200 and 400 parts per million. This period of relative climate stability coincided with the rise of agriculture and the development of civilization.
The fuse of the carbon bomb was truly lit in 1859, when Edwin Drake hit his gusher of an oil well in Pennsylvania and began the age of oil in America. When a barrel of crude oil was burned, it released about 317 kilograms of invisible carbon dioxide into the air. In 1890, 1.3 billion tons of carbon were released into the sky. Some of it went back into the trees, some of it went into the oceans, but some of it stayed in the atmosphere. In 1930, 3.86 billion tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere. In 1970, 14.53 billion tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere. It was joined by other industrial gases that wafted up from factories, refineries, feedlots, and fertilizer plants, gases like methane and nitrous oxide that were also invisible and seemingly harmless. Some of these gases blocked far more light than carbon, on the order of thirty to fifty times more. As more of these gases were released into the atmosphere, more heat would be trapped. This is incontrovertible.
In the 1950s, a chemist and oceanographer named Charles David Keeling installed an air monitor on top of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Its measurements showed that carbon was accumulating in the atmosphere. In 1959, carbon composed 316 parts per million in the atmosphere. In 1970, it composed 325 parts per million. In 1990, it was 354 parts per million. Concurrent with this discovery, scientists tested air samples that were trapped in tiny bubbles in the glaciers of Antarctica. This proved that during the early millennia of human existence, carbon levels remained in the narrow band between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Now that carbon levels exceeded that threshold, it raised troubling questions: What would the world’s climate be like at 360 parts per million? Or at 380? Or at 400? There was no certain answer.
In 1988, a group of scientists working with the United Nations formed a consortium called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which set out to synthesize the research on global climate change occurring around the world. Initially, the IPCC was very cautious and even seemed to downplay the potential risks from higher carbon concentrations. The panel said that more study was needed, and that no rash actions should be taken that might dampen the prosperity that came from burning fossil fuels. Each ensuing IPCC report, however, became more certain than the last. Carbon concentrations were increasing, which inevitably trapped more heat in the atmosphere. Humans were responsible for the increase. The future implications were unpredictable, but could be severe. The world could expect more dramatic rainfall events and bigger storms in part because warmer air held more moisture. Areas that were parched would become drier. Weather data showed that the world was already getting warmer, as would be predicted when greenhouse gases increased.
While the scientific community was in agreement on these facts, the American public was in doubt. This wasn’t accidental. As early as 1991, Charles Koch and other executives in the fossil fuel industry helped foster skepticism about the evidence of climate change. When George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a treaty to limit carbon emissions, the Cato Institute held a seminar in Washington called “Global Environmental Crises: Science or Politics?”
The seminar featured scientists who questioned the prevailing view that humankind’s carbon emissions caused the Earth to warm, including Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, Charles Koch’s alma mater. A brochure for the seminar featured a large-print quote from Lindzen in which he said: “The notion that global warming is a fact and will be catastrophic is drilled into people to the point where it seems surprising that anyone would question it, and yet, underlying it is very little evidence at all.”
The seminar was not a fringe event. Lindzen and other speakers at the conference were invited to join White House staffers in the Roosevelt Room while they were in town for the conference, according to an internal White House memo from Nancy G. Maynard, who worked for the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Maynard’s boss forwarded the invitation to Bush’s chief of staff, John H. Sununu, under the subject line “Alternative Perspectives on Global Warming.”
Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other firms spent millions of dollars to support the idea that there was an “alternative”