This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the
decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate
change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by
George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of
reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists,
activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many
readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close
they came to solving it. Jake Silverstein
PROLOGUE: The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. 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 odds of succeeding, according to a recent study
based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. 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 climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree
warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario.
Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most
coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. 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. 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.
whole article at
Leave a Reply