ROLLING STONE 37F
ROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the climate crisis,
scientists have struggled to define the
risks of life on a warming planet. “We
have understood the basic physics of cli-
mate change for more than 120 years,”
says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist
at Texas A&M. But nobody was too wor-
ried at first. The warming of the planet, if it was
seen as a threat at all, was viewed as a far-off, dis-
tant event, something that would play out over
century-long time scales.
The warming is a result
of the slow accumulation
of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, which traps
heat just like the glass
roof of a greenhouse. Un-
like other air pollutants,
such as the chemicals that
cause smog, which vanish
as soon as you stop emit-
ting them, a good fraction
of CO2 that was emitted
while factories forged can-
nons during the Civil War
is still in the atmos phere
today, and will remain for
centuries into the future.
“The climatic impacts of
releasing CO2 will last
longer than Stonehenge,”
wrote climate scientist
David Archer. “Longer
than time capsules, longer
than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of
human civilization so far.” The fingerprints of
accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere were also
hard to detect, at least in real time. In March
1958, when scientist Ralph Keeling first started
measuring it from the Mauna Loa observatory
in Hawaii, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was
315.71 parts per million. A year later, it was 316.71
parts per million. Why would anyone be alarmed
by an increase of one part per million of CO2?
But in the atmosphere, small changes over
time can add up to big impacts. In 1988, NASA
scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S.
Senate that the burning of fossil fuels was now
altering the Earth’s climate. “Global warming
has reached a level such that we can ascribe
with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-
effect relationship between the greenhouse ef-
fect and observed warming,” Hansen said. “It
is already happening now.’’ He and other scien-
tists understood the implications of this warming
— droughts, heat waves, sea-level rise. But they
didn’t have a clear timeline for when these im-
pacts would occur or how severe they would be.
Big Oil and Big Coal understood the implica-
tions of rising CO2 levels all too well. They im-
mediately began cranking out propaganda ar-guing that a warmer world was a better world.
Groups like the Greening Earth Society argued
that more CO2 meant plants would grow fast-
er, agriculture would boom, and we would all
enjoy more days at the beach. Companies like
Exxon (now ExxonMobil) began spending hun-
dreds of millions of dollars in a well-orchestrated
campaign to deny, confuse, and block any un-
derstanding of the risks of burning fossil fuels.
In the coming years, they organized and fund-
ed industry groups with innocuous-soundingleast, not directly — from a few more parts per
million of CO2 in the atmosphere.
In 1988, under the auspices of the U.N., the In-
tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
was created — an organization of top scientists
tasked with issuing periodic reports that assessed
the latest knowledge about climate change. The
first report, released in 1990, was a weak sketch
of the risks, from sea-level rise to drought to
increased storm intensity. But it inspired the
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where
the issue of climate risk
was addressed direct-
ly for the first time. The
summit was a big event,
with virtually every na-
tion in the world signing
a global treaty called the
United Nations Frame-
work Convention on Cli-
mate Change (UNFCCC).
The goal of the treaty
was “to stabilize green-
house-gas concentrations
in the atmosphere at a
level that would prevent
dangerous anthropogen-
ic [human-caused] inter-
ference with the climate
system.” Nice thought,
but as Penn State climate
scientist Michael Mann
later wrote, “Danger-
ous to whom?” The risks
to an islander living on
a low atoll in the Pacific
were surely different than
the risks to the Mercedes-
riding diplomats who
crafted the treaty, to say nothing of the outsize
risks to future generations. In 1995, the IPCC
followed up with a second report, which was
more thorough but still full of cautious, bureau-
cratic language (“potentially serious changes
have been identified”). Nobody but hardcore sci-
entists and activists read it.
In 1997, at the climate talks in Kyoto, Japan,
UNFCCC members agreed to the Kyoto Protocol,
which required that by 2012 developing coun-
tries cut total emissions of greenhouse gases by
five percent from 1990 levels. The agreement got
a lot of press and inspired high-minded speech-
es about the importance of reducing the level of
CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. But it didn’t in-
spire much action. “Part of the problem was that
negotiations focused on agreeing on the percent-
age of tons of carbon-dioxide-emission reduc-
tions, which no regular human being has any
clue about,” Dudek explains. “How can you build
political support around a goal that most people
can’t understand, even if they wanted to?”names like the Global Climate Coali-
tion, and poured money into conser-
vative think tanks like the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and the Heritage
Foundation, where undermining cli-
mate science was job one.
In addition, there was a collective-action prob-
lem. Even if half the nations of the world decid-
ed to slash carbon pollution, if big fossil-fuel
burners like the U.S. and China didn’t take ac-
tion too, the problem wouldn’t be solved. Many
leaders saw restrictions on carbon as hobbling
their economy and thus jeopardizing their po-
litical power. As Dan Dudek, a vice president at
the Environmental Defense Fund, puts it, “What
president or prime minister is going to restrict
fossil fuels if it means he or she will be turned
out of office?”
But the biggest issue was simply defining the
threat of global warming. With nuclear weapons,
the risks were clear: Start a war, and millions of
people could die in minutes. The ozone hole was
similarly clear-cut: If you let deadly levels of ra-
diation hit the Earth, you get cancer and die. In
both cases, global treaties were effective in re-
ducing risk. But with global warming, the threat
was not so clear. Nobody was going to die — atA map showing the
average temperature
rise over the past
four years; 2016
and 2019 were the
hottest on record.NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER