global warming. And a fuse.32
“BOY, IF THIS IS TRUE”: THE RISE OF CLIMATE ACTIVISM
The widening body of global-warming research started to connect with what would turn out to be the first generation of climate activists. For them, the focus was not scientific experiment but political action.
In 1973, on the Old Campus at Yale University, botanist George Woodwell delivered a global warming lecture. One of the people in the audience was an undergraduate named Fred Krupp. “Boy, if this is true,” Krupp remembers saying to himself, “we’re in a lot of trouble.” Krupp would become the president of the Environmental Defense Fund eleven years later, at age 30, and from there one of the foremost policy proponents for reducing carbon emissions .33
A few years later, in 1978, in Washington, D.C., Rafe Pomerance, president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, was reading an environmental study when one sentence caught his eye: increasing coal use could warm the earth. “This can’t be true,” Pomerance thought. He started researching the subject, and he soon caught up with a scientist named Gordon MacDonald, who had been a member of Richard Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality. After a two-hour discussion with MacDonald, Pomerance said, “If I set up briefings around town, will you do them?” MacDonald agreed, and they started making the rounds in Washington, D.C.
The president of the National Academy of Sciences, impressed by the briefing, set up a special task force under Jule Charney. Charney had moved from Princeton to MIT where, arguably, he had become America’s most prominent meteorologist. Issuing its report in 1979, the Charney Committee declared that the risk was very real. A few other influential studies came to similar conclusions, including one by the JASON committee, a panel of leading physicists and other scientists that advised the Department of Defense and other government agencies. It concluded that there was “incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change.” The scientists added that the ocean, “the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system,” was likely to slow observable climate change. The “JASONs,” as they were sometimes called, said that “a wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”34
The campaign “around town” led to highly attended Senate hearings in April 1980. The star of the hearing was Keeling’s Curve. After looking at a map presented by one witness that showed the East Coast of the United States inundated by rising sea waters, the committee chair, Senator Paul Tsongas from Massachusetts, commented with rising irony: “It means good-bye Miami, Corpus Christi . . . good-bye Boston, good-bye New Orleans, good-bye Charleston. . . . On the bright side, it means we can enjoy boating at the foot of the Capitol and fishing on the South Lawn.”35
One of the recipients of the MacDonald-Pomerance briefings was Gus Speth, chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality. Speth asked for a report short enough for policymakers. The authors were those at the forefront of global-warming study—Charles Keeling, Roger Revelle, George Woodwell, and Gordon MacDonald. They warned of “significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately.” In contrast to Arrhenius and Callendar, who had seen virtue in a warm climate, they were emphatic: “There appear to be very few clear advantages for man in such short-term alterations in climate.” They offered a four-point program : acknowledgment of the problem, energy conservation, reforestation—and lower carbon fuels. That last meant using natural gas instead of coal.36
Speth took the report to the White House and the Department of Energy. The reception was frosty. For at that moment the Carter administration—reeling from second oil shock, the Iranian Revolution, and natural gas shortages—was restricting natural gas use and promoting more coal.
Speth did not give up. He made the issue central to the 1981 annual report from the Council on Environmental Quality. But that was the end of the road, at least for the time being. For Jimmy Carter had already been defeated by Ronald Reagan in November 1980.37 But some environmental groups were beginning to take up climate as a core issue.
Under the Reagan administration, government money for climate research was reduced. No one knew this better than Charles Keeling. Though his funding was often precarious, the integrity of the carbon-monitoring project at Mauna Loa in Hawaii was preserved. Overall, though constrained, scientific research on climate did continue.
A key breakthrough in the science of climate change occurred in the 1980s with the