Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate affair over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell, and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised (John Chafee, George Mitchell, George Brown). Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that, until now, had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil and gas executives.

  It was not entirely surprising to see envoys from Exxon, the Gas Research Institute, and the electrical-grid trade groups, even if they had gone silent since Changing Climate. But they were joined by executives from the American Petroleum Institute, which that spring, at the industry’s annual world conference in Houston, had invited a leading government scientist to make the case for a transition to renewable energy; the speech was titled “The Reality of the Greenhouse Effect.” Even Richard Barnett, the chairman of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, the face of the campaign to defeat an ozone treaty, was there. Barnett’s retreat had been humiliating and swift. After DuPont, by far the world’s single largest manufacturer of CFCs, realized that it stood to profit from the transition to replacement chemicals and began placing full-page ads in The New York Times to announce its support for a phaseout, the alliance abruptly reversed its position, demanding that Reagan sign a treaty as soon as possible. Now Barnett, at the Quality Inn, was claiming to “bask in the glory of the Montreal Protocol” and quoting Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to emphasize his earnest hope for a coalition between industry and environmental activists. There were more than 250 people in the old ballroom, and if the concentric rings had extended any further, they would have needed a larger hotel.

  That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions; John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; and introductions were made and business cards exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next evening, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s town house on Capitol Hill, the oil and gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators, and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of Soviet climatology, settled into an engrossing conversation about global warming with Topping’s ten-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a virtuous realignment—a solution.

  It was because of all this good cheer that Hansen was inclined to shrug off a peculiar series of events that occurred just a week later. He was scheduled to appear at another Senate hearing, this time devoted entirely to climate change. It was called by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources after Rafe Pomerance and Gordon MacDonald persuaded its chairman, Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana, of the issue’s significance to the future of the oil and gas industry. Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress as a federal employee; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.” Until now the process had appeared perfunctory. But on the Friday evening before his Monday appearance, he was informed that the White House demanded changes to his testimony.

  No rationale was provided. Nor could Hansen understand by what authority the White House could censor scientific findings. He told the administrator in NASA’s legislative affairs office that he refused to make the changes. If that meant he couldn’t testify, so be it.

  The NASA administrator had another idea. The Office of Management and Budget, she explained, had the authority to approve government witnesses. But it couldn’t censor a private citizen.

  At the hearing on November 9, Hansen was listed as “Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.”—as if he were a crank with a telescope who had stumbled into Dirksen off the street. He was careful to emphasize the absurdity of the situation in his opening remarks, at least to the degree that his midwestern reserve would allow: “Before I begin, I would like to state that although I direct the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I am appearing here as a private citizen.” In the most understated terms available to him—one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate modeling, the person responsible for many of the decisive findings about the greenhouse effect in the previous decade—Hansen provided his credentials: “ten years’ experience in terrestrial climate studies and more than ten years’ experience in the exploration and study of other planetary atmospheres.”

  Assuming that one of the senators would immediately question this bizarre introduction, Hansen had prepared an elegant response. He planned to say that, although his NASA colleagues endorsed his conclusions, the White House had insisted he utter false statements that would have distorted them. He figured this would lead to an uproar. But no senator thought to ask about his title. So the atmospheric scientist from New York City said nothing else about it.

  After the hearing he went to lunch with John Topping, who was stunned to hear of the White House’s ham-handed attempt to silence him. “Uh, oh,” joked Topping, “Jim is a dangerous man. We’re going to have to rally the troops to protect him.” The idea that quiet, sober Jim Hansen could be seen as a threat to anyone, let alone national security—well, it was enough to make him burst into laughter.

  Still the brush with state censorship stayed with Hansen in the months that followed, long after the exuberance of the Climate Institute gathering had faded. It weighed on him, this desire to silence him, and after some reflection Hansen decided that it wasn’t very funny, not at all.

  At first he had assumed that it was enough to publish articles in the nation’s most prestigious journals about global warming and that federal policymakers, perceiving the gravity of the situation, would spring into action. Then he figured that his statements to Congress, reported in the national press, would do it. It had seemed, at least momentarily, that the energy industry, understanding what was at stake for its future, might lead. But nothing had worked. And now, even after the political triumph of the Montreal Protocol and the bipartisan support of climate policy, he realized there were people at the highest levels of the federal government—within the White House itself—who hoped to prevent so much as an honest reckoning with the nature of the problem. This, it seemed, was a new development: not merely an expression of indifference or caution, but the emergence of an antagonistic—a nihilistic—force. He didn’t speak much about the censorship episode with his friends or colleagues, but this private knowledge unsettled him.

  Nobody else seemed to share his anxiety. By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate change legislation—a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of transforming national energy policy.

  In March 1988, Wirth joined forty-one other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan pursue an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the global total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In
May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.

  But a pledge didn’t reduce emissions. Hansen was learning to think more strategically—less like a scientist and more like a politician. Despite Wirth’s efforts, there was as yet no serious national or international plan to limit fossil fuel consumption. Even Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of thirty-nine, Gore had announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but when the subject failed to thrill primary voters in New Hampshire, he stopped mentioning it. Instead he spoke about the Palestine Liberation Organization (he didn’t think the United States should negotiate with it), school prayer (he supported it), and the federal funding of abortion for low-income women (he opposed it). In April he dropped out of the race.

  As spring turned to summer, Anniek Hansen noticed a change in her husband. He grew pale and unusually thin, almost gaunt. When she would ask him about his day, Hansen would reply with some ambiguity and automatically turn the conversation to sports: the Yankees, his children’s teams. Even by his own standards, he was tense, quiet, removed; in the hours he spent at home, he was not really there. She would begin a conversation and find out that he hadn’t heard a word she said. She knew what he was thinking: he was running out of time. We were running out of time.

  Then came the summer of 1988 and Jim Hansen wasn’t the only one who could tell that time was running out.

  Part III

  You Will See Things That You Shall Believe

  1988–1989

  Rafe Pomerance (center) and Daniel Becker (far right) at Noordwijk in 1989

  14.

  Nothing but Bonfires

  Summer 1988

  It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska were incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly a million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, sixteen hundred miles away.

  In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station in the state registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert. “The dang heat,” said a farmer in Grinnell. “Farming has so many perils, but climate is ninety-nine percent of it.” In parts of Wisconsin, where Governor Tommy Thompson banned fireworks and smoking cigarettes outdoors, the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers evaporated until they could not assimilate the sewage discharged into them. “At that point,” said an official from the Department of Natural Resources, “we must just sit back and watch the fish die.”

  Harvard University, for the first time, closed because of heat. New York City’s streets melted, its mosquito population quadrupled, and its murder rate reached a record high. “It’s a chore just to walk,” a former hostage negotiator told a reporter. “You want to be left alone.” The twenty-eighth floor of Los Angeles’s second-tallest building burst into flames; the cause, the fire department concluded, was spontaneous combustion. Ducks fled the continental United States in search of wetlands, many ending up in Alaska, swelling its pintail population to 1.5 million from 100,000. “How do you spell relief?” asked a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “If you are a duck from America’s parched prairies, this year you may spell it A-L-A-S-K-A.”

  Nineteen Miss Indiana contestants, outfitted with raincoats and umbrellas, sang “Come Rain or Come Shine,” but it did not rain. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had outlasted Al Gore in the Democratic primary, stood in an Illinois cornfield and prayed for rain, but it did not rain. Cliff Doebel, the owner of a gardening store in Clyde, Ohio, paid $2,000 to import Leonard Crow Dog, a Sioux Indian medicine man from Rosebud, South Dakota. Crow Dog had performed 127 rain dances, all successful. “You will see things that you shall believe,” he told the townspeople of Clyde. “You will feel there is a chance for us all.” After three days of dancing, it rained almost a quarter of an inch.

  Texas farmers fed their cattle cacti. Stretches of the Mississippi River flowed at less than one-fifth of normal capacity. At Greenville, Mississippi, 1,700 barges beached; an additional 2,000 were marooned at St. Louis and Memphis. The on-field thermometer at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, where the Phillies were hosting the Chicago Cubs for a matinee, read 130 degrees. During a pitching change, every player, coach, and umpire, save the catcher and the entering reliever, Todd Frohwirth, fled into the locker rooms. (Frohwirth would earn the victory.) In the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood on June 21, yet another record smasher, a roofer working with 600-degree tar screamed, “Will this madness ever end?”

  On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth.

  “I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” said Hansen.

  This tickled Pomerance. He was the one who tended to worry about press; Hansen usually claimed indifference to such vulgar considerations. “Why’s that?” he asked.

  Hansen explained that he had just received the most recent global temperature data. Barely over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise.

  “I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” said Hansen.

  15.

  Signal Weather

  June 1988

  The night before the hearing, Hansen flew to Washington to give himself enough time to prepare his oral testimony in his hotel room. But he couldn’t focus—the ball game was on the radio. The slumping Yankees, who had fallen behind the Tigers for first place, were trying to avoid a sweep in Detroit, and the game was tight, a pitchers’ duel between John Candelaria and Frank Tanana that went into extra innings. Hansen fell asleep without finishing his statement.

  Hansen had told Pomerance that the biggest problem with the previous hearing, at least apart from the whole censorship affair, had been the month in which it was held: November. “This business of having global warming hearings in such cool weather,” he said, “is never going to get attention.” He wasn’t joking. But they wouldn’t have that concern again. On the morning of the Wirth hearing, Hansen awoke to bright sunlight, high humidity, choking heat. It was signal weather in Washington: the hottest June 23 in history.

  Before heading to the Capitol, he attended a meeting at NASA headquarters. One of his early champions at the agency, Ichtiaque Rasool, was announcing the creation of a new carbon dioxide program. Hansen, sitting in a room with about thirty other scientists, continued to scribble his testimony under the table, barely listening. He paused, however, when he heard Rasool say that the program aimed to determine when a warming signal might emerge. “As you all know,” said Rasool, “no respectable scientist would say that you already have a signal.”

  Hansen interrupted.

  “I don’t know if he’s respectable or not,” he said, “but I do know one scientist who is about to tell the U.S. Senate that the signal has emerged.”

  The other scientists looked up in surprise, but Rasool ignored Hansen and continued his presentation. Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

  By 2:10 p.m., when the session began, it was 98 degrees, and not much cooler in Room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which was being irradiated by two banks of television-camera lights. The reporters had been alert
ed by Timothy Wirth’s office that the plainspoken NASA scientist was going to make a “major statement.” After the congressional staff saw the cameras, even those senators who hadn’t planned to attend appeared at the dais, hastily reviewing the remarks their aides had drafted for them.

  Half an hour before the hearing, Wirth pulled Hansen aside. Wirth wanted to change the order of speakers, placing Hansen first. The senator wanted to make sure that his statement got sufficient attention. Hansen agreed.

  “We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Programme to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat from Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” Press coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”

  Wirth asked those standing in the gallery to claim the few remaining seats available. “There is no point in standing up through this on a hot day,” he said, glad for the opportunity to advertise the weather. Then he introduced the star witness.

  Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with ninety-nine percent confidence,” he said. He encouraged the senators to do what was possible to curb the warming immediately. But he saved his strongest words for after the hearing, when he was smothered by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”