The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  “GLOBAL COOLING” : THE NEXT ICE AGE?

  During these years concern was rising about climate change, but for a variety of reasons. Some in the national security community worried about climate change as a strategic threat: they feared the Soviet Union would alter the climate, either intentionally for military advantage or accidentally, as a result of diverting rivers or such “hare-brained” ideas as the proposal to dam the Bering Straits.19

  The implications of Keeling’s work on carbon were beginning to seep into the policy community. A 1965 report on “environmental pollution” from President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee included a 22-page appendix written by, among others, Revelle and Keeling. It reiterated the argument that “by burning fossil fuels humanity is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment” that almost certainly would change temperatures.

  KEELING’S CURVE: ATMOSPHERIC CO2 LEVELS

  Measured at Mauna Loa Observatory

  PREHISTORIC CO, LEVELS

  Data from Antarctic ice cores

  Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center

  In 1969, picking up on this and other research, Nixon White House adviser (and later senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo arguing that the new Nixon administration “really ought to get involved” with climate change as an issue. “This very clearly is a problem” and “one that can seize the imagination of persons normally indifferent to projects of apocalyptic change.” The research, he said, indicated that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere could raise the average temperature by seven degrees by 2000 and sea levels by ten feet. “Good-bye New York,” he said. “Good-bye Washington, for that matter.” He had one piece of good news, however: “We have no data on Seattle.”

  Yet these early statements notwithstanding, at least as much of the discussion was about global cooling as about global warming. As the deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology wrote back to Moynihan, “The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between. One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons . . . and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to the temperature rise from CO2.”20

  Fears were growing that the glaciers would return, the same fears that had animated Louis Agassiz and other scientists a century earlier. Already, at the end of the 1950s, Betty Friedan—later famous for writing The Feminine Mystique—popularized these theories in an article on “The Coming Ice Age.” “If man finds no way to switch the glacial thermostat and avoid a new ice age,” she said, “there may well be a real estate boom in the Sahara.” By the early 1970s the CIA was investigating the geopolitical impact of global cooling, including the “megadeaths and social upheaval” that would ensue. In 1972 Science magazine reported that earth scientists meeting at Brown University had concluded that “the present cooling is especially demonstrable” and that “global cooling and related rapid changes of environment, substantially exceeding the fluctuations experienced by man in historical times must be expected.” Around the same time, a number of scientists who had participated in a Defense Department climate analysis wrote to President Nixon that the government needed to study the risk that a new glacial period was coming. Others warned that the increasing concentrations of aerosols in the atmosphere could be “sufficient to trigger an ice age.” The U.S. National Science Board reported a few years later that the last two or three decades had recorded a cooling trend. It was not a onesided argument by any means, as is clear from the pages of Science. In 1975 one scientist blasted the “complacency” of those who focused on the falling temperatures “over the past several decades,” which was leading them to “discount the warming effect of the CO2 produced by the burning of chemical fuels.”21

  The increasing interest in climate change meant that money was beginning to flow into climate study. The reason was clear. “The propelling concern for climate research,” as two students of the era have observed, “was the possibility of climate cooling, rather than climate warming.”22

  The same concerns were reflected in public discussion. “The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” wrote Newsweek in 1975. While meteorologists argued about the “causes” and “extent,” they were “almost unanimous” in seeing a cooling trend that could lead to another “little ice age,” as between 1600 and 1900, or even another “great Ice Age.” In 1976 National Geographic gave equal weighting to the question as to whether the earth was “cooling off ” or warming “irreversibly.” The same year Time magazine was reporting, “Climatologists still disagree on whether earth’s long-range outlook is another Ice Age, which could bring mass starvation and fuel shortages, or a warming trend, which could melt the polar icecaps and flood coastal cities.”23

  By the early 1980s, discussion about global cooling had taken a new form—the harsh “nuclear winter,” the extreme cooling that could be set off by a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. This would be the result of the vast smoke and dust clouds triggered by the atomic explosions, which would cut off sunlight and darken the earth, lead to “subfreezing temperatures” even in summer, and “pose a serious threat to human sur vivors.” The best-known proponent of the threat of nuclear winter was Carl Sagan, who as a young man had achieved fame among astronomers for identifying the extreme greenhouse atmosphere of Venus, and then went on to achieve much greater fame as host of the PBS television series Cosmos (and his much imitated refrain about “billions and billions of stars”).24

  Notwithstanding the fear of nuclear winter, by the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, a notable shift in the climate of climate change research was clear—from cooling to warming. Keeling’s Curve was beginning to flow into a larger realm of scientific research, ranging from direct observations in the air, on land, and on sea, to what would prove most crucial indeed: advances in modeling climate in computer simulations.

  MODELING THE CLIMATE

  Specifically, two technological advances were broadening the scientific base for understanding climate. One was satellites. The first U.S. weather satellite was launched in 1960, opening the doors not only to a much more holistic view of the earth but also to a much greater and continually growing flow of data. Initially this fueled work on a subject that gained some attention and government funding—“advertant” (that is, intentional) weather modification, aimed at such things as moderating storms and increasing rain in dry parts of the world. Already in 1961 President John F. Kennedy, addressing the United Nations, was calling for “cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.” The topic of weather modification passed from the scene, but the contribution of satellites to vastly improved understanding of weather continued to grow.

  The second advance was the invention of, and extraordinary development in, computing power, which in turn made possible the new discipline of climate modeling. The advent of the computer, in historical terms, owes much to a chance meeting on a railroad platform near the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II. A young mathematician caught sight of a world-famous figure—at least world famous in the worlds of science and mathematics. His name was John von Neumann. “With considerable temerity” the mathematician, Herman Goldfine, started a conversation. To Goldfine’s surprise, von Neumann, despite his towering reputation, was quite friendly. But when Goldfine told von Neumann that he was helping develop “an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second,” the conversation abruptly changed “from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics.”25

  John von Neumann—born János Neumann in Budapest—had emigrated to the United States in 1930 to become, along with Albert Einstein, one of the first faculty members at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
Von Neumann would prove to be one of the most extraordinary and creative figures of the twentieth century, not only one of the century’s greatest mathematicians but also an outstanding physicist and, almost as a sideline, one of the most influential figures in modern economics (he invented game theory and is said to have “changed the very way economic analysis is done”). Not only that, he is often described as the “father of the computer” as well as the inventor of nuclear deterrence. (In 1956, near the end of his life, gathered around his bed in Walter Reed Hospital were the secretary of defense and his deputies, the secretaries of the army, navy, and air force, and all the joint chiefs of staff, all there for his “last words of advice and wisdom.”) He also fathered the modern mathematical analysis of climate modeling that became the basic tool for diagnosing global warming. He accomplished all this before he died in 1957, at the age of fifty-three.26

  Von Neumann had an extraordinary ability to do complex calculations in his head at lightning speed. Once, as a six-year-old, he saw his mother staring off into space, daydreaming , and he asked her, “What are you calculating?” As an adult he let his subconscious work on mathematical problems in his sleep and woke up at 3:00 a.m. with the answer. At the same time, he had the ability to look at things in a wholly new manner. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam emphasized how much analogies figured in von Neumann’s thought processes. One of his closest friends, Ulam would exchange both mathematical insights and intricate Yiddish jokes with him. Ulam would tease von Neumann for being too practical, for trying to apply mathematics to all sorts of problems. Once he told von Neumann, “When it comes to the application of mathematics to dentistry, maybe you’ll stop.”

  The economist Paul Samuelson said von Neumann had “the fastest mind” he had ever encountered. The head of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory called him “the cleverest man in the world.” A peer summed up what many who worked with him thought: “Unquestionably the nearest thing to a genius I have ever encountered.”27

  That chance meeting on the Aberdeen railroad platform in August 1944 would propel von Neumann to become the “father of computing.” Until then, computers were not machines but a job classification: “computers” were people who did the tiresome but essential calculations needed for surveying or for calculating the tides or the movements of heavenly bodies. But von Neumann had been questing after something like a mechanical computer in order to handle the immense computational challenge he and his colleagues had faced while working on the atomic bomb during World War II. At the secret Los Alamos, as they struggled to figure out how to transform the theoretical concept of a chain reaction into a fearsome weapon, they had “invented modern mathematical modeling.” But they needed the machines to make it practical.28

  Immediately after the encounter on that station platform, von Neumann used his authority as a top-flight scientific adviser to the war effort to jump into this nascent and obscure computer project and promote its development. By June 1945 he had written a 101-page paper that became “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” He started designing and building a new prototype computer in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study.

  But to what to apply this new tool? Van Neumann identified “the first great scientific subject” for which he wanted to use this newly discovered computer power: “the phenomena of turbulence,” or, put more simply, forecasting the weather. He recognized the similarities between simulating atomic explosions and making weather predictions; both were nonlinear problems in fluid dynamics that needed vast amount of computation at breakneck speed.29

  The complexity of the weather cried out for the rigorous mathematical analysis that von Neumann loved and that only the computer made possible. The strategic significance made it urgent. The intellectual challenge appealed to him. He feared that the Soviets might add weather modification to their arsenal and wage “climatological warfare” against the United States. He himself gave some favorable thought to using better knowledge of the weather to “jiggle the earth,” as he put it—that is, modify the weather and create a warmer semitropical climate around the world. Frankly, he thought, people would like that.

  In seeking support for funding for the navy computing and climate studies, he argued that high-speed computing “would make weather predictions a week or more ahead practical.” He thereafter supervised the building of MANIAC—for Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. The New York Times would call it a “giant electronic brain.”30

  By 1948 the Numerical Meteorology Project was up and running. A new recruit, Jule Charney, a mathematician and meteorologist, took the lead in figuring out the mathematical formulas to conjoin climate modeling with the advances in computing. What they were trying to do was express the physical laws governing the dynamics of heat and moisture in the atmosphere in a series of mathematical algorithms that could be solved by a computer as they unfolded over time. By the early 1950s Charney and the group were producing its first computer simulations of climate. By the 1960s the Princeton initiative had morphed into the GFDL—Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, now part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—which became one of the leaders in developing climate-change models.31

  Von Neumann’s quest to understand stratospheric circulation and atmospheric turbulence was giving rise to increasingly sophisticated simulations of how the global atmosphere worked—the patterns and flows by which the air moved around the world. These became known as general circulation models. They had to be global because the earth had only one atmosphere. The modelers were constantly striving to make their models more and more realistic, which meant more and more complex, in order to better understand how the world worked.

  Climate modeling was very difficult, taxing, and definitely pioneering. “The computer was so feeble at the time,” recalled Syukuro Manabe, recruited to the GFDL from the meteorology faculty at Tokyo University and one of the most formidable of all the climate modelers. “If we put everything into the model at once, the computer couldn’t handle it. I was there and was watching the model blow up all the time.”

  But already in 1967 Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald, members of the Princeton lab, were hypothesizing, in what became a famous paper, that a doubling of CO2 would increase global temperatures by three to four degrees. They backed into the subject by accident. “I wanted to see how sensitive the model is to cloudiness, water vapor, ozone, and to CO2,” said Manabe. “So I was changing greenhouse gases, clouds . . . playing and enjoying myself. I realized that CO2 is important, as it turned out, I changed the right variable and hit the jackpot,” he continued. “At that time, no one cared about global warming... Some people thought maybe an ice age is coming.”

  Notwithstanding his conviction that “probably this is the best paper I wrote in my whole career,” Manabe led further breakthroughs on modeling in the mid-1970s. Over the years data from satellites provided a benchmark against which to test the accuracy of the ever-more-complex models. And yet that 1967 hypothesis—that a doubling of CO2 would bring a three-to-fourdegree increase in the average global temperature—would become a constant in the debate over global warming. And a fuse.32

  “BOY, IF THIS IS TRUE”: THE RISE OF CLIMATE ACTIVISM

  The widening body of global-warming research started to connect with what would turn out to be the first generation of climate activists. For them, the focus was not scientific experiment but political action.

  In 1973, on the Old Campus at Yale University, botanist George Woodwell delivered a global warming lecture. One of the people in the audience was an undergraduate named Fred Krupp. “Boy, if this is true,” Krupp remembers saying to himself, “we’re in a lot of trouble.” Krupp would become the president of the Environmental Defense Fund eleven years later, at age 30, and from there one of the foremost policy proponents for reducing carbon emissions .33

  A few years later, in 1978, in Washington, D.C., Rafe Pomerance, president of the environmental group Fri
ends of the Earth, was reading an environmental study when one sentence caught his eye: increasing coal use could warm the earth. “This can’t be true,” Pomerance thought. He started researching the subject, and he soon caught up with a scientist named Gordon MacDonald, who had been a member of Richard Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality. After a two-hour discussion with MacDonald, Pomerance said, “If I set up briefings around town, will you do them?” MacDonald agreed, and they started making the rounds in Washington, D.C.

  The president of the National Academy of Sciences, impressed by the briefing, set up a special task force under Jule Charney. Charney had moved from Princeton to MIT where, arguably, he had become America’s most prominent meteorologist. Issuing its report in 1979, the Charney Committee declared that the risk was very real. A few other influential studies came to similar conclusions, including one by the JASON committee, a panel of leading physicists and other scientists that advised the Department of Defense and other government agencies. It concluded that there was “incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change.” The scientists added that the ocean, “the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system,” was likely to slow observable climate change. The “JASONs,” as they were sometimes called, said that “a wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”34

  The campaign “around town” led to highly attended Senate hearings in April 1980. The star of the hearing was Keeling’s Curve. After looking at a map presented by one witness that showed the East Coast of the United States inundated by rising sea waters, the committee chair, Senator Paul Tsongas from Massachusetts, commented with rising irony: “It means good-bye Miami, Corpus Christi . . . good-bye Boston, good-bye New Orleans, good-bye Charleston. . . . On the bright side, it means we can enjoy boating at the foot of the Capitol and fishing on the South Lawn.”35