It was understood that action would have to come immediately. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Reilly and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger the E.P.A. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the “greenhouse effect” - a metaphor dating to the early 1900s - was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. Almost nothing stood in our way - nothing except ourselves. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions - far closer than we’ve come since. Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?īecause in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert Polynesia swallowed by the sea the Colorado River thinned to a trickle the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum.
Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. The Paris climate agreement - the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 - hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution.
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