-scene photographs, Watson’s video was a surveillance camera catching the killer red-handed.

As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many
people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “
World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”

The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire
Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post);
“Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times). On the second day of the
Senate hearing, devoted to global warming, every seat in the gallery was occupied; four men squeezed together on a broad window sill.

Pomerance had suggested that Chafee, instead of opening with the typical statement about the need for more research, deliver a call for action. But Chafee went further: He called for the State Department to begin negotiations on an international solution
with the Soviet Union. It was the kind of proposal that would have been unthinkable even a year earlier, but the ozone issue had established a precedent for global environmental problems: high-level meetings among the world’s most powerful nations,
followed by a global summit meeting to negotiate a framework for a treaty to restrict emissions.

After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no
less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.�
�

The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian
Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.


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