by Tim Folger
"In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than had been assumed," Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the head of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, recently observed. "We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize."
Obama's science adviser, John Holdren, a physicist on leave from Harvard, has said that he believes "any reasonably comprehensive and up-to-date look at the evidence makes clear that civilization has already generated dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system."
There is also broad agreement among scientists that coal represents the most serious threat to the climate. Coal now provides half the electricity in the United States. In China, that figure is closer to 80 percent, and a new coal-fired power plant comes online every week or two. As oil supplies dwindle, there will still be plenty of coal, which could be—and in some places already is being—converted into a very dirty liquid fuel. Before Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was appointed to his current post as energy secretary, he said in a speech, "There's enough carbon in the ground to really cook us. Coal is my worst nightmare." (These are lines that Hansen is fond of invoking.) A couple of months ago, seven prominent climate scientists from Australia wrote an open letter to the owners of that country's major utility companies urging that "no new coal-fired power stations, except ones that have ZERO emissions," be built. They also recommended an "urgent program" to phase out old plants.
"The unfortunate reality is that genuine action on climate change will require that existing coal-fired power stations cease to operate in the near future," the group wrote.
But if Hansen's anxieties about DAI and coal are broadly shared, he is still, among climate scientists, an outlier. "Almost everyone in the scientific community is prepared to say that if we don't do something now to reverse the direction we're going in we either already are or will very, very soon be in the danger zone," Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science and a provost at the University of California at San Diego, told me. "But Hansen talks in stronger terms. He's using adjectives. He has started to speak in moral terms, and that always makes scientists uncomfortable."
Hansen is also increasingly isolated among climate activists. "I view Jim Hansen as heroic as a scientist," Eileen Claussen, the president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said. "He was there at the beginning, he's faced all kinds of pressures politically, and he's done a terrific job, I think, of keeping focused. But I wish he would stick to what he really knows. Because I don't think he has a realistic view of what is politically possible, or what the best policies would be to deal with this problem."
In Washington, the only approach to limiting emissions that is seen as having any chance of being enacted is a so-called cap and trade system. Under such a system, the government would set an overall cap for CO2 emissions, then allocate allowances to major emitters, like power plants and oil refineries, which could be traded on a carbon market. In theory, at least, the system would discourage fossil fuel use by making emitters pay for what they are putting out. But to the extent that such a system has been tried, by the members of the European Union, its results so far are inconclusive, and Hansen argues that it is essentially a sham. (He re cently referred to it as "the Temple of Doom.") What is required, he insists, is a direct tax on carbon emissions. The tax should be significant at the start—equivalent to roughly a dollar per gallon for gasoline—and then grow steeper over time. The revenues from the tax, he believes, ought to be distributed back to Americans on a per capita basis, so that households that use less energy would actually make money, even as those that use more would find it increasingly expensive to do so.
"The only defense of this monstrous absurdity that I have heard," Hansen wrote a few weeks ago, referring to a cap and trade system, "is 'Well, you are right, it's no good, but the train has left the station.' If the train has left, it had better be derailed soon or the planet, and all of us, will be in deep doo-doo."
GISS's headquarters, at 112th Street and Broadway, sits above Tom's Restaurant, the diner made famous by Seinfeld and Suzanne Vega. Hansen has occupied the same office, on the seventh floor, since he became the director of the institute, almost three decades ago. One day last month, I went to visit him there. Hansen told me that he had been trying to computerize his old files; still, the most striking thing about the spacious office, which is largely taken up by three wooden tables, is that every available surface is covered with stacks of paper.
During the week, Hansen lives in an apartment just a few blocks from his office, but on weekends he and Anniek frequently go to an eighteenth-century house that they own in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and their son and daughter, who have children of their own, come to visit. Hansen dotes on his grandchildren—in many hours of conversation with me, just about the only time that he spoke with unalloyed enthusiasm was when he discussed planting trees with them this spring—and he claims they are the major reason for his activism. "I decided that I didn't want my grandchildren to say 'Opa understood what was happening, but he didn't make it clear,'" he explained.
The day that I visited Hansen's office, the House Energy and Commerce Committee was beginning its markup of a cap and trade bill cosponsored by the committee's chairman, Henry Waxman, of California. The bill—the American Clean Energy and Security Act—has the stated goal of cutting the country's carbon emissions by 17 percent by 2020. It is the most significant piece of climate legislation to make it this far in the House. Hansen pointed out that the bill explicitly allows for the construction of new coal plants and predicted that it would, if passed, prove close to meaningless. He said that he thought it would probably be best if the bill failed so that Congress could "come back and do it more sensibly."
I said that if the bill failed I thought it was more likely that Congress would let the issue drop, and that was one reason most of the country's major environmental groups were backing it.
"This is just stupidity on the part of environmental organizations in Washington," Hansen said. "The fact that some of these organizations have become part of the Washington 'go along, get along' establishment is very unfortunate."
Hansen argues that politicians willfully misunderstand climate science; it could be argued that Hansen just as willfully misunderstands politics. In order to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, annual global emissions would have to be cut by something on the order of three-quarters. In order to draw them down, agricultural and forestry practices would have to change dramatically as well. So far, at least, there is no evidence that any nation is willing to take anything approaching the necessary steps. On the contrary, almost all the trend lines point in the opposite direction. Just because the world desperately needs a solution that satisfies both the scientific and the political constraints doesn't mean one necessarily exists.
For his part, Hansen argues that while the laws of geophysics are immutable, those of society are ours to determine. When I said that it didn't seem feasible to expect the United States to give up its coal plants, he responded, "We can point to other countries being fifty percent more energy-efficient than we are. We're getting fifty percent of our electricity from coal. That alone should provide a pretty strong argument."
Then what about China and India?
Both countries are likely to suffer very severely from dramatic climate change, he said. "They're going to recognize that. In fact, they already are beginning to recognize that.
"It's not unrealistic," he went on. "But the policies have to push us in that direction. And, as long as we let the politicians and the people who are supporting them continue to set the rules, such that 'business as usual' continues, or small tweaks to 'business as usual,' then it is unrealistic. So we have to change the rules." He said that he was thinking of attending another demonstration soon, in West Virginia coal country.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT The Sixth Extinction?
FROM The Ne
w Yorker
THE TOWN OF El Valle de Antón, in central Panama, sits in the middle of a volcanic crater formed about a million years ago. The crater is almost four miles across, but when the weather is clear you can see the jagged hills that surround the town, like the walls of a ruined tower. El Valle has one main street, a police station, and an open-air market that offers, in addition to the usual hats and embroidery, what must be the world's largest selection of golden-frog figurines. There are golden frogs sitting on leaves and—more difficult to understand—golden frogs holding cell phones. There are golden frogs wearing frilly skirts, and golden frogs striking dance poses, and ashtrays featuring golden frogs smoking cigarettes through a holder, after the fashion of FDR. The golden frog, which is bright yellow with dark brown splotches, is endemic to the area around El Valle. It is considered a lucky symbol in Panama—its image is often printed on lottery tickets—though it could just as easily serve as an emblem of disaster.
In the early 1990s, an American graduate student named Karen Lips established a research site about two hundred miles west of El Valle, in the Talamanca Mountains, just over the border in Costa Rica. Lips was planning to study the local frogs, some of which, she later discovered, had never been identified. In order to get to the site, she had to drive two hours from the nearest town—the last part of the trip required tire chains—and then hike for an hour through the rainforest.
Lips spent two years living in the mountains. "It was a wonderland," she recalled recently. Once she had collected enough data, she left to work on her dissertation. She returned a few months later, and, though nothing seemed to have changed, she could hardly find any frogs. Lips couldn't figure out what was happening. She collected all the dead frogs that she came across—there were only a half dozen or so—and sent their bodies to a veterinary pathologist in the United States. The pathologist was also baffled: the specimens, she told Lips, showed no signs of any known disease.
A few years went by. Lips finished her dissertation and got a teaching job. Since the frogs at her old site had pretty much disappeared, she decided that she needed to find a new location to do research. She picked another isolated spot in the rainforest, this time in western Panama. Initially, the frogs there seemed healthy. But before long, Lips began to find corpses lying in the streams and moribund animals sitting on the banks. Sometimes she would pick up a frog and it would die in her hands. She sent some specimens to a second pathologist in the United States, and, once again, the pathologist had no idea what was wrong.
Whatever was killing Lips's frogs continued to move, like a wave, east across Panama. By 2002 most frogs in the streams around Santa Fé, a town in the province of Veraguas, had been wiped out. By 2004 the frogs in the national park of El Copé, in the province of Coclé, had all but disappeared. At that point, golden frogs were still relatively common around El Valle; a creek not far from the town was nicknamed Thousand Frog Stream. Then, in 2006, the wave hit.
Of the many species that have existed on Earth—estimates run as high as 50 billion—more than 99 percent have disappeared. In light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
Records of the missing can be found everywhere in the world, often in forms that are difficult to overlook. And yet extinction has been a much contested concept. Throughout the eighteenth century, even as extraordinary fossils were being unearthed and put on exhibit, the prevailing view was that species were fixed, created by God for all eternity. If the bones of a strange creature were found, it must mean that that creature was out there somewhere.
"Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." When, as president, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region.
The French naturalist Georges Cuvier was more skeptical. In 1812 he published an essay on the "Revolutions on the Surface of the Globe," in which he asked, "How can we believe that the immense mastodons, the gigantic megatheriums, whose bones have been found in the earth in the two Americas, still live on this continent?" Cuvier had conducted studies of the fossils found in gypsum mines in Paris and was convinced that many organisms once common to the area no longer existed. These he referred to as espèces perdues, or lost species. Cuvier had no way of knowing how much time had elapsed in forming the fossil record. But, as the record indicated that Paris had, at various points, been under water, he concluded that the espèces perdues had been swept away by sudden cataclysms.
"Life on this earth has often been disturbed by dreadful events," he wrote. "Innumerable living creatures have been victims of these catastrophes." Cuvier's essay was translated into English in 1813 and published with an introduction by the Scottish naturalist Robert Jameson, who interpreted it as proof of Noah's flood. It went through five editions in English and six in French before Cuvier's death in 1832.
Charles Darwin was well acquainted with Cuvier's ideas and the theological spin they had been given. (He had studied natural history with Jameson at the University of Edinburgh.) In his theory of natural selection, Darwin embraced extinction; it was, he realized, essential that some species should die out as new ones were created. But he believed that this happened only slowly. Indeed, he claimed that it took place more gradually even than speciation: "The complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their production." In On the Origin of Species, published in the fall of 1859, Darwin heaped scorn on the catastrophist approach: "So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world."
By the start of the twentieth century, this view had become dominant, and to be a scientist meant seeing extinction as Darwin did. But Darwin, it turns out, was wrong.
Over the past half-billion years, there have been at least twenty mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth has suddenly and dramatically contracted. Five of these—the so-called Big Five—were so devastating that they are usually put in their own category. The first took place during the late Ordovician period, nearly 450 million years ago, when life was still confined mainly to water. Geological records indicate that more than 80 percent of marine species died out. The fifth occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. The end-Cretaceous event exterminated not just the dinosaurs but 75 percent of all species on Earth.
The significance of mass extinctions goes beyond the sheer number of organisms involved. In contrast to ordinary, or so-called background, extinctions, which claim species that, for one reason or another, have become unfit, mass extinctions strike down the fit and the unfit at once. For example, brachiopods, which look like clams but have an entirely different anatomy, dominated the ocean floor for hundreds of millions of years. In the third of the Big Five extinctions—the end-Permian—the hugely successful brachiopods were nearly wiped out, along with trilobites, blastoids, and eurypterids. (In the end-Permian event, more than 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species vanished; the event is sometimes referred to as "the mother of mass extinctions" or "the great dying.")
Once a mass extinction occurs, it takes millions of years for life to recover, and when it does it generally has a new cast of characters; following the end-Cretaceous event, mammals rose up (or crept out) to replace the departed dinosaurs. In this way, mass extinctions, though missing from the original theory of evolution, have played a determining role in evolution's course; as Richard Leakey has put it, such events "restructure the biosphere" and so "create the pattern of life." It is now generally agreed among biologists that another mass extinction is underway. Though it's difficult to put a precise figure on the losses, it is estimated that if current trends continue, b
y the end of this century as many as half of Earth's species will be gone.
***
The El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center, known by the acronym EVACC (pronounced "e-vac"), is a short walk from the market where the golden-frog figurines are sold. It consists of a single building about the size of an average suburban house. The place is filled, floor to ceiling, with tanks. There are tall tanks for species that, like the Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog, live in the forest canopy, and short tanks for species that, like the big-headed robber frog, live on the forest floor. Tanks of horned marsupial frogs, which carry their eggs in a pouch, sit next to tanks of casque-headed frogs, which carry their eggs on their backs.
The director of EVACC is a herpetologist named Edgardo Griffith. Griffith is tall and broad-shouldered, with a round face and a wide smile. He wears a silver ring in each ear and has a large tattoo of a toad's skeleton on his left shin. Griffith grew up in Panama City and fell in love with amphibians one day in college when a friend invited him to go frog hunting. He collected most of the frogs at EVACC—there are nearly six hundred—in a rush, just as corpses were beginning to show up around El Valle. At that point, the center was little more than a hole in the ground, and so the frogs had to spend several months in temporary tanks at a local hotel. "We got a very good rate," Griffith assured me. While the amphibians were living in rented rooms, Griffith and his wife, a former Peace Corps volunteer, would go out into a nearby field to catch crickets for the frogs' dinner. Now EVACC raises bugs for the frogs in what looks like an oversized rabbit hutch.
EVACC is financed largely by the Houston Zoo, which initially pledged $20,000 to the project and has ended up spending ten times that amount. The tiny center, though, is not an outpost of the zoo. It might be thought of as a preserve, except that instead of protecting the amphibians in their natural habitat, the center's aim is to isolate them from it. In this way, EVACC represents an ark built for a modern-day deluge. Its goal is to maintain twenty-five males and twenty-five females of each species—just enough for a breeding population.