Losing Earth
Page 8
The urgency of the alarm seemed to have everything to do with the phrase “a hole in the ozone layer,” which, charitably put, was a mixed metaphor. For there was no hole, and there was no layer. Ozone, which shielded Earth from ultraviolet radiation, was distributed throughout the atmosphere, settling mostly in the middle stratosphere and never in a concentration higher than fifteen parts per million. As for the “hole”—while the levels of ozone over Antarctica had declined drastically, the depletion was a temporary phenomenon, lasting about two months a year. In satellite images colorized to show ozone density, however, the darker region appeared to depict a void. When F. Sherwood Rowland, one of the chemists who identified the problem in 1974, spoke of the “ozone hole” in a university slide lecture in November 1985, the crisis found its catchphrase. The New York Times borrowed it for an article that same day, and though scientific journals initially refused to use the term, within a year it was unavoidable. The ozone crisis had its signal, which was also a symbol: a hole.
It was already understood, thanks to the work of Rowland and his colleague Mario Molina, that the damage was largely caused by the synthetic chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigerators, spray bottles, and plastic foams, which escaped into the stratosphere and vampirized ozone molecules. It was also understood that the ozone problem and the greenhouse gas problem were linked. CFCs were unusually potent greenhouse gases. Though CFCs had been mass-produced only since the 1930s, they were already responsible, by Jim Hansen’s calculation, for nearly half of Earth’s warming during the 1970s. But nobody was worried about CFCs because of their warming potential. They were worried about going blind.
The United Nations, through two of its intergovernmental agencies—the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)—had in 1977 established the World Plan of Action on the Ozone Layer. In 1985, UNEP established a framework for a global treaty, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. The negotiators failed to agree on any specific CFC regulations in Vienna, but two months later, after the British scientists reported their Antarctic findings, Reagan proposed a reduction in CFC emissions of 95 percent. It was a sudden, stunning reversal. Just several months earlier, the National Resources Defense Council had sued the EPA for failing to propose a single regulation, despite its obligations under the Clean Air Act. Since taking power, the Reagan administration had dutifully parroted the arguments of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, a lobbying group founded in 1980 that represented nearly every U.S. business that had the word refrigeration in its name or was involved in the production, manufacture, and consumption of chemicals, plastics, paper goods, and frozen food—five hundred companies in total, from DuPont and the American Petroleum Institute to Mrs. Smith’s Frozen Food Company. The alliance hounded the EPA, members of Congress, and Reagan himself with a single message: there was too much uncertainty in the science to justify any further regulation of CFCs. But once the public discovered the “ozone hole,” every relevant government agency and every sitting U.S. senator urged the president to endorse the UN’s plan for a treaty. When Reagan finally submitted the Vienna Convention to the Senate for ratification, he praised the “leading role” played by the United States, fooling nobody.
Senior members of UNEP and the WMO began to wonder whether they could do for the carbon dioxide problem what they had done for ozone. The organizations had been holding semiannual conferences on global warming since the early 1970s. But in 1985, just several months after the bad news from the Antarctic, at an otherwise sleepy meeting in the Carinthian city of Villach, eighty-nine scientists from twenty-nine countries began to discuss a subject that fell wildly outside their fields of expertise: politics.
Many of the most valuable conversations did not take place during the meeting hours, which were dominated by presentations, but at night, at taverns over glasses of Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch, or on the terraces at the Hotel Post, with their panoramic views of Austria’s Alpine foothills. The old guard was well represented—Roger Revelle, Syukuro Manabe, Thomas Malone—and its members had long lost their ability to be surprised by any of the dire predictions. But the newcomers were stunned to learn of the severity of the threat. Many had practical concerns. An Irish hydrology expert asked whether his country should reconsider the location of its dams. A Dutch seacoast engineer questioned the wisdom of rebuilding dikes that had been destroyed by recent floods. And the conference’s chairman, James Bruce, an unassuming, pragmatic hydrometeorologist from Ontario, posed a question that unsettled the conference.
Bruce was a minister of the Canadian environmental agency, a position that conferred on him the esteem that his American counterparts had forfeited when Reagan took the White House. Just before leaving for Villach, he had met with provincial dam and hydropower managers. OK, one of them said, you scientists win. You’ve convinced me that the climate is changing. Well, tell me how it’s changing. In twenty years, will the rain be falling somewhere else?
Bruce took this challenge to Villach: Well, gang, you’re the experts. What am I supposed to tell him? You guys have been talking about this stuff for years. People are hearing the message and they want practical guidance. So how do we, in the scientific world, begin a dialogue with the world of action?
The world of action. For a room of scientists who prided themselves as belonging to a specialized guild of monkish austerity, this was a startling provocation. On a bus tour of the countryside, commissioned by their Austrian hosts, Bruce sat with Roger Revelle, ignoring the Alps, speaking animatedly about the need for scientists to demand political remedies in times of existential crisis.
Within a couple of days, there were some notable conversions, none more striking than that of Thomas Malone, who just the previous year, speaking on behalf of the National Academy, had urged Congress not to take action on climate change. At the final assembly in Villach, he stood before his peers and atoned. “As a reversal of an opinion I held a year or so ago,” said Malone, “I believe it is timely to start on the long, tedious, and sensitive task of framing a convention on greenhouse gases, climate change, and energy.” There was some mumbling in the room. Malone was about as reliable a bellwether for the scientific establishment as there was; if he had come around to the notion that scientists should advocate for policy, anyone could join him without the risk of being considered a radical. James Bruce stood up and declared that it was time to begin serious consideration of “the costs and benefits of a radical shift away from fossil fuel consumption”—even if they were only a bunch of geophysicists.
The formal report ratified at Villach contained the most forceful warnings yet issued by a scientific body. Most major economic decisions undertaken by nations, it pointed out, were based on the assumption that past climate conditions were a reliable guide to future conditions. But the future would not resemble the past. Though some warming was inevitable, the scientists acknowledged, the extent of the disaster could be “profoundly affected” by aggressive, coordinated government policies. Fortunately they had established, with the ozone treaty, a new international model to accomplish just that. The balloon could be patched, the eggshell bandaged, the ceiling replastered. There was still time.
12.
The Ozone in October
Fall 1985–Summer 1986
It was fall 1985, and Curtis Moore, a Republican staff member on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, was telling Rafe Pomerance that the greenhouse effect wasn’t a problem.
With his last ounce of patience, Pomerance begged to disagree.
Yes, Moore clarified, of course, it was an existential problem—the fate of civilization depended on it, the oceans would boil, all of that. But it wasn’t a political problem. Know how you could tell? Political problems had solutions. And the climate issue had none. Without a solution—an obvious, attainable one—any policy could only fail. No elected politician desired to come within shouting distance of failure. So when it came to the dangers of despoili
ng our planet beyond the range of habitability, most politicians didn’t see a problem. Which meant that Pomerance had a very big problem indeed.
He had followed the rapid ascension of the ozone issue with the rueful admiration of a competitor. He was thrilled for its success—however inadvertently, the treaty would serve as the world’s first action to delay climate change. But it offered an especially acute challenge for Pomerance, who, after his yearlong hiatus, had become the nation’s first, and only, full-time global warming lobbyist. At the suggestion of Gordon MacDonald, Pomerance joined the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit begun by Gus Speth, formerly of Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality and a founder of the National Resources Defense Council. Unlike Friends of the Earth, WRI was not an activist organization; it occupied the nebulous intersection of politics, international diplomacy, and energy policy; its advisory board was populated by veteran environmentalists as well as executives from Dow Chemical and Exxon. Its mission was expansive enough to allow Pomerance to work without interference on developing policy solutions to global warming. Yet the only thing that anyone on Capitol Hill wanted to talk about was ozone.
That was Curtis Moore’s proposal: use ozone to revive carbon dioxide. The ozone hole had a solution—an international treaty, under the auspices of the United Nations, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train?
Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.
Moore came through. At his suggestion, Pomerance and Gus Speth met with Senator John Chafee, the Rhode Island Republican who chaired the Senate subcommittee on environmental pollution, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide. On June 10 and 11, 1986, F. Sherwood Rowland, NASA’s Robert Watson, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international CFC negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, George Woodwell, and Carl Wunsch, a Charney group alumnus, would testify about climate change. As soon as the first witness appeared, Pomerance realized that Moore’s instincts had been right. The ozone gang was good.
Robert Watson dimmed the lights in the hearing room. On a flimsy projection screen, he beamed footage with the staticky, low-budget quality of a slasher flick. It showed a bird’s-eye view of the Antarctic, partly obscured by spiraling clouds. The footage looked so realistic that Chafee had to ask whether it was an actual satellite image. Watson acknowledged that though created by satellite observations, it was, in fact, a simulation, a pictorial representation of the data.
An animation, to be precise. The three-minute time-lapse video showed every day of October—the month during which the ozone thinned most drastically—for seven consecutive years. (The other months, conveniently, were omitted.) A canny filmmaker had colored the “ozone hole” pink. As the years sped forward, the polar vortex madly gyroscoping, the pink smudge underwent a peristaltic expansion until it obscured most of Antarctica. The smudge turned mauve, representing an even thinner density of ozone, and then the dark purple of a hemorrhaging wound. The data represented in the video wasn’t new, but nobody had thought to represent it in this medium. If F. Sherwood Rowland’s earlier colorized images were crime-scene photographs, Watson’s video was a surveillance camera catching the killer red-handed.
As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer guaranteed a paroxysm of press coverage for the hearings. As he had feared, it caused many casual observers to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s World News Tonight, warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”
The confusion helped. For the first time since Changing Climate, global warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times). On the second day of the hearing, devoted to global warming, every seat in the gallery was occupied; four men squeezed together on each of the broad windowsills, their legs dangling, like schoolchildren.
Speth and Pomerance had proposed to Chafee that, instead of opening with the familiar call for more research, he demand action. But Chafee went further: he requested that the State Department begin negotiations on a global climate accord with the Soviet Union. It was the kind of proposal that would have been unthinkable even a year earlier, but the ozone melee had established a precedent for international environmental problems: high-level meetings among the world’s great powers, followed by a summit meeting to negotiate a framework for a binding treaty.
After three years of backsliding and silence from the federal government, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: a solution materialized, and a moral argument passionately articulated—by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” said Chafee. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”
The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked—by Woodwell, by a WRI colleague of Pomerance’s named Andrew Maguire, and by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never one hundred percent certain,” testified Theodore Rabb, a Princeton historian. “Even Newton has been proven to be wrong. That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” James Hansen, in his prepared statement, wrote that “evidence confirming the essence of the greenhouse theory is already overwhelming from a scientific point of view.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so widely accepted that nobody dared object.
The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, alarmed the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, ordinary people could be made to see it. They could watch it gestate on videotape. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Newspapers advised greater vigilance in the application of sunscreen. Americans felt that their lives, and the lives of their children, were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.
13.
Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.
Fall 1987–Spring 1988
Four years after Changing Climate, two years after a hole had torn open the sky, and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit the use of CFCs, the climate change corps was ready for a party. It had become conventional wisdom that the issue would follow ozone’s route of ascent into international law. The head of Reagan’s EPA, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, telling reporters that global warming would likely be the subject of a similar international agreement. The political momentum had flipped. Now that the ozone problem was on the verge of being “fixed,” climate issues had once again become a popular excuse for hearings on Capitol Hill—a noncontroversial subject that elicited concern, headlines, and expressions of moral grandstanding and American might. In 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Co
ngress; Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a formal national climate change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on October 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.
The mood was inspired by the host: John Topping, bighearted and curious, with the infectious enthusiasm of an autodidact, was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon, and an EPA official under Reagan. He had first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the EPA in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that only seven people out of the EPA’s thirteen-thousand-person staff were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined. Even sober, steady William Ruckelshaus, Reagan’s replacement for Anne Gorsuch as EPA administrator, had delivered a pair of speeches in 1984 acknowledging that a failure to reduce dependence on fossil fuels would lead to “a succession of unexpected and shattering crises” and “threaten all we hold dear.” After Topping left the administration, he founded a nonprofit organization, the Climate Institute, to unite scientists, politicians, and businesspeople to solve the problem. He didn’t have any difficulty raising $150,000 from BP America, General Electric, and the American Gas Association, contacts from his tenure at the EPA, to fund the conference. His industry friends were intrigued. If a guy like Topping thought this greenhouse business was important, they’d better see what it was all about.