Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  Hansen figured he was the only NASA scientist who, as a child, did not dream of outer space. He dreamed only of baseball. On clear nights, his transistor radio picked up the broadcast of the Kansas City Blues, the New York Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate. Every morning, he cut the box scores out of the Omaha World-Herald (for which he served as chief Denison delivery boy from third grade through high school), pasted them into a notebook, and tallied statistics. In a childhood of deprivation and meagerness—during his earliest years he shared two rooms with six siblings in homes that lacked running water and a refrigerator—Hansen found comfort in numbers. He majored in math and physics at the University of Iowa. But he never would have taken an interest in celestial matters were it not for the unlikely coincidence of two events during his graduation year: the eruption of a volcano in Bali and a total eclipse of the moon.

  On the penultimate night of 1963—whipping wind, 12 below—Hansen accompanied his astronomy professor to a cornfield miles outside of town. They set a telescope in an old corncrib that, Hansen shortly discovered, was being used as shelter by every beetle, fly, and wasp from the surrounding forty acres. Between two and eight o’clock in the morning, Hansen made continuous photoelectric recordings of the eclipse, pausing only when the extension cord froze and when he had to race to the car to avoid frostbite.

  During an eclipse, the moon resembles a tangerine or, if the eclipse is total, a drop of blood. But this night, to the consternation of Hansen’s professor, the moon vanished altogether. Hansen made the mystery the subject of his master’s thesis, concluding that the moon had been obscured by the dust erupted into the atmosphere by Mount Agung, on the other side of the planet from his corncrib, six months earlier. The discovery stirred in him a fascination with the influence of invisible particles on the visible world. You could not make sense of the visible world, he realized, until you understood the whimsies of the invisible one.

  A leading authority on the invisible world happened to be teaching at the University of Iowa: James Van Allen, who had grown up in a nearby farming town, had designed the first U.S. satellite, chaired the team of scientists that proposed sending people to the moon, and made the first major discovery of the space age, identifying the two doughnut-shaped regions of convulsing particles that circle Earth, later known as the Van Allen belts. At Van Allen’s prodding, Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: the planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it might have had habitable temperatures, it appeared to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect. As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean, believed to have covered the planet by an average depth of eighty feet, began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation—a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other extreme, Mars’s threadbare atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.

  Anniek expected Jim’s professional life to resume some semblance of normality once the data from Venus had been collected and analyzed. But shortly after Pioneer entered Venus’s atmosphere, Hansen came home from the office in a state of uncharacteristic fervor, with exciting news—and an apology. The prospect of two or three more years of intense work had sprung open before him. NASA was expanding its study of Earth’s atmospheric conditions. Hansen had already done some research on the global atmosphere while developing weather models for Jule Charney, who had visited the Goddard Institute. Now Hansen would have the opportunity to apply to Earth the lessons he had learned from Venus.

  We want to learn more about our climate, he told Anniek—and how human beings can influence it. They would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. With software programs they would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. Everything that happened on Earth was subject to the laws of physics, represented by mathematical formulas. Most of these formulas had been developed decades, if not centuries, earlier. But it was not until the refinement of supercomputers in the 1950s and 1960s that the formulas governing the behavior of the sea, land, and sky could be combined into a single computer model. The Mirror Worlds, technically “general circulation models,” could predict such complex phenomena as regional weather patterns, storm formation, vegetation growth, and the dynamics of ocean circulation. The Mirror Worlds differed significantly from the real world in just one regard: they could be sped forward to reveal the future.

  Anniek’s disappointment—another several years of distraction, stress, time spent apart from family—was tempered, if only slightly, by the high strain of Jim’s enthusiasm. It wasn’t often that her husband seemed giddy. Busy, sure; passionate, yes. But this was different. She thought she understood it.

  So this means, she asked, that you might figure out a way to predict weather more accurately?

  Yes, said Jim. Something like that.

  3.

  Between Clambake and Chaos

  July 1979

  The scientists summoned by Jule Charney to judge the fate of civilization arrived on July 23, 1979, with their wives, children, and weekend bags at a three-story mansion in Woods Hole, on the southwestern spur of Cape Cod. They would review the available science and decide whether the White House should take seriously Gordon MacDonald’s prediction of a climate apocalypse. The Jasons had predicted a warming of 2 or 3 degrees Celsius by the middle of the twenty-first century, but like Roger Revelle before them, they emphasized reasons for uncertainty. Jule Charney—warmhearted, dashing, gregarious—asked his scientists to quantify that uncertainty. They had to get it right: their conclusion would be delivered to the president. But first, Charney announced, they would hold a clambake.

  They gathered with their families on a bluff overlooking Quissett Harbor and took turns tossing mesh produce bags stuffed with lobster, clams, and corn into a bubbling cauldron. They exchanged pleasantries and admired the sunset, the water twinkling between the masts of moored Herreshoffs. It had been an unseasonably hot day, in the high 80s, but the harbor breeze was salty and cool. It didn’t look like the dawning of an apocalypse. It looked more like a family reunion. While the children scrambled across the rolling green lawn, the scientists mingled with a claque of visiting dignitaries, whose status lay somewhere between chaperone and client—men from the Departments of State, Energy, Defense, and Agriculture; the EPA; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships between the sun, atmosphere, land, and ocean—which was to say, the climate.

  The hierarchy was made visible during the workshop sessions, held in the carriage house next door: the scientists sat at tables arranged in a rectangle, while their federal observers sat along the room’s perimeter, observing the action as if at a theater in the round. The first two days of meetings didn’t make good theater, however, as the scientists reviewed the basic principles of the carbon cycle, ocean circulation, and radiative transfer. On the third day, Charney introduced a new prop: a black speaker attached to a telephone. He dialed, and Jim Hansen answered.

  Charney called Hansen because he had grasped that in order to determine the exact range of future warming, his group would have to venture into the realm of the Mirror Worlds. Charney himself had used a general circulation model to revolutionize weather prediction. But Hansen was one of just a few climate modelers who had studied the effects of carbon emissions. When, at Charney’s request, Hansen prog
rammed his model to evaluate a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it projected a temperature increase of 4 degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions—between a warming of 2 degrees Celsius and 4 degrees Celsius—was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests choked by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.

  In the carriage house, the quiet, disembodied voice of Jim Hansen explained how his model weighed the influences of clouds, oceans, and snow on warming. The elder scientists interrupted, shouting questions; when they did not transmit through the telephone, Charney repeated them in a bellow. The questions kept coming, often before their younger respondent could finish his answers, and Hansen wondered if it wouldn’t have been faster for him to drive the five hours and meet with them in person.

  In the end Charney left it to Akio Arakawa, a pioneer of computer modeling and the world’s leading authority on clouds, to determine which prediction was more accurate. On the final night at Woods Hole, Arakawa stayed up late in his motel room, printouts from Hansen and Manabe blanketing his double bed. The discrepancy, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected sunlight; if a warmer climate caused more ice to melt, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had underestimated the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay exactly in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome falling in the middle: a warming of 3 degrees.

  The publication several months later of Jule Charney’s report, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, was not accompanied by a banquet, a parade, or even a press conference. Yet within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community, and the oil and gas industry—within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet—the Charney report almost immediately assumed the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air, and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm by 3 degrees Celsius. The last time the world was 3 degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were eighty feet higher, and wild horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.

  Still the Charney report left Jim Hansen with more urgent questions. A warming of 3 degrees would be nightmarish, but unless carbon emissions ceased suddenly, 3 degrees would be only the beginning. The real question was whether the warming trend could be reversed. Was there time to act? The report warned that “a wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.” But how would a global commitment to cease burning fossil fuels come about, exactly? Who had the power to make such a thing happen? Hansen didn’t know how to begin to answer these questions. He didn’t know anything about politics, after all. But he’d learn.

  4.

  Enter Cassandra, Raving

  1979–1980

  As James Hansen was charting his Mirror Worlds and Rafe Pomerance was working his connections on Capitol Hill, a small group of philosophers, economists, and social scientists were busy conducting a vigorous debate, largely among themselves, about whether a human solution to this human problem was even possible.

  These scholars—call them the Fatalists—did not trouble themselves about the details of warming; they took the worst-case scenario as a given. Nor did they concern themselves with whether humanity could cease burning fossil fuels within some fixed period of time; they assumed that a solution was technically possible. They asked instead whether human beings, when presented with this particular existential crisis, were willing to prevent it.

  It was not so simple a question as it appeared. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when fossils were first burned to generate energy on an industrial scale, an unprecedented disjunction occurred in the course of civilization. Humanity lost control of its technology. The new, world-moving inventions—the spinning jenny, the coke-fueled furnace, the coal-fed steam engine—invited dangers that their creators had not anticipated and, increasingly, could not avoid. The black smoke erasing daylight from London and Yorkshire offered an early example of unintended consequences; the Dust Bowl revealed that the short-term benefits of mechanization could lead to the frivolous discounting of ancient wisdom; and the wide adoption of gasoline-powered automobiles showed the power of technological advancement to breed mass delusion, as in 1943, when residents of Los Angeles, swimming in smog, believed the city to be under chemical attack from the Japanese. The perils increased in proportion to the power of the technology until, by the nuclear age, it became possible for the species to commit suicide as easily as pressing a button. In a 1977 report prepared by the National Research Council, Roger Revelle and Charles Keeling argued that carbon emissions posed an equal threat. “It has become increasingly apparent in recent years,” they wrote, “that human capacity to perturb inadvertently the global environment has outstripped our ability to anticipate the nature and extent of the impact.”

  The critical word was inadvertently. Effect had been severed from cause. As our technology grew more sophisticated, our behavior grew more childish. Though many of our routine activities required the combustion of vast quantities of carbon, we were only passively aware, at the periphery of our consciousness, of the hum of air-conditioning, the click of a light switch, the rumble of an internal combustion motor. The debt accrued nonetheless. And the bill would come. Another report in 1977, commissioned by the Energy Research and Development Administration (the predecessor to the Energy Department), warned that humanity’s fossil fuel habit would lead inexorably to a host of “intolerable” and “irreversible” disasters, but it categorized the best available remedy—a transition to renewable energy—as far-fetched. “Any government action requires political consensus,” concluded the authors. “Such consensus may be difficult to achieve.”

  The anthropologist Margaret Mead, who knew something about the rigidity of cultural patterns, had understood the urgency of the problem even earlier, in 1975, when she convened a global warming symposium at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “We are facing a period when society must make decisions on a planetary scale,” she wrote. Her conclusions were stark, immediate, and unadorned with the caveats that dominated the academic literature. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” she said, “the whole planet may become endangered.”

  But the Fatalists wondered whether greater awareness of the problem really would provoke a sensible response. Was the threat of distant catastrophe sufficient to motivate change? If so, how much threat, and how much change? We worry about our children’s futures and our grandchildren’s futures. But how much, precisely? And how much do we worry about our great-grandchildren or their great-grandchildren? Enough to compromise our living standards? An abrupt transition to renewable forms of energy called for sacrifices. Was the prospect of, say, a global food shortage one century hence enough to motivate a person to commute to work by public bus? Was it enough to convince a family of four to forgo a dryer for a clothing rack? And what degree of certainty was required if so? Thirty percent? Ninety-eight percent? The question had to be asked not only of individuals but also of nations and corporations. How much value did we assign to the future?

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bsp; The answer, any economist would cede, was exceedingly little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, priced the future at a deep discount. The benefit of a short-term gain dwarfed the cost of a long-term risk. As Lester Lave, an economist at the Brookings Institution who began studying climate change in the seventies, put it at the time, “If the world were to disappear twenty-five or thirty years from now, it would make no difference to economists today.” This made the threat of climate change the perfect economic disaster. By the end of the seventies, the Yale economist William Nordhaus, a member of President Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, had become so alarmed by the problem that he developed a new economic model to deal with it.

  Since climate had been consistent for centuries, Nordhaus noted, human beings had taken it for granted and failed to assign it value. But a stable climate had a gargantuan monetary value. As Roger Revelle had observed, trillions of dollars’ worth of long-term investments—in infrastructure, agriculture, national security, and urban development—relied on the assumption that the basic conditions governing the natural world were permanent. Jesse Ausubel, then a young staffer at the National Academy of Sciences (and one of the first people in the world to serve as a full-time climate change analyst), posed the challenge this way: “What do you do when the past is no longer a guide to the future?” Even a slightly warmer climate would incur extraordinary costs. Some scientists had already begun to try to quantify these in dollar amounts. At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Stephen Schneider and Robert Chen, who had assisted the Charney group, had found that about five meters of sea level rise would imperil 6 percent of the nation’s real estate wealth. That correlation had a limit: once the water rose beyond a certain threshold, the national economy, like the properties themselves, crashed into the sea. But the rise of the oceans would be just the beginning of the economic pain. It would be followed by agricultural decline, increased conflict between northern and southern states, an amplification of economic inequality, the dissolution of national boundaries. Nordhaus argued that it was irrational—not just morally, which was materially irrelevant anyway, but economically—to delay action.