Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  “What about the greenhouse effect?” asked Gore. The issue was apolitical and could not have higher stakes. It seemed certain to get headlines.

  Grumbly demurred. “There are no villains,” he said. “Besides, who’s your victim?”

  “If we don’t do something,” said Gore, “we’re all going to be the victims.”

  He didn’t say: If we don’t do something, we’ll be the villains too.

  The Revelle hearing, convened on July 31, 1980, at 9:30 a.m. in a small subcommittee room on the second floor of the Rayburn House Office Building, went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s senior colleagues, who drifted in and out of the room—and consciousness—while the witnesses testified. There were few people left in the gallery by the time the Brookings economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said, “and especially of our willingness to consider problems that will not be manifest until after the next election. It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.” At the end of this particular sad day, Gore’s hearing failed to make the nightly news broadcasts, which chose instead to cover the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate, and the national surplus of butter.

  A few months later, Gore found another opening. Staff members on the science committee heard that the White House planned to eliminate the Energy Department’s carbon dioxide program. If they could put a hearing together quickly enough, they figured they could shame the administration before it could execute its plan. The front-page Times article about James Hansen’s paper had proved that there was a national audience for the carbon dioxide problem—it just had to be framed correctly. Hansen could occupy the role of hero: a sober consummate scientist who had seen the future and sought to rouse the world to action. A villain was emerging too: Fred Koomanoff, Reagan’s new director of the Energy Department’s carbon dioxide program, a wolf asked to oversee the henhouse. Both men would testify.

  Hansen did not disclose to Gore’s staff that, in late November, he received a letter from Koomanoff declining to fund his climate-modeling research. Koomanoff left open the possibility of supporting other carbon dioxide studies, but ultimately the rest of Hansen’s funding lapsed and he had to release five employees—half his staff. He doubted that Koomanoff could be moved. But the hearing would give Hansen the chance to appeal directly to the congressional leaders who oversaw Koomanoff’s budget.

  Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than it had been at Gore’s first greenhouse effect hearing. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaning the national economy’s reliance on fossil fuels, spoke of the need to use science as the basis for policy. Bob Shamansky, a Democrat from Ohio, objected to the use of the term greenhouse effect because he had always enjoyed visiting greenhouses. “Everything,” he said, “seems to flourish in there.” He suggested that they call it the “microwave oven” effect, “because we are not flourishing too well under this. Apparently we are getting cooked.”

  A Republican from Pennsylvania, Robert Walker, questioned the logic of holding additional hearings on the subject. Hadn’t they heard enough already? “Today I have a sense of déjà vu.” In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet Congress had failed to propose a single law. “How frequently must we confirm the evidence before taking remedial steps?” he asked. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear.”

  Gore disagreed: they needed a higher degree of certainty, he believed, to convince a majority of Congress to restrict the use of fossil fuels. The reforms required were of such magnitude and sweep that they “would challenge the political will of our civilization.” Nothing less than transformation of the American economy would do it.

  Yet the experts invited by Gore agreed with Walker: the science was plenty certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a University of California, Berkeley, chemist who in 1961 had won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”

  Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. Not all his work, he explained, involved complex computer models. He also went to libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches in the previous century. By comparing old shipping records with current satellite data, he had found that since the 1930s Antarctica had already lost a band of ice, 180 miles in width, rimming the continent. Most disturbing of all, century-old glass astronomy plates had revealed a new problem: some of the more obscure greenhouse gases—especially chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a class of synthetic substances used in refrigerators and spray cans—had proliferated wildly in recent years. “We may already have in the pipeline a larger amount of climate change than people generally realize,” Hansen told the nearly empty room.

  Gore asked when the planet would reach a point of no return—a “trigger point,” after which temperatures would spike. “I want to know,” he said, “whether I am going to face it or my kids are going to face it.”

  “Your kids are likely to face it,” said Calvin. “I don’t know whether you will or not. You look pretty young.”

  It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five and fifty years in the future was negligible in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. When it came to the carbon problem, however, the two time schemes were converging.

  “Within ten or twenty years,” said Hansen at last, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.”

  Representative Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge so soon. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability?”

  “Yes,” said Hansen.

  How soon, asked Scheuer, would they need to change the national model of energy production?

  Hansen hesitated—it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of offsetting emissions by planting more trees. False hopes were worse than no hope at all. They gutted any ambition to develop adequate solutions.

  “That time,” said Hansen finally, “is very soon.”

  “My opinion is that it is past,” said Calvin, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. Scheuer directed him to speak into the microphone. The Nobel laureate rose from his seat and walked to the witness table. He grabbed the microphone.

  “It is already later,” said Calvin, “than you think.”

  9.

  The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe

  1982

  Gore considered the hearing an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of CBS Evening News to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explain
ed that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Melvin Calvin announced that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore, in a brief appearance, mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.

  But Hansen’s funding was not restored. He wondered whether he had been doomed by his testimony or by his conclusion, in the Science paper, that full exploitation of coal resources—a stated goal of Reagan’s energy policy—was “undesirable.” Whatever the cause, he found himself alone. It was the scenario he had feared, the scenario he had fought for a year to avoid. He felt that he was the victim of some political shadow play whose lineaments he could only dimly perceive. He knew he had done nothing wrong—he had only done diligent research and reported his findings, first to his peers, then to the American people. But now it felt as if he were being punished for it.

  Anniek did not entirely share his frustration. With Jim’s professional duties reduced, the life of their family came to feel fuller. He began to leave the office at five o’clock to coach his son’s baseball team, his daughter’s basketball team. (He was a patient, committed coach, detail-oriented, if a touch too competitive for Anniek’s liking.) The Hansens moved to a large suburban home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and expanded it further; their dining room table seated sixteen. Several New York Yankees lived in the neighborhood and on weekends could be seen playing catch with their children in their backyards. At dinner Jim never spoke about work, only about his children’s teams and their fortunes—or the Yankees and their fortunes. He didn’t even complain about the commute from New Jersey. But Anniek sensed that he was keeping to himself his inner musings—whether he would be able to secure federal funding for his climate experiments, whether the Goddard Institute would be forced to move its office to Maryland to cut costs, whether his future would even be at NASA.

  Hansen wondered whether there might be another way forward. Not long after his modeling research funding ran out, a major symposium he was helping to organize at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty campus began to receive overtures from a funding partner far wealthier and less ideologically blinkered than the Reagan administration: Exxon. Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research programs, including an international effort coordinated by the United Nations and one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy since the mid-seventies. Now Shaw offered to fund Hansen’s symposium at Lamont-Doherty.

  As an indication of the seriousness with which Exxon took the issue, Shaw sent in his place his boss, Edward David, Jr., the president of the research division, Nixon’s former science adviser, and a member of Reagan’s science advisory panel during the transition period. Hansen was glad for the support. He figured that Exxon’s contributions might go well beyond picking up the tab for travel expenses, lodging, and the prime rib dinner for the symposium’s two dozen attendees at the colonial-style Clinton Inn in Tenafly, the only decent hotel within ten miles of campus. As a gesture of his appreciation, Hansen invited David to give the keynote address.

  There were moments in David’s speech (“Inventing the Future: Energy and the CO2 ‘Greenhouse’ Effect”) that seemed to channel Rafe Pomerance. He began by attacking capitalism’s blind faith in the free market, a doctrine that was “less than satisfying” when it came to environmental protection. Moral considerations, he argued, were necessary too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it was not “fashionable” to do so. Exxon tended to look no further than twenty years in the future when making business decisions, David explained, but that wouldn’t do when it came to the carbon dioxide problem; they needed to consider at least a fifty-year window. In the coming years a great transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy would be necessary, and indeed it had already begun. As Exxon had made deep investments in nuclear and solar technology, David was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would help save the world from the perils of climate change.

  Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. The frustration of losing his funding had begun to lift, replaced by a dawning sense of relief. It was better, he decided, to be on his own. Without funding, he wouldn’t have to follow orders. He wouldn’t have to court politicians or bureaucrats, and he wouldn’t have to fear reprisals. He was free to follow the research wherever it led. He was free to say anything. And if the world’s largest oil and gas company dedicated itself to establishing a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.

  It seemed that something was beginning to turn. With the carbon dioxide problem, as with its other thuggish assaults on environmental policy, the administration had alienated many of its own loyalists. But the early demonstrations of autocratic force had retreated into compromise and deferral. By the end of 1982, multiple congressional committees had begun investigating Anne Gorsuch for her indifference to enforcing the cleanup of Superfund sites, and the House voted to hold her in contempt; congressional Republicans turned on James Watt after he eliminated thousands of acres of land from consideration for wilderness designation. Both cabinet members would resign within the year.

  The carbon dioxide issue was beginning to trouble the public consciousness—Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story. This prospect would have alarmed Hansen just a couple of years earlier; it still made him uneasy. But he was beginning to understand that politics offered freedoms that the rigors of the scientific ethic denied. The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that, however crudely, mimicked our own. It shared many of the same fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.

  Part II

  Bad Science Fiction

  1983–1988

  James Hansen testifying before the Senate on June 23, 1988

  10.

  Caution Not Panic

  1983–1984

  By the end of 1984, Rafe Pomerance was unemployed, recently recovered from a bout of tachycardia, kicking around a drafty farmhouse in the woods of West Virginia, wondering what he would do with the rest of his life. He knew, from tired experience, that politics moved not in a straight line, but jaggedly, like the Keeling curve—a slow progression interrupted by sharp seasonal declines. But he had entered an especially long, dark winter. The climate issue, after several years of swift progress—during which a question considered esoteric even within the scientific community rose nearly to the level of action, the level at which Republican congressmen made statements like “It is up to us now to summon the political will”—had curdled and died. And all because of a single, lethal report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but had transformed the state of climate politics.

  After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries—among them Roger Revelle; the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe; veterans of the Charney group and the Manhattan Project; and three future Nobel laureates: the Yale economist William Nordhaus, the astrophysicist William Alfred Fowler, and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, the leading intellectual architect of cold war game theory—were asked to review the literature, evaluate
the consequences of global warming for the world order, and propose remedies. Then Reagan won the White House.

  For the next three years, as the commission continued its work—drawing upon the contributions of about seventy experts from the fields of atmospheric chemistry, marine biology, geology, astronomy, public health, economics, and political science—the forthcoming report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the Academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the Academy’s elders to explain what it was.

  The commission finally announced its findings on October 19, 1983, in the only setting commensurate with its self-regard: a formal gala, preceded by cocktails and dinner in the Academy’s cruciform Great Hall, a secular Sistine Chapel, with vaulted ceilings soaring to a dome painted as the sun. An inscription encircling the sun honored science as the “pilot of industry,” and the Academy had invited to the ceremony the nation’s foremost pilots of industry, among them a cadre of vice presidents from Peabody Coal, General Motors, and the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. Exxon’s Walter Eckelmann, one of the commission’s advisers, was there, as was Andrew Callegari, the head of Exxon’s carbon dioxide research program. They were eager to learn how the United States planned to act so that they could prepare for the inevitable policy debates. Rafe Pomerance was eager too. But he wasn’t invited.