Time_USA_-_23_09_2019

22 Time September 23, 2019

One Of the impOrtant milestOnes in the struggle to
build awareness of the climate crisis in the U.S. was the
publication 30 years ago by TIME of its historic “Planet
of the Year” issue, focusing the nation’s attention on our
“Endangered Earth.” Prior to its decision to creatively
adapt its Person of the Year brand to help mobilize public
opinion in response to the unprecedented threat to the
future of humanity, TIME organized a 1988 conference
of climate experts and policymakers to review the rapidly
accumulating evidence confirming the warnings of
scientists years earlier. All who attended felt it was the
most impressive conference yet held to explore what
many realized for the first time was an existential crisis.
In the late 1960s, I experienced my own unexpected
awakening to this planetary danger as an undergraduate
in a college class taught by the legendary scientist Roger
Revelle, who was among the first scientists to discover
that human activity was adding more carbon dioxide
to the earth’s atmosphere than nature could absorb. In
1965, Revelle had warned President Lyndon Johnson of
the mounting crisis. Measurements made by Revelle’s
colleague Charles David Keeling from the top of Mauna
Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii showed clearly that the
increased burning of fossil fuels was leading to a dramatic
rise in the concentrations of CO₂ measurements in the
atmosphere.
Seven years after that class, as a young, newly elected
member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I asked
what was being done about this emerging threat and
found the most common answer was, “What threat?”
During my first-ever congressional hearing on this
crisis, I asked Dr. Revelle to be the leadoff witness,
naively hoping when he spoke, those listening would
have the same epiphany I had as an undergrad. When that
didn’t happen, I asked myself for the first time an urgent
question that has preoccupied me ever since: How can
this crisis be made as clear to our nation and to the world
as Revelle made it to me?
Nearly 40 years later, although we have made a great
deal of progress, we are not yet gaining on the crisis. It is
still worsening faster than we are mobilizing to confront it.
The evidence is now even more overwhelming, of course,
and Mother Nature has joined the discussion. The U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently
issued its latest stark assessment, in which the world’s
leading scientists warned we must undergo an urgent and

Why I have hope for

the climate-change

battles to come

rapid transformation of our civilization

in order to avert the most catastrophic

effects of a disrupted global climate

system.

Humanity is now spewing more

than 110 million tons of global warm-

ing pollution every day into the exceed-

ingly thin shell of atmosphere that sur-

rounds our planet as if it were an open

sewer. The extra heat energy being

trapped on earth and exacerbated by

man-made climate change is now equal

to what would be released by 500,

Hiroshima-class atomic bombs explod-

ing on earth every single day, according

to James Hansen, a leading climate sci-

entist. And the knock-on consequences

of all that extra heat energy is leading to

increasingly dangerous threats to lives

and livelihoods all around the world.

The past five years have been the

hottest five years recorded since the

world’s top weather and climate agen-

cies started tracking global tempera-

tures in the 1880s. This past July was

the hottest month ever in recorded

history. More than 90% of the extra

heat is going into the oceans, and it is

fueling supercharged hurricanes. Hur-

ricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria (all in

2017) caused as much as $265 billion

in damages. Overall, weather disasters

in 2017 and 2018 cost the global econ-

omy $653 billion —the costliest back-

to-back years in history. Wildfires are

worsening around the world, includ-

ing across the American West, while

farmers in the Midwest have dealt with

periods of both catastrophic flood-

ing and drought that destroyed crops

and threatened the economic health of

communities. Sea levels are rising at

an accelerating rate as the melting of

land-based ice in Greenland and Ant-

arctica increases to record levels. The

list goes on.

AL GORE

ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL FOR TIME

VIEWPOINT 2050: THE FIGHT FOR EARTH

We must

be on

guard

against

despair,

which is

ultimately

just

another

form of

denial

when the

future of

humanity

is at stake