“rise about four feet every ten years”: Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,123.
“Rough estimates indicate”: Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, 127.
sending aircraft to seed the clouds: H. E. Willoughby et al., “Project STORMFURY: A Scientific Chronicle 1962–1983,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 66 (1985), 505–514.
An astonishing twenty-six hundred seeding sorties: Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 180.
Other climate-modification plans pursued: National Research Council, Weather & Climate Modification: Problems and Progress (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 1973), 9.
“What mankind needs is a war against cold”: Cited in Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 202.
Gorodsky believed this arrangement: Nikolai Rusin and Liya Flit, Man Versus Climate, Dorian Rottenberg, trans. (Moscow: Peace Publishers, 1962), 61–63.
“New projects for transforming nature”: Rusin and Flit, Man Versus Climate, 174.
Public concern about the environment: David W. Keith, “Geoengineering the Climate: History and Prospect,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 25 (2000), 245–284.
“rockets and different types of missiles”: Mikhail Budyko, Climatic Changes, American Geophysical Union, trans. (Baltimore: Waverly, 1977), 241.
“climate modification will become necessary”: Budyko, Climatic Changes, 236.
“foremost proponent of geoengineering”: Joe Nocera, “Chemo for the Planet,” The New York Times (May 19, 2015), A25.
“I’m a proponent of reality”: David Keith, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times (May 27, 2015), A22.
he describes himself as a “tinkerer”: David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2013), xiii.
development costs would run to about $2.5 billion: Wake Smith and Gernot Wagner, “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Tactics and Costs in the First 15 Years of Deployment,” Environmental Research Letters, 13 (2018), doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d.
three hundred times that amount every year: It’s been estimated that global fossil-fuel subsidies totaled $5.2 trillion in 2017; see: David Coady et al., “Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates,” IMF (May 2, 2019), imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509.
“Dozens of countries would have both”: Smith and Wagner, “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Tactics and Costs.”
the number of flights would ramp up accordingly: Smith and Wagner, “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Tactics and Costs.”
determined it would change the appearance of the sky: Ben Kravitz, Douglas G. MacMartin, and Ken Caldeira, “Geoengineering: Whiter Skies?” Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (2012), doi.org/10.1029/2012GL051652.
the latest version has more than two dozen entries: Alan Robock, “Benefits and Risks of Stratospheric Solar Radiation Management for Climate Intervention (Geoengineering),” The Bridge (Spring 2020), 59–67.
“Ironically, such engineering efforts”: Dan Schrag, “Geobiology of the Anthropocene,” in Fundamentals of Geobiology, Andrew H. Knoll, Donald E. Canfield, and Kurt O. Konhauser, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 434.
3
“Iceworm thus couples mobility”: Cited in Erik D. Weiss, “Cold War Under the Ice: The Army’s Bid for a Long-Range Nuclear Role, 1959–1963,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 3 (2001), 31–58.
“Camp Century is a symbol of man’s unceasing struggle”: The Story of Camp Century: The City Under Ice (U.S. Army film 1963, digitized version 2012).
two Boy Scouts—one American, one Danish: Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper, and Matthias Heymann, “Exploring Greenland’s Secrets: Science, Technology, Diplomacy, and Cold War Planning in Global Contexts,” in Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice, Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper, and Matthias Heymann, eds. (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 16.
Almost at once, the tunnels started to contract: Kristian H. Nielsen, Henry Nielsen, and Janet Martin-Nielsen, “City Under the Ice: The Closed World of Camp Century in Cold War Culture,” Science as Culture, 23 (2014), 443–464.
the annual general meeting of all the devils of hell: Willi Dansgaard, Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Cap Research (Odder, Denmark: Narayana Press, 2004), 49.
more than a thousand in all: Jon Gertner, The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future (New York: Random House, 2019), 202.
didn’t seem to realize what a “gold mine” of data: Dansgaard, Frozen Annals, 55.
Dansgaard’s reading of the Camp Century core: W. Dansgaard et al., “One Thousand Centuries of Climatic Record from Camp Century on the Greenland Ice Sheet,” Science, 166 (1969), 377–380.
“a three-year-old who has just discovered a light switch”: Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University, 2000), 120.
it was a doozy: Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine, 114.
temperatures on the ice sheet: These figures come from Konrad Steffen, who tragically died in an accident on the ice sheet just as this book was going to press. They are cited in: Gertner, “In Greenland’s Melting Ice, A Warning on Hard Climate Choices,” e360 (June 27, 2019), e360.yale.edu/features/in-greenlands-melting-ice-a-warning-on-hard-climate-choices.
ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold: A. Shepherd et al., “Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018,” Nature, 579 (2020), 233–239.
during an exceptionally warm couple of days: Marco Tedesco and Xavier Fettweis, “Unprecedented Atmospheric Conditions (1948–2019) Drive the 2019 Exceptional Melting Season over the Greenland Ice Sheet,” The Cryosphere, 14 (2020), 1209–1223.
Greenland shed almost six hundred billion tons of ice: Ingo Sasgen et al., “Return to Rapid Ice Loss in Greenland and Record Loss in 2019 Detected by GRACE-FO Satellites,” Communications Earth & Environment, 1 (2020), doi.org/10.1038/s43247-020-0010-1.
“The current Arctic is experiencing rates”: Eystein Jansen et al., “Past Perspectives on the Present Era of Abrupt Arctic Climate Change,” Nature Climate Change, 10 (2020), 714–721.
An early cost estimate for the project: Peter Dockrill, “U.S. Army Weighs Up Proposal For Gigantic Sea Wall to Defend N.Y. from Future Floods,” ScienceAlert (Jan. 20, 2020), sciencealert.com/storm-brewing-over-giant-6-mile-sea-wall-to-defend-new-york-from-future-floods.
“We understand the hesitancy”: John C. Moore et al., “Geoengineer Polar Glaciers to Slow Sea-Level Rise,” Nature, 555 (2018), 303–305.
“We live in a world”: Andy Parker is quoted in Brian Kahn, “No, We Shouldn’t Just Block Out the Sun,” Gizmodo (Apr. 24, 2020), earther.gizmodo.com/no-we-shouldnt-just-block-out-the-sun-1843043812. I have undeleted the expletive.
Credits
1MGMT. design
2MGMT. design
3MGMT. design
4© Ryan Hagerty, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
5MGMT. design
6© Drew Angerer/Getty Images
7The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1974.25.11.2
8© Danita Delimont/Alamy Stock Photo
9National Park Service Photo by Brett Seymour/Submerged Resources Center
10MGMT. design, adapted from Alan C. Riggs and James E. Deacon, “Connectivity in Desert Aquatic Ecosystems: The Devils Hole Story.”
11, 12Photos by Phil Pister, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Desert Fishes Council, Bishop, CA.
13Originally published in Charles Darwin, Animals and Plants Under Domestication, vol. 1.
14MGMT. design
15Photo: © W
ilfredo Licuanan, courtesy of Corals of the World, coralsoftheworld.org.
16© James Craggs, Horniman Museum and Gardens
17MGMT. design
18Photo: Arthur Mostead Photography, AMPhotography.com.au
19MGMT. design
20MGMT. design
21Courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
22MGMT. design, adapted from Zeke Hausfather, based on data from Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report.
23MGMT. design, adapted from Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report, figure 2.5.
24MGMT. design
25© Iwan Setiyawan/AP Photo/KOMPAS Images
26MGMT. design
27Courtesy of soviet-art.ru.
28MGMT. design, adapted from David Keith
29Photo by Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
30Photo by US Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
31MGMT. design
32MGMT. design, adapted from Kurt M. Cuffey and Gary D. Clow, “Temperature, Accumulation, and Ice Sheet Elevation in Central Greenland Through the Last Deglacial Transition,” Journal of Geophysical Research 102 (1997).
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
The Prophet of Love
About the Author
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. She’s a two-time National Magazine Award winner. Her work has also been honored with a National Academies Communication Award, the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Heinz Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Kolbert is a visiting fellow at Williams College’s Center for Environmental Studies. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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