It is no great mystery what causes global warming: Carbon dioxide
emissions from coal-fired power plants, cars, and trucks; cooking fires;
and deforestation result in most of it. Americans have a primary
responsibility. The U.S. transportation system emits more carbon diox-
ide than any other nation’s entire economy(with the sole exception of
China), reports the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
We could reduce those emissions with a collective will, embodied
in legislation like the Kyoto Protocol, but very little progress has been
made. In only a few places—most notably, Europe—are people not
only paying attention but also acting on their awareness. (And even
many of the European countries are missing their targets under the
Kyoto Protocol.) Meanwhile, the ominous build-up of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere continues.
This book grew out of a lengthy collection of articles underwritten
with the generous support of the Richard and Rhoda Goldman
Foundation and appearing in the September/October 2000 edition of
E/The Environmental Magazine. We wanted to move beyond the scien-
tific debate. The idea was to document—through the kind of in-depth,
heavily sourced reporting the magazine is known for—the evidence for
a changing climate.
We certainly found it. Our reporters traveled to India, China,
Australia, Fiji, Antarctica, and the Caribbean islands of Antigua and
Barbuda. In the United States, we visited Alaska, coastal California, the
Pacific Northwest, New Jersey, and New York City.
This book represents a considerable expansion of that original
reporting, and adds a chapter on threats and challenges in Europe.
Taken together, it offers overwhelming evidence that global warming is
under way, producing exactly the extreme weather events predicted by
the vast majority of the world’s scientific community.
In his 1997 book Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s
Unfinished Business, S. Fred Singer wrote, “At most, we believe there
will be a modest warming in the [twenty-first century], generally bene-
ficial for agriculture and human welfare. Available evidence suggests
that none of the extreme fears about severe weather events, sea-level
rise, and spread of diseases, is warranted.”
But the “available evidence” suggests no such thing. The testimony
viii Preface