Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

Author:Nathaniel Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Global Warming & Climate Change, History, Science
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-04-09T03:00:00+00:00

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 Congress; 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.

Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate affair over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell, and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things.

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