by Eric Rutkow
For many years, the link between deforestation and global warming received little attention. It was not even mentioned in the 1965 report on environmental pollution. At the time, forest coverage in the developed world had largely stabilized, and almost no one was paying attention to the world’s tropical forests. But then came the international environmental movement and the “Decade of Destruction.” By the mid-1980s, some climate scientists were speculating that deforestation contributed a staggering 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.
This rough estimation was reinforced in 1987, when scientists used satellites to monitor Amazonian destruction for the first time. What they found was shocking. Their satellites detected more than 170,000 fires between June and October, the so-called burning season. Smoke clouds spiraled twelve thousand feet into the air. One of the lead researchers observed, “There is enough to compare it to the outburst of a very large volcano.” The following year—during the torturous summer of 1988—the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: “Vast Amazon Fires, Man-Made, Linked to Global Warming.” As the article explained, “In the case of carbon dioxide . . . the forest destruction is doubly harmful. . . . The dwindling forest cover becomes not only less efficient in absorbing and removing this ‘greenhouse gas,’ but the fires also add new, huge volumes of it.” Saving the rain forests and their trees was no longer just a matter of biodiversity protection, but one of global climate stability.
The path forward, at this point, was unclear. Combatting global warming would require an unprecedented international effort. The cost of neutralizing tropical deforestation alone—assuming the political obstacles could be overcome—was placed in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And this would only address a fraction of the total greenhouse gas emissions. The majority came from fossil fuels, which powered the global industrial economy. Developed nations could not spend their way past the problem even if they had wanted to.
Still, some in the environmental movement believed that there was reason to be Pollyannaish.
The year before the 1988 heat wave, the international community had come together and negotiated a comprehensive treaty to address a different global environmental crisis: the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer (which provided a natural shield against ultraviolet radiation). That treaty, known as the Montreal Protocol, had set standards controlling the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a chemical compound that was popular in aerosol sprays but that lingered in the upper atmosphere and destroyed ozone. The passage of the Montreal Protocol had been the greatest international environmental success to date (far outpacing the save-the-rain-forest campaign). It suggested that nations could work together to address some types of global challenges.
But the science of ozone depletion was simpler than that of climate change. If the Montreal Protocol model were to be followed, a necessary first step would be the establishment of a scientific consensus that governments could rely upon. Policymakers required some uniform baseline data before they could commence informed negotiations. In December 1988, the United Nations announced the creation of a new agency to address this deficiency. Known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it promised to bring together experts from around the world to sift through and interpret the flood of scientific literature. And every few years, the IPCC’s findings would be published in a report—the closest approximation of an international consensus.
The IPCC issued its First Assessment Report in September 1990. It was a doorstopper, but all the analysis and statistics could be boiled down to a few phlegmatic phrases: “Our judgment is that global-mean surface air temperature has increased by between 0.3o and 0.6oC over the last hundred years. . . . [T]he size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.” This was a rather tepid way to describe what many scientists considered a warming crisis. It even failed to attribute any definite responsibility to the actions of mankind. As Weart explained, “Under pressure from the industrial interests, as well as from the mandate to make only statements that virtually every knowledgeable scientist could endorse, the IPCC’s consensus statements were highly qualified and cautious. This was not mainstream science so much as conservative, lowest-common-denominator science.” Nevertheless, the report did represent an international consensus, one that could serve as a starting point for negotiations at the upcoming 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
It was inevitable that the United States would play a key role in any potential negotiations. In addition to being the world’s largest economic and military power, America was also unrivaled at producing greenhouse gases—about one-quarter of total global emissions were estimated to come from America; and since the U.S. population only composed 4 percent of the planet’s population, Americans were on average the earth’s worst polluters. Consequently, any plan to combat global warming seemed to require their participation.
The administration of President George H. W. Bush was divided over how to approach the Earth Summit. Some advisors considered climate change a threat to national security and pressed for strong leadership. Others scoffed at the entire hullaballoo, labeling it nothing more than environmentalist hand-wringing and junk science. Bush, for his part, supported additional climate change research, but tended to chafe at any measures that threatened short-term economic growth, something any serious international effort to halt global warming would likely require.
Bush’s refusal to promise support for a climate change treaty at Rio prompted a wave of criticism in the media and in Congress, where Senator Al Gore led the attack. The outrage prompted the Bush administration to publicly reverse course. But then, when the Earth Summit arrived in June 1992, the U.S. delegation opposed the calls of many nations—mostly from Western Europe and certain low-lying island states—for aggressive reforms. America did, however, agree to a nonbinding climate convention, akin to the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment. This represented a degree of progress.
Bush flew down to Rio toward the end of the summit and declared, “We’ve signed a climate convention. . . . Let me be clear on one fundamental point. The United States fully intends to be the world’s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. We have been that for many years. We will remain so.”
After Rio, conditions grew more favorable for the eventual U.S. approval of a binding treaty. The Democrats—who tended to both acknowledge the threat of climate change and to support the expansion of international law—won the 1992 presidential election. Al Gore, the new vice president, had authored a book, Earth in the Balance, in which he wrote: “I favor an international treaty limiting the amounts of CO2 individual nations are entitled to produce each year.” His influence on President Bill Clinton’s administration strengthened U.S. commitment to the negotiation process that had started around the Earth Summit and was leading toward a new conference at Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997. Furthermore, two years into Clinton’s first term, the IPCC published its second report. Its key language—quoted widely in the media—read: “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” The scientific consensus had begun to harden.
Nevertheless, negotiations surrounding the potential treaty were hard fought. As with the rain forest debate, nations on each side of the development curve argued over principles of justice. Poorer countries wanted the wealthier ones—the source of most of the world’s greenhouse gases—to bear the brunt of the burden. Conversely, some wealthy nations argued that the warming crisis demanded that all countries, especially fast-growing ones like India and China, needed to trim emissions. In either case, the impact would be especially high in the United States, the world’s great greenhouse gas emitter.
Continued U.S. resistance nearly shuttered the treaty, but at the last minute, Gore flew to Kyoto to help hammer out a resolution. The upshot was a binding agreement, but one as watered down as
a dose of homeopathic medicine. Known as the Kyoto Protocol, it split the world into two groups, Annex I and Annex II—in the roughest sense these annexes represented, respectively, the developed and developing world. Annex II countries faced few obligations; Annex I countries pledged to reduce CO2 emissions an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 baseline levels (which were based on data in the IPCC report). Several key provisions for how this would be measured, meanwhile, were tabled for a future conference.
The Kyoto Protocol was not only limited, it was not even enforceable at first. Many nations, including the United States, required supplemental legislative approval before their international commitments could be ratified. The protocol’s terms stated that it would only become law upon ratification by fifty-five countries that represented, collectively, more than 55 percent of total Annex I emissions as of 1990. The United States alone accounted for over 36 percent of this total. Its cooperation therefore was essential.
In late 2000, a follow-up conference was held in the Hague to sort out the issues that Kyoto had left unresolved. The thorniest question concerned the tree resources of large Annex I nations such as Canada, Russia, and the United States. As the New York Times reported, “After 11 days of draining and unwieldy bargaining by 170 countries . . . all the issues had been narrowed to just this one: How much credit should big forested countries get for all that photosynthesis?” In the end, to quote the Times piece, “the negotiators got lost in the trees.” They reached an impasse over a difference of only 20 million tons of forest-related carbon credits, a paltry percentage of the 6 billion tons of CO2 that the world was producing annually.
In the midst of this, America faced a new presidential election. The contest to replace Clinton was the closest in recent history and served in part as a referendum on climate change, such was the importance each aspirant gave to global warming. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Gore, vowed to continue his advocacy and make the issue a centerpiece of his presidential agenda. The Republican, George W. Bush, a Texas governor with close ties to the petroleum industry, sought to discredit the entire movement.
Bush’s controversial, Supreme Court–aided victory laid to rest any hopes that the United States would join Kyoto or otherwise address climate change in the near term. The new president staffed his administration with veterans of the energy sector—his vice president, Dick Cheney, was the former CEO and chairman of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil field service suppliers.
Early in Bush’s second term, the Kyoto Protocol reached the Annex I 55 percent threshold. This meant that it had been ratified by almost all of the nations in the developed world, except the United States. America, in holding out, joined an elite club of corrupt and broken states. (But it was a fast-collapsing fraternity that would be down to a single, stubborn member by 2010.) The elder Bush’s 1992 promise about America being a global leader had come true, only it was now a leadership of opposition against a monolithic environmental consensus.
The younger Bush administration’s hard-line stance engendered strong opposition from environmentalists and scientists at home. In 2004, for example, forty-eight American Nobel laureates signed a petition endorsing Democratic challenger John Kerry and rebuking Bush’s dismissive treatment of global warming. It read: “By ignoring scientific consensus on critical issues such as global climate change, [President Bush and his administration] are threatening the Earth’s future.” Perhaps the most influential single voice on this environmental counterfront was Bush’s vanquished presidential rival. Gore had initially retreated from public life following his election defeat, but he eventually began traveling the country giving lectures on the impending climate catastrophe that he felt was awaiting America. In 2006, his lectures were turned into a documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, which became a runaway success. It grossed more than $23 million and won the Oscar for best documentary. An accompanying book sat comfortably on the bestseller list for months.
Gore’s call of alarm was strengthened when the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. The science had grown increasingly sophisticated as high-speed computers allowed for more complex climate modeling, and the new data only reaffirmed the arguments floating around since the time of Callendar. The report concluded, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] greenhouse gas concentrations.” The international scientific community had now endorsed a position that treated man-made global warming as a near certainty. Nothing short of Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to demonstrate a greater degree of scientific consensus.
In late 2007, it was announced that the year’s Nobel Peace Prize was going to be awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC. Many saw the decision as a political gesture, a staunch rebuff of those, like President Bush, who refused to act in the face of mounting evidence. The speech that the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave at the award ceremony in Oslo, Norway, did little to dispute this. In praising Gore, the chairman said:
Political defeats can also bring good results! Again and again, Gore has hammered in his message, not least to Americans. The USA is, along with China, the great polluter. But that also entails a responsibility for becoming the leader in emission reduction. . . . We all have a responsibility, small countries and large, all mankind, but the heaviest responsibility rests on the rich nations, which to a large extent created global warming.
Nonetheless, President Bush, the self-appointed Decider, was not known as a man who changed his mind, even in the face of rising criticism or new information. His position remained fixed.
The election of Barack Obama seemed to offer a new direction. However, by the time the new president assumed office, the nation was in the grip of an all-consuming economic crisis. Political energy went toward health care reform and saving the country’s struggling financial system. To complicate matters further, Bush’s denial of global warming became Republican Party orthodoxy. The average American and many media outlets seemed convinced that a scientific controversy existed, regardless of the overwhelming consensus expressed through the IPCC.
As the United States waits, signs of climate change continue to appear. The record temperatures of 1988 were topped five times in the first decade of the new millennium. Extreme weather—which computer models predict as a consequence of climate change—appears to be increasing as well: Hurricane Katrina; record flooding along the Mississippi; killer blizzards in the Midwest and Northeast; severe droughts across Texas and parts of the Southeast; heavy rains in Southern California. Scientists acknowledge that no individual event conclusively proves climate change, but trends are becoming noticeable. And nowhere is this more evident than among America’s trees, the pillars of the landscape.
The great 1988 blaze at Yellowstone, for instance, appears to have been the start of a new era of rising wildfires. A 2011 study of the Yellowstone region found that the rates of burning have increased over the past twenty years at a pace unknown in the last ten millennia. And the situation in Yellowstone is being repeated all across the nation. The total forest acreage consumed annually by wildfire is reaching levels not seen in a hundred years, since the peak of unregulated industrial logging. At a 2011 Senate hearing on wildfires, the head of the Forest Service testified, “Our scientists believe this is due to a change in climate.”
Recent years have also seen a proliferation of tree diseases and pests. The list is a long one indeed. In New York City, for example, a quarantine is in effect to contain an infestation of Japanese long-horned beetles, which destroy maple trees. Cities across the Midwest are losing their ash trees to a pest known as the emerald ash borer. In California and parts of the West, millions of oak trees are falling victim to an illness that’s been named “Sudden Oak Death.” Some of these problems likely stem from the same international forces that produced chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease; however, many seem to be worsened by—if not entir
ely the result of—changing climate conditions, such as warmer winters and wetter summers.
Even more alarming, small shifts in climate seem to be leading to a higher overall rate of tree deaths. This was the conclusion of a 2009 article in Nature. It found that tree mortality rates in the western United States and Canada had doubled, and it suggested rising temperatures were a likely cause. As the climate continues to alter, trees will struggle to stay rooted. Some speculate that global warming will soon eliminate the famous Joshua trees from the national park in California that bears their name.
The federal and state agencies that oversee the nation’s forests and trees have been forced to formulate new management strategies. In 2010, the Forest Service published the National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change. The report noted, “Most of the urgent . . . management challenges of the past 20 years, such as wildfires, changing water regimes, and expanding forest insect infestations, have been driven, in part, by a changing climate. Future impacts are projected to be even more severe.” Climate change is threatening to undermine a century’s worth of progress in forestry. In July 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service for the first time identified climate change as the main factor causing the endangerment of a tree species, the whitebark pine. (The agency determined that official listing was “precluded by higher priority actions.”)
Trees, however, may not be mere victims. Many see them as potential saviors as well. A 2011 study published in Nature claimed that forests are even more effective at absorbing carbon dioxide than previously thought. Each year, the researchers found, trees lock away roughly 2.4 billion tons of solid carbon in their wood fiber. If the study’s numbers are accurate, then the world’s forests are absorbing an amount equivalent to one-third of total man-made CO2 production.