Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (17 page)

When warnings of a second problem with the atmosphere grew loud and frequent, many people expected it to be solved as the ozone problem had been, with a clear, effective treaty enjoying widespread international support, led again by the United States. At least, they didn’t see why this wasn’t possible. But as global issues go, the ozone hole was in many ways unique: It had a single cause whose sources were few and easily identifiable, the consequences of inaction were easy to estimate, and a perfectly adequate replacement for CFCs already existed. With global climate change and the putative role of carbon dioxide in raising temperatures worldwide, none of the above was true. The sources are infinite: you emit carbon dioxide, and so do your dog and its fleas and the bacteria in your shower drain, not to mention your car and your furnace. And all the major questions – the consequences of global warming, how much of it is caused by human activity, even whether it’s happening at all – are still in the process of being answered.

FROM OZONE TO GREENHOUSE GASES

B
efore 1820, no one asked how the earth is warmed. It was in that year that Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier attacked the question of how the earth retains the sun’s heat instead of simply reflecting it back into space. Fourier had contracted myxedema – a disease that makes one feel perpetually cold – while serving in the
corps des savants
that accompanied Napoleon on his Egypt campaign. After his return to France, he wore an overcoat throughout the year and devoted much time to the study of how heat spreads. His conclusion was that while much heat does bounce back, the earth’s atmosphere traps some of it and re-reflects it back to the earth’s surface. He compared this to a giant bell jar whose dome is formed of clouds and gases that trap sufficient heat to make life possible. His article, ‘General Remarks on the Temperature of the Terrestrial Globe and Planetary Spaces,’ was published in 1824. At the time, it was not considered his best work and was forgotten until the end of the century.
 14 

In 1895, the Swedish physicist Svente Arrhenius, who had read Fourier’s work developed the first theoretical model for calculating the influence of carbon dioxide on the earth’s temperature.
 15 
His conclusion was that a decrease of about 40 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause temperatures to drop by 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (
7 – 9
degrees F) and trigger a new ice age. By the same token, a doubling of those levels would raise temperatures by 5 to 6 degrees (9-11 degrees F). He further estimated that it would take about three thousand years of burning fossil fuels to accomplish this doubling. To a man accustomed to the harsh Nordic winters of the Little Ice Age, ending about then, a long, gentle warming must have seemed a pleasant prospect.

A few years after Arrhenius published his calculations, Spindletop blew in, followed by the other giant oil field finds in Texas and Oklahoma. Henry Ford’s Model T displaced horses much faster than anyone had expected, while Edison’s electric light drove demand for electric power production. Fossil fuel-burning accelerated far faster than Arrhenius had anticipated, but no one was concerned with whether this might affect the weather. Except, that is, for George Callendar, who in 1938 published an article entitled, ‘The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.’
 16 
Based on data he had collected from two hundred weather stations around the world between 1880 and 1934, Callendar calculated that the earth had warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.55 C) in that time. He predicted that it would warm another 2 degrees (1.1 C) over the next century as a result of the continuing discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1956, after eighteen years of further data collecting, he published calculations showing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rising from 290 parts per million (ppm) in 1900 to 325 ppm in 1956. This level was very close to the 315 ppm that Charles Keeling, a young postdoctoral student at the California Institute of Technology announced the same year. These numbers and curves sparked a landmark article the following year by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, both of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who noted that ‘human beings are carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment by returning to the atmosphere within a few centuries the concentrated organic carbon stored in the earth over hundreds of millions of years.’
 17 
Keeling’s measurements over the next twenty years only underlined this point. From 315 ppm in 1956, the Keeling Curve climbed steadily to 365 ppm by 1997.
 18 

As the Keeling Curve rose, so did concern with its implications. Already sensitized to environmental hazards such as water pollution and pesticides, people began to take notice of the weather. Beginning in the 1960
s
, John McGowan of the Scripps Institution began to notice that the waters off the California coast were gradually warming and by 1995 were nearly 3 degrees F. warmer than in 1960. The ice cover on Mount Kenya began to disappear visibly around 1963 and had shrunk by 40 percent by 1987. Arctic summers grew cozier by 6 degrees F. over twenty years, and the glaciers in the Peruvian Andes tripled their rate of melting between 1960 and the early 1980
s
.
 19 
These portents stimulated a broad discussion of potential implications and policy measures. As early as 1965,
 20 
a White House report on environmental issues mentioned the possible consequences of global warming. In 1971, William Kellogg of the National Council on Atmospheric Research organized a conference in Stockholm on what he called ‘inadvertent climate modification.’
 21 

Over the next two decades, both analyses and signs multiplied. Writing in
Science
magazine in 1975, Columbia University’s Wallace S. Broecker predicted a substantial acceleration of the warming trend over the next ten years.
 22 
Two years later the National Academy of Sciences released a report entitled ‘Energy and Climate,’ which concluded that possible global warming should produce neither panic nor complacency, but intensified research. In the same year, William Kellogg and Margaret Mead published ‘The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering’
 23 
in which they called for a ‘law of the air’ whereby all nations would agree to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to some negotiated level. As the 1970
s
faded into the 1980
s
, the weather seemed bent on fulfilling the predictions. The rate of retreat of mid-latitude glaciers accelerated from 30 to 45 meters per year.
 24 
Toolik Lake at the base of the Brooks Range on Alaska’s frigid North Slope showed a 3-degree F (5.4 C) rise in summer temperatures between 1979 and 1994.
 25 
The arctic ice sheet shrank by 6 percent,
 26 
the snowline continued to retreat, and computer models of the atmosphere predicted yet more warming. In 1987, a conference sponsored by the United Nations, Canada, and the World Meteorological Society gathered 330 scientists and policy makers from forty-six nations who released a statement saying: ‘Humanity is conducting an enormous, unintended, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.’
 27 
They went on to urge the nations of the developed world to act immediately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But 1988 was the bell ringing year for global warming. For starters, it was the hottest year on record, topping three other years in the 1980
s
that had all briefly held the record. Sixty-nine U.S. cities recorded their highest one-day temperatures ever, as did Moscow. In Los Angeles, four hundred electric transformers blew up on a single day as the mercury hit 110 degrees F (43 C).
 28 
The Midwest suffered its worst drought since the Dust Bowl days, while Yellowstone National Park literally burned. In the midst of this holocaust, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, stood up before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and said: ‘The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.’ Hansen was 99-percent certain that current temperatures represented a real warming trend as opposed to natural variability, and added, ‘We’re loading the climate dice.’
 29 
Coming from an expert like Hansen in the august chambers of the U.S. Senate that statement can be said to have marked the real beginning of the battle over global warming. Meeting in Toronto later that interminable summer, the United Nations Environmental Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and launched preparations for a global Conference on Environment and Development (that would become known as the Earth Summit) to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. It would be one of the seminal meetings of the last decade of the twentieth century.

To comprehend what did and didn’t happen at Rio, you need to understand some of the key forces and attitudes that were developing in the late 1980
s
and early 1990
s
. One key factor was the debate over the science. While no one disputed Keeling’s data on rising carbon content in the atmosphere, there was much debate about the effect. On the one hand were those like Hansen, who drew an analogy with the experience of the ozone hole. In that case, actual measurement data had confirmed earlier scientific predictions, and steps had been taken immediately to fix the problem through internationally agreed reductions of CFC emissions. Here again, these people argued, the unusual weather is demonstrating the validity of scientific theory, and something dramatic and similar to the Montreal Protocol needs to be done now. On the other hand were people like Richard Lindzen, a climatologist from M.I.T., who argued that cause and effect were not so clear nor was the future so easily forecast.
 30 
In the first place, many of the recent climatic events were the ‘highest temperature since…’ or ‘the worst storm since…’ But ‘since’ meant there had been an earlier dramatic event before the accumulation of atmospheric carbon and the supposed onset of warming. Moreover, a period of warming greater than today’s had occurred in the Middle Ages, when the Vikings settled in Iceland and Greenland. This had been followed by the Little Ice Age of about 1350-1850 and then by renewed warming, all without greenhouse gas emissions. Even worse, meteorologists had recorded a distinct
cooling between
1940 and 1970, even though, according to the theory, this should have been a time of accelerated warming. It had also long been known that physical events, such as the wobble of the earth’s orbit and the dimming and brightening of the sun, affect temperature and climate. Might these be partly or totally responsible for the changes? Then there was the fact that while surface records showed warming, weather balloons showed no change in atmospheric temperatures at high altitudes. To address these issues, the scientists of the IPCC built computer models to simulate the climate.

The first report of the IPCC, issued in 1990, concluded with certainty that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases were increasing. It forecast that under a ‘business as usual’ scenario the twenty-first century would see a 0.3 degree C (0.54 F) increase in temperature per decade along with a sea-level rise of 6 centimeters per decade. Thus at the end of the twenty-first century average temperatures would be 3 – 4 degrees C (5.4-7.2 degrees F) higher than at present, and sea levels would have risen 60-70 centimeters, about 2 feet. The IPCC went on to conclude that to stabilize current concentrations of carbon dioxide, present greenhouse gas emissions would have to be cut by 60-80 percent, meaning essentially a shutdown of most significant industry and transportation.
 31 
Although this conclusion had the authority of two thousand of the world’s leading scientists behind it, there was a problem. The computer said there should already have been a warming over the last one hundred years of about 1 degree C (1.8 F). But the actual warming had been measured at about 0.5 degrees C (0.9 F). Moreover, the computer could not explain the cooling from 1940 to 1970. The IPCC acknowledged it had trouble simulating cloud behavior in its computer and that there were levels of detail the computer simply couldn’t reach. The battle of the scientists raged on.

Meanwhile, environmentalism was on the rise in Europe. Although Europe had no history of environmentalism similar to that of the United States, London’s killer fog of 1952 had resulted in clean air legislation in 1956, and people on the Continent were noticing that the rivers and streams as well as the air were more and more foul. I was living in the Netherlands in the late 1960
s
and remember discussions in the Dutch press about the poor quality of the Rhine River water when it finally reached Rotterdam after traversing the length of Europe. Perhaps more importantly, acid rain began to become a problem in Europe as it was in the United States. In April 1974, the acidity of the rain in Scotland was measured at 1500 times normal.
 32 
By 1982, 7 percent of the trees in Germany’s Black Forest were dead or dying, and within three years the figure had climbed to 50 percent.
 33 
In Sweden, four thousand lakes were dead by 1980, and another five thousand were dying.
 34 
Environmental concerns led France to create a Ministry of the Environment in 1971.
 35  
Other European countries soon followed suit.

The growing public preoccupation with environmental issues dovetailed with another political trend. Although historically Judeo-Christian, much of Europe had embraced the godless religions of communism, fascism, and socialism in the twentieth century. Fascism, of course, failed in World War II, and by the 1970
s
communism was failing and socialism had been so co-opted by the mainstream bourgeoisie that it differed little from conservatism. The anticapitalist left had lost its home and its cause. It found the Green cause. Environmentalism was perfect in many ways. Protecting the environment automatically aligned one with the good. It legitimized being anticorporate and antiglobalization, and, of course, it required big government and regulation to impose a whole new lifestyle on western society. Much of the European left embraced the fledgling Green movement, and it quickly became a significant political force. Greens entered the Swiss parliament in 1979 and four years later became a significant force in the German parliament with nearly 6 percent of the national vote. Eventually the German Greens would form part of Germany’s ruling coalition and hold the post of foreign minister in the person of Joshka Fisher, a former radical left street demonstrator. This strain of environmentalism was much more ideological than the mainstream American environmental groups, and less interested in practical solutions than in grand revolutionary agendas and policies. The environmental ministries in most European countries came to be dominated by the views of the Greens if not by the Greens themselves. It was they who were the chief representatives of Europe in the various UN working bodies and at Rio.