Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

He did manage, however, to secure a spot at the crowded press briefing earlier that day, where he’d snatched up a copy of the 496-page report, Changing Climate, and scanned its contents. There had been other blue-ribbon studies in the past four years—by the National Resource Council, the National Climate Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Energy Department’s multifarious carbon dioxide program—all of which had reached the same basic conclusions as the Charney report. And just that week, the EPA had published its own major assessment, Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming? (The EPA’s answer, which ran a grim two hundred pages, could be reduced to a word: nope.) But no institutional body had dedicated nearly as much money, time, or expertise to the task as the Academy. The scope of Changing Climate was impressive, with its various commissions on agriculture and social policy, its subchapters with titles both specific and grand: “The Colorado River” and “Weeds,” “The Deep Circulation” and “The Time Dimension.” Nevertheless, as Pomerance flipped through its pages, he could see that it offered no significant new findings. “We are deeply concerned about environmental changes of this magnitude,” read the executive summary. “We may get into trouble in ways that we have barely imagined.”

  The authors did try to imagine some of them: an ice-free Arctic, for instance, and Boston sinking into its harbor, with Beacon Hill surfacing as an island two miles off the coast. There was speculation about political revolution, trade wars, and a long quotation from A Distant Mirror, the medieval history written by Barbara Tuchman, Pomerance’s aunt, describing how climatic changes in the fourteenth century led to “people eating their own children” and “feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet.” The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg—a Jason, a presidential adviser, and Roger Revelle’s successor as the director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, the nation’s preeminent oceanographic center—argued in his preface that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.

  That’s what Nierenberg wrote in Changing Climate. But it’s not what Nierenberg and other august members of the central committee emphasized in the press interviews that followed. They argued the opposite: there was no urgent need for action. Nierenberg warned that the public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though Changing Climate urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” It was a serious problem, granted, but “if it goes the way we think, it will be manageable in the next hundred or so years.” Better to wait and see. Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major, immediate interventions in national energy policy might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.

  This line was echoed by Roger Revelle himself. “We’re flashing a yellow light but not a red light,” he told reporters. “It’s not an unmitigated disaster by any means. It’s just a change.” A third prominent member of the central committee, Joseph Smagorinsky, a pioneering climate modeler who helped found the lab at Princeton where Syukuro Manabe ran his global warming models, openly denigrated the “unnecessarily alarmist” EPA report. He reserved particular contempt for its use of projections, extending more than a century into the future, that assumed humanity would continue to consume increasing quantities of fossil fuels. “If you do that,” said Smagorinsky, “you get fantastic numbers.” Nierenberg called the EPA report “a badly done thing.” But in the end the authors of the two reports endorsed the same response, with the EPA arguing that it was already too late to avoid the worst, and the Academy that it was too early. Both suggested that adaptation was the only possible outcome. As Thomas Schelling put it in the pages of Changing Climate, echoing Klaus Meyer-Abich, no regulatory policy could possibly succeed, “so climate change is what we should expect.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  While Pomerance tried to absorb the commission’s appeasements, he glanced, baffled, around the briefing room. The reporters and staff members listened politely to the presentation and took dutiful notes, as at any technical briefing. The officials in the room who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: he was an optimist by training and experience, superior and pedantic, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, a member of the Curia Regis of scientists who had helped guide every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt through economic despair, the nuclear age, and the cold war. These scientists, many of whom had contributed to Changing Climate, had helped to restore the plains after the Dust Bowl, invented the bomb and won World War II, developed the booming aerospace and computer industries. They had solved every existential crisis the nation had faced over the previous generations. Surely they would not be daunted by an excess of a gas that human beings exhaled with each breath. Nierenberg had served on Reagan’s science and technology task force during the transition period—he was passed over for the job of science adviser—and his political sensibility reflected all the ardor of his party: sanguine about the saving graces of market forces, skeptical of government intervention.

  Pomerance, having come of age during the Vietnam War and the birth of the environmental movement, shared none of this procrustean faith in American ingenuity. He feared the dark undertow of rapid industrial advancement, the way that each new technological superpower carried within it unintended consequences that, if unchecked, eroded the foundations of society. Technology had not solved the air and water crises of the 1970s. Activism and organization, forcing robust government regulation, had. Hearing Nierenberg’s equivocations, he shook his head, rolled his eyes, groaned. He felt that he was the only sane person in a briefing room gone mad. How could a committee that included Roger Revelle, George Woodwell, and William Nordhaus counsel doing nothing? Revelle had been warning presidents since the Eisenhower administration; Woodwell had drafted the 1970 letter to the Carter White House, signed by Revelle, Gordon MacDonald, and Charles David Keeling, declaring that the window for reducing dependence on fossil fuels “is fast passing”; and Nordhaus, in the very pages of Changing Climate, made the case for a carbon tax—an argument far more audacious than the EPA’s ambivalent position. To conclude, from all this, that no action should be taken was not only insane; it was wrong. Someone in the next row told Pomerance to calm down.

  Nierenberg’s press release for Changing Climate, being one-hundredth the length of the actual assessment, received one hundred times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade publications across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.” The effusiveness of the Academy scientists’ reassurances invited derision. On CBS Evening News, Dan Rather said they had given “a cold shoulder” to the EPA assessment published earlier that week. The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.”

  The greatest blow, however, came from The New York Times, which published its most prominent piece on global warming to date under the headline “Haste on Global Warming Trend Is Opposed.” Although the paper included an excerpt from Changing Climate that detailed some of its gloomier predictions, the article itself gave the greatest weight to a statement, heavily workshopped by White House senior staff, credited to George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the EPA’s “unwarranted” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action.” In case the administration’s position was not entirely clear, Keyworth
added for emphasis, “There are no actions recommended other than continued research.”

  In the following weeks, press coverage withered and the industry tuned out. The American Petroleum Institute disbanded its CO2 task force; Exxon ended its carbon dioxide program. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited Changing Climate as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO2 greenhouse effect.” If the Academy had concluded that emissions regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon make a fuss? Edward David, Jr., two years after boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered: “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels—petroleum products, natural gas, and steam coal.” He spoke of “going back to the fundamentals.”

  In a frantic effort to resuscitate the issue, Pomerance helped draw together another hearing before Al Gore’s subcommittee, on February 28, 1984, to review the findings of the two federal reports. Pomerance asked to testify himself. It didn’t come naturally—he preferred to let those with greater expertise or celebrity speak for him. He had a talent for convincing people that his idea was theirs, that they’d thought of it themselves, had always wanted to act on it, and just hadn’t had the chance until now. But there was no time for that approach anymore. He was desperate. Gore shared his desperation. He spoke with an urgency that at times flagged into resignation, likening the greenhouse effect to “a bad science fiction novel,” its ramifications so inconceivable—Manhattan as balmy as Palm Beach, Kansas posing as central Mexico—as to make measured debate seem frivolous.

  Gore had summoned as witnesses the figures he deemed most capable of producing clips for the nightly news. Carl Sagan called it “the height of irresponsibility” to alter the global environment without grappling with the consequences. Wallace Broecker presented an ominous new prophecy: deeply buried ice, recently excavated from Antarctica and Greenland, revealed that radical climate changes did not occur gradually, as previously assumed, but in sudden wild “jumps” that reorganized the circulation of the oceans and could lead to cataclysms worse than anything yet imagined. John Hoffman, now the director of the EPA’s carbon dioxide research office, calculated that a sea level rise of a single foot might trim as much as two hundred feet off the Atlantic Coast. Appearing in defense of Changing Climate was Thomas Malone, a genial, highly regarded member of the Academy who had written the report’s foreword.

  Malone had been one of the first American scientists to speak out about the carbon dioxide issue; in 1966 he oversaw an Academy report, chaired by Gordon MacDonald, on humankind’s ability to change the global climate, and later that year he testified before Congress that the danger of global warming “is something we must resolve in a matter of decades.” Yet now, nearly two decades later, he repeated Nierenberg’s reassurances, urging Congress not to take “premature” action. Pomerance, seated beside Malone, could not disguise his reaction.

  “I know you’re itching to say something, Mr. Pomerance,” said Gore.

  “It is time to act,” said Pomerance. “We know what to do. The evidence is in. The problem is as serious as exists. People talk about not leaving this to their grandchildren. I’m concerned about leaving this to my children.” The whole premise of the conversation was confused, he said. It was ridiculous to wait for scientists to demand action. They already agreed on the basic facts, after all. Why not place the burden on the energy industries? Ask them to prove that burning fossil fuels was benign. The Academy’s caution was inane, while the EPA, in its pessimism, failed to emphasize that it was still possible to avoid the worst-case scenarios. But action had to come immediately. Even if coal were banned tomorrow, it would take years, if not decades, to phase out. Civilization was a locomotive hurtling over a rickety bridge toward an abyss. The track light was blinking red, the boom barrier was descending, but the train had too much momentum—

  “You are the ones who are going to have to make that decision,” he told Gore. “Don’t rely on the scientists. It’s not their job.”

  What could Congress do? Pomerance had come with an action plan, which he entered into the record: prepare for the climatic changes that were inevitable; fund more research; make conservation the highest consideration in all energy policy; and abolish the federal synthetic-fuels initiative. These measures would have the added benefits of reducing acid rain, increasing energy security, promoting public health, and saving money. “This issue is so big,” said Pomerance, “yet the attitude that is being taken is so relaxed. I mean, it strikes one as a bit incredible.”

  He took a breath before concluding. “The major missing element in all this is leadership,” he said. “It needs to come from the political community.”

  Those remaining in the hearing room turned to the congressman from Tennessee, who, in the previous hearing, had spoken of the challenge posed by the warming problem to the political will of civilization. In order to justify major policy, he said, the nation needed a high degree of certainty about the science; yet the potential consequences were too horrific to delay much longer. “It is a hard one,” he said. “It is really hard.” The hearing adjourned a few minutes later.

  Not long after the hearing, Pomerance resigned from Friends of the Earth. He credited various factors: he had struggled with the politics of managing a staff and a board; he’d had disagreements with David Brower, the organization’s leader in influence if no longer in title; and the environmental movement from which Friends of the Earth had emerged in the early seventies was in crisis. It lacked a unifying cause. Climate change, Pomerance believed, could be that cause. But its insubstantiality made it difficult to rally the older activists, whose strategic model relied on protests at sites of horrific degradation—Love Canal, Hetch Hetchy, Three Mile Island. How did you stage a protest when the toxic waste dump was the entire planet or, worse, its invisible atmosphere?

  Observing her husband, Lenore Pomerance was reminded of an old Philadelphia Bulletin ad campaign: “In Philadelphia—nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.” In one of the spots, all the passengers on a crowded commuter train bury their faces in their newspapers, except for one man, who stares out the window into the distance. Here Rafe, the loner, was staring down the world’s largest problem, while everyone else had their heads in their laps, lost in the news of the day. Pomerance didn’t like talking about his work and acted cheerful at home, fooling his kids. But he couldn’t fool Lenore. And he couldn’t fool his nervous system. Near the end of his tenure at Friends of the Earth, a doctor diagnosed him with an abnormally high heart rate.

  Pomerance planned to take a couple of months to reflect on what he should do next. Two months stretched to a year. He brooded; he checked out. He spent weeks at a time at an old farmhouse that he and Lenore owned in West Virginia, near Seneca Rocks. When they had bought it in the early seventies, it had a wood-burning stove and lacked running water. To make a phone call on a private line, you had to drive to the operator’s house and hope she was in. Pomerance sat in the cold house and he thought.

  The winter returned him to his childhood. He grew up in Cos Cob, Connecticut, on part of an estate purchased by his grandfather, a banker and conservationist named Maurice Wertheim, in 1912. A short walk from Pomerance’s home brought him to a pond on which his mother taught him to ice-skate. He remembered the muffled hush of twilight, the snow dusting the ice, the ghostly clearing surrounded by a wood darker than the night. His house had been designed by his father, an architect whose glass-enveloped structures mocked the vanity of humankind’s efforts to improve on nature; the broad expansive windows invited the elements inside, the trees and the ice and, in the rattling of the broad panes, the wind. Winter, Pomerance believed, was part of his soul. When he imagined the future, he worried about the loss of ice, the loss of spiky Connecticut January mornings. He worried about the loss of some irreplaceable part of himself.

  He want
ed to recommit himself to the fight but he couldn’t figure out how. During the past five years he had tried every tactic that had sustained the environmental wars of the seventies. Nothing had worked. The carbon dioxide issue had fallen off the national agenda. If scientists, the intelligence community, Congress, and the national press could not force action, who could? He didn’t see what was left for him to do. He didn’t see what was left for anyone to do. He didn’t see that the answer was at that moment floating over his head, about ten miles above his West Virginia farmhouse, just beyond the highest clouds in the sky.

  11.

  The World of Action

  1985

  It was as if, without warning, the sky opened and the sun burst through in all its irradiating, blinding fury. The mental image was of a pin stuck through a balloon, a chink in an eggshell, a crack in the ceiling—Armageddon descending from above. It was a sudden global emergency: there was a hole in the ozone layer.

  The claxon was cranked by a team of British government scientists, until then little known in the field, who made regular visits to research stations in Antarctica—one on the Argentine Islands, the other on a sheet of ice drifting out into the sea at the rate of a quarter mile per year. At each site, the scientists had set up a machine invented in the 1920s called the Dobson spectrophotometer, which resembled a large slide projector turned with its eye staring straight up. After several years of results so alarming that they had disbelieved their own evidence, the British scientists finally reported their discovery in the May 1985 issue of Nature. “The spring values of total O3 in Antarctica have now fallen considerably,” the abstract read. But by the time the news filtered into national headlines and television broadcasts several months later, it had transfigured into something horrific: a substantial increase in skin cancer, a sharp decline in the global agricultural yield, and the mass death of fish larvae, one of the first links in the marine food chain. Later came fears of atrophied immune systems and blindness; one activist likened the ozone hole to “AIDS from the sky.”