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The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was
no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could
watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass
building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric
problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made
just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.

4.
‘Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.’
Fall 1987-Spring 1988
Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate.
It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the
Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement. Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees,
across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of
the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing
for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.

The convivial mood had something to do with its host. John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A.
in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to
the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined. After leaving the administration, he founded a nonprofit organization, the Climate Institute, to bring together scientists, politicians and businesspeople to discuss
policy solutions. He didn’t have any difficulty raising $150,000 to hold “Preparing for Climate Change”; the major sponsors included BP America, General Electric and the American Gas Association. Topping’s industry friends
were intrigued. If a
guy like Topping thought this greenhouse business was important, they’d better see what it was all about.


Jim Hansen at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1989. Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the
center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were
his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a
diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.


It was not entirely surprising to see envoys from Exxon, the Gas Research Institute and the electrical-grid trade groups, even if they had been silent since “Changing Climate.” But they were joined by executives from General Electric, AT&T and the
American Petroleum Institute, which that spring had invited a leading government scientist to make the case for a transition to renewable energy at the industry’s annual world conference in Houston. Even Richard Barnett was there, the chairman of the
Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, the face of the campaign to defeat an ozone treaty. Barnett’s retreat had been humiliating and swift: After DuPont,
by far the world’s single largest manufacturer of CFCs, realized that it stood to profit from the
transition to replacement chemicals, the alliance abruptly reversed its position, demanding that the United States sign a treaty as soon as possible. Now Barnett, at the Quality Inn, was speaking about how “we bask in the glory
of the Montreal Protocol�
�� and quoting Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to express his hope for a renewed alliance between industry and environmentalists. There were more than 250 people in all in the old ballroom, and if the concentric rings extended any further, you
would have needed a larger hotel.

That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly
exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group
representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start
of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.

It was perhaps because of all this good cheer that it was Hansen’s instinct to shrug off a peculiar series of events that took place just a week later. He was scheduled to appear before another Senate hearing, this time devoted entirely to climate
change. It was called by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources after Rafe Pomerance and Gordon MacDonald persuaded its chairman, Bennett Johnston, a
Democrat from Louisiana, of the issue’s significance for the future of the oil-and-gas industry
(Louisiana ranked third among states in oil production). Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the
White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”

The process appeared entirely perfunctory, but this time, on the Friday evening
before his appearance that Monday, he was informed that the White House demanded changes to his testimony. No rationale was provided. Nor did Hansen understand by what
authority it could censor scientific findings. He told the administrator in NASA’s legislative-affairs office that he refused to make the changes. If that meant he couldn’t testify, so be it.

The NASA administrator had another idea. The Office of Management and Budget had the authority to approve government witnesses, she explained. But it couldn’t censor a private citizen.

At the hearing three days later, on Monday, Nov. 9, Hansen was listed as “Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y. ” — as if he were a crank with a telescope who had stumbled into the Senate off the street. He was careful to emphasize the absurdity of
the situation in his opening remarks, at least to the degree that his Midwestern reserve would allow: “Before I begin, I would like to state that although I direct the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I am appearing here as a private citizen.�
� In the most understated terms available to him, Hansen provided his credentials: “Ten years’ experience in terrestrial climate studies and more
than 10 years’ experience in the exploration and study of other planetary atmospheres.”

Assuming that one of the senators would immediately ask about this odd introduction, Hansen had prepared an elegant response. He planned to say that although his NASA colleagues endorsed his findings, the White House had insisted he utter false
statements that would have distorted his conclusions. He figured this would lead to an uproar. But no senator thought to ask about his title. So the atmospheric scientist from New York City said nothing else about it.

After the hearing, he went to lunch with John Topping, who was stunned to hear of the White House’s ham-handed attempt to silence him. “Uh, oh,” Topping
joked, “Jim is a dangerous man. We’re going to have to rally the troops to protect him.”
The idea that quiet, sober Jim Hansen could be seen as a threat to anyone, let alone national security — well, it was enough to make him laugh.

But the brush with state censorship stayed with Hansen in the months ahead. It confirmed that even after the political triumph of the Montreal Protocol and the bipartisan support of climate policy, there were still people within the White House who hoped
to prevent a debate. In its public statements, the administration showed no such reluctance: By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado
on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in
the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy
policy.


Southern Hemisphere ozone cover in 1987 as mapped by one satellite. NASA
In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans,
to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest
contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.


But a pledge didn’t reduce emissions. Hansen was learning to think more strategically — less like a scientist, more like a politician. Despite the efforts of Wirth, there was as yet no serious plan nationally or internationally to address climate
change. Even Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim
to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for
president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after
the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.

Hansen told Pomerance that the biggest problem with the Johnston hearing, at least apart from the whole censorship business, had been the month in which it was held: November. “This business of having global-warming hearings in such cool weather is
never going to get attention,” he said. He wasn’t joking. At first he assumed that it was enough to publish studies about global warming and that the
government would spring into action. Then he figured that his statements to Congress would do it. It
had seemed, at least momentarily, that industry, understanding what was at stake, might lead. But nothing had worked.

As spring turned to summer, Anniek Hansen noticed a change in her husband’s disposition. He grew pale and unusually thin. When she asked him about his day,
Hansen replied with some ambiguity and turned the conversation to sports: the Yankees, his
daughter’s basketball team, his son’s baseball team. But even for him, he was unusually quiet, serious, distracted. Anniek would begin a conversation and
find that he hadn’t heard a word she said. She knew what he was thinking: He was running out
of time. We were running out of time. Then came the summer of 1988, and Jim Hansen wasn’t the only one who could tell that time was running out.

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.



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