Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

  “Isn’t this what you were talking about the other day?” she asked, gesturing.

  There was an article about a geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald. Pomerance hadn’t heard of MacDonald, but he knew all about the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which MacDonald belonged. The Jasons were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers who join forces in times of galactic crisis. They were convened by the U.S. intelligence apparatus to devise novel scientific solutions to the most vexing national security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like high-power laser beams, sonic booms, and plague-infected rats. Some of the Jasons had federal contracts or long-standing ties to U.S. intelligence; others held prominent titles at major research universities; all were united by the conviction, shared by their federal clients, that American power should be guided by the wisdom of its superior scientific minds. The Jasons met each summer in secret, and their very existence had been a loosely guarded secret until the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed their plan to festoon the Ho Chi Minh Trail with motion sensors that signaled to bombers. After Vietnam War protesters set MacDonald’s garage on fire, he pleaded with the Jasons to use their powers for peace instead of war.

  He hoped that the Jasons could join forces to save the world. For human civilization, as he saw it, was facing an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” an essay published in 1968, while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” The world’s most advanced militaries, he warned, would soon be able to weaponize weather. By accelerating industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, they could alter weather patterns, forcing mass migration, starvation, drought, and economic collapse.

  In the decade since, MacDonald had grown alarmed to see humankind accelerate its pursuit of this particular weapon of mass destruction, not maliciously, but unwittingly. President Carter’s initiative to develop high-carbon synthetic fuels—gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands—was a frightening blunder, the equivalent of building a new generation of thermonuclear bombs. During spring 1977 and summer 1978, the Jasons met in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre–Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a dramatic one, marking the point at which human civilization would contribute as much carbon to the atmosphere as the planet had done in the preceding 4.6 billion years. The inevitability of the doubling was not in question; a high school student could do the arithmetic. Depending on the future rate of fossil fuel consumption, the threshold would likely be breached by 2035 and no later than 2060.

  The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate, was composed in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: global temperatures would increase by an average of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; and agricultural production and access to drinking water would plummet, triggering unprecedented levels of migration. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, would be the effect on the poles. Even minimal warming could “lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contained enough water to raise the oceans sixteen feet.

  The Jasons sent the report to dozens of scientists in the United States and abroad; to industry groups like the National Coal Association and the Electric Power Research Institute; and, within the government, to the National Academy of Sciences, the Commerce Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, every branch of the military, the National Security Council, and the White House.

  Pomerance read about this in a state of shock that, as was the pattern with him, swelled briskly into outrage. “This,” he told Agle, “is the whole banana.”

  He had to meet Gordon MacDonald. The scientist, the article had mentioned, worked at the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded think tank that developed national defense and nuclear warfare technology. His title was senior research analyst, which was a delicate way of saying science adviser to the national intelligence community. After a single phone call, Pomerance, a Vietnam War protester and conscientious objector, drove several miles on the Beltway to a group of anonymous white office buildings that more closely resembled the headquarters of a regional banking firm than the solar plexus of the American military-industrial complex. He was shown into the office of a brawny, soft-spoken man with a wave of glossy, silverish hair over horn-rimmed frames, who possessed more than a passing resemblance to Alex Karras—a geophysicist trapped in the body of an offensive lineman. He extended a hand like a bear’s paw.

  “I’m glad you’re interested in this,” said MacDonald, taking in the young activist.

  “How could I not be?” said Pomerance. “How could anyone not be?”

  MacDonald seemed miscast as a preacher of existential doom; he was too imposing of physical bearing and too decorous of manner. A bout of polio at the age of nine had left him with a chronic limp and a passion for scientific inquiry, awoken by the months of convalescence he had spent at a Dallas clinic reading medical journals about his illness. Despite his bad leg, he started at guard for the San Marcos Academy Bears and was offered a football scholarship to Rice. Harvard offered him a scholarship with no strings attached. Upon reaching campus, he swiftly earned a reputation as a prodigy. In his twenties, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at thirty-two, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at forty, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. Now approaching his fiftieth birthday, MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age—in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. MacDonald had followed the problem closely ever since, with increasing alarm.

  He spoke for two hours. As he traced the history of humanity’s understanding of the problem, explaining the fundamental science, Pomerance grew increasingly appalled.

  “If I set up briefings with some people on the Hill,” asked Pomerance, “will you tell them what you just told me?”

  Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon dioxide roadshow. Pomerance arranged informal briefings with anybody he could think of in a position of power on Capitol Hill. The men settled into a routine, with MacDonald methodically explaining the science and Pomerance interjecting the exclamation points. They were surprised to find that, though most of the offices they visited had received copies of the Jasons’ report, few senior officials were familiar with its findings, let alone grasped the dystopian consequences of global warming. After conversations with the EPA, The New York Times, the Energy Department (which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier, at MacDonald’s urging), the National Security Council (a senior staffer, Jessica Mathews, was Pomerance’s first cousin), and the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, they at last worked their way up to the president’s top scientist himself, Frank Press.

  Pomerance did not fully appreciate the extent of MacDonald’s standing within the highest echelons of the U.S. government until they entered Press’s chambers in the Old Executive Office Building, the granite fortress that stood on White House grounds, looming over the West Wing. MacDonald and Press had known each other since the Kennedy administration, when Press had figured out how to use Geiger counters to detect the Soviet Union’s underground nuclear testing program. Press was familiar with the carbon dioxide issue. In July 1977, six months after Carter took office, he had written a memo to the president expl
aining that unchecked fossil fuel combustion might lead to a “global climatic warming” as high as 5 degrees Celsius and “large scale crop failures.” “As you know,” he wrote to Carter, “this is not a new issue.” But Press had concluded that “the present state of knowledge” did not justify taking action in the near term. Since then, Press had overseen the development of Carter’s synthetic-fuels program.

  What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national security meeting. Press had summoned nearly the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and defense strategy, who did not seem especially familiar with the climate issue. Pomerance figured it was best to let MacDonald do all the talking. There was no need to emphasize to Press and his lieutenants that this was an issue of profound national significance. The solemn mood in the office told him that this was understood.

  To explain what the carbon dioxide problem meant for the future, and not just the distant future, MacDonald began by turning to the distant past—to John Tyndall, an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife with sleeping pills. In 1859, Tyndall hit upon the greenhouse effect’s fundamental corollary: because carbon dioxide molecules absorbed heat, variations in its atmospheric concentration could create changes in climate. This finding inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum for the mass production of energy could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.

  Consumption increased beyond anything the Swedish chemist could have imagined. Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar calculated the effect of “throwing some 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the air each minute.” He discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. “Man,” he wrote, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.

  MacDonald’s voice was deliberate and authoritative, his powerful hands conveying the force of his argument. His audience listened in bowed silence. Pomerance couldn’t read them. Political appointees concealed their private opinions for a living. Pomerance couldn’t. He shifted in his chair, restless, glancing between the Jason and the government suits, trying to see whether they grasped the shape of the behemoth that MacDonald was describing.

  MacDonald concluded his sermon with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, had advised every president on major policy; Revelle had been a close colleague of MacDonald’s and Press’s since they had all served together under Kennedy. Whereas Arrhenius and Callendar, in their icy Northern European hamlets, welcomed the prospect of warmer weather, Revelle recognized that human society had been organized around specific climatic conditions that, if altered, would lead to violent disruptions. MacDonald quoted from a major paper Revelle and Hans Seuss had published in 1957: “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be repeated in the future.” The following year, Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea—a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil fuel emissions. A young geochemist named Charles David Keeling charted the data. Keeling’s graph came to be known as the Keeling curve, though it more closely resembled a jagged lightning bolt hurled toward the firmament. As MacDonald’s imperturbable audience looked on, he traced the Keeling curve in the air, his thick forefinger jabbing toward the ceiling.

  With each passing year, MacDonald explained, humanity’s large-scale geophysical experiment grew more audacious. After Keeling had charted it for nearly a decade, Revelle shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels. His administration commissioned a study by the president’s Science Advisory Committee, led by Revelle, which warned in its 1965 report of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters—changes that could be “not controllable through local or even national efforts.” Nothing less than a coordinated global effort would be required. Yet no such effort materialized, and emissions continued to rise. At this rate, said MacDonald, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, and the forced migration of one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries—within their own lifetimes.

  “And what,” asked Press, “would you have us do about it?”

  President Carter’s efforts, in the wake of the Saudi oil crisis, to promote solar energy—he had proposed that Congress enact a “national solar strategy” and installed thirty-two solar panels on the roof of the White House to heat the First Family’s water—was a strong start, said MacDonald, though Carter’s plan to stimulate production of synthetic fuels was a dangerous lurch in the direction of auto-annihilation. Nuclear power, despite the recent horrors at Three Mile Island, should be expanded. But even natural gas and ethanol were preferable to coal. There was no way around it: coal production would ultimately have to end.

  Carter’s advisers asked respectful questions but Pomerance couldn’t tell whether they were persuaded. The men stood and shook hands and Press led MacDonald and Pomerance out of his office. As they emerged onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Pomerance turned to MacDonald.

  Knowing Press as you do, asked Pomerance, what do you think he’s going to do?

  Knowing Frank as I do, said MacDonald, I really couldn’t tell you.

  Pomerance grew uneasy. Since meeting MacDonald, he had fixated on the science of the carbon dioxide problem and the prospect of a political solution. But with their tour of Capitol Hill concluded, Pomerance began to question how the warming of the atmosphere might touch his own life. Lenore, his wife, was eight months pregnant. They had spent a lot of time talking about their hopes for the future. Was it ethical, he wondered, to bring a child onto a planet that before much longer could become inhospitable to humanity? Was there still time to avoid the worst? And why had it fallen to him, a thirty-two-year-old lobbyist without scientific training, to bring attention to an urgent, global crisis?

  After several weeks, MacDonald called to tell him that Press had taken action. On May 22, Press wrote to the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Philip Handler, requesting a full assessment of the carbon dioxide problem. Handler tapped Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, to gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists, and climate modelers. They would judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified—whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

  Pomerance was relieved to hear it, but he couldn’t help wondering why it had taken so long. Scientists at the highest levels of government had known about the dangers of fossil fuel combustion for decades yet had produced little besides journal articles, academic symposiums, and technical reports. Nor had any politician or environmentalist championed the issue. No one had done much of anything. That, he figured, was about to change. If Charney’s elite group confirmed that human civilization was hastening its own extinction, the president would be forced to act.

  2.

  Mirror Worlds

  Spring 1979

  In the living room of James and Anniek Hansen, under a bright window giving on to Morningside Park, there was a brown velvet love seat that nobody ever sat in. Erik, their two-year-old son, was forbidden to go near it. The ceiling above the co
uch sagged ominously, as if pregnant with some alien life form, and the bulge grew with each passing week. Jim promised Anniek that he would fix it, which was only fair, because it had been on his insistence that they gave up the prospect of a prewar apartment in Spuyten Duyvil overlooking the Hudson River and moved to this two-story walk-up with crumbling walls, police-siren lullabies, and gravid ceiling. Jim had resented the commute to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, complaining that such a profligate waste of his time—forty-five minutes each way—would soon be unsustainable, once the Pioneer spacecraft reached Venus and began to beam back data. But despite living within a few blocks of his office, Jim couldn’t find time for the ceiling, and after four months it finally burst, releasing a confetti of browned pipes and splintered wood.

  That was April. Jim repeated his vow to fix the ceiling the next time he had a spare moment. That would come, according to his calculations, on Thanksgiving Day. Anniek held him to his word, though it meant that she had to live with a hole in her living room ceiling for seven months—seven months of plaster and dust powdering the love seat.

  Another promise Jim made to Anniek: he would be home for dinner every night by seven o’clock. By half past eight, however, he was back to his mathematical preoccupations. Anniek did not begrudge him his deep commitment to his research; it was one of the things she loved about him. Still it baffled her that the subject of his obsession should be the atmospheric conditions of a planet more than twenty-four million miles away. It baffled Jim, too, when he came to think about it. How he had traveled to Venus from Denison, Iowa, where he had been the youngest child of a diner waitress and an itinerant farmer turned bartender, was a mystery, the outcome of a series of bizarre twists of fate for which he claimed no agency. It was just something that had happened to him.