Aug 7, 2018 08:50 PM
https://undark.org/article/new-york-time...te-change/
EXCERPT: The New York Times Magazine has just published an ambitious and heavily-promoted issue entitled “Losing Earth,” which is entirely devoted to telling a single complicated story: How the world missed its window to address climate change. Nathaniel Rich’s historical narrative looks at the politicians, scientists, public officials, and others who, from 1979 to 1989, were central to raising the alarm on a subject that scientists had already been studying for years.
In revealing the choices they did and did not make, Rich pinpoints the markers that led us to today, in which the attempt to address climate change is a story of failure. [...] Today we’re in what Rich says is the “second chapter — call it The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.”
Thirty years ago [...] NASA climate scientist James Hansen warned that we were running out of time to address the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions. ‘‘Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,’’ he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.’’
Rich’s story starts even before that testimony, in 1979 when environmental activist Rafe Pomerance discovered mentions of the effect of rising carbon emissions on the future climate in a generally ignored EPA report on coal. He wondered why no one else seemed to be talking about it. From there, Rich unspools a detailed history of how NASA scientist James Hansen and a number of scientists, activists, and politicians, organized around global warming, and how others, namely President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff John Sununu, tried to scuttle progress. Notably, almost everyone in the story is a man with the exception of some peripheral characters [...] Rich concludes with the first major global conference [...] in 1989 [...] became the first in a very long series of meetings that have avoided taking binding action to slash emissions.
This all took place before partisan lines had calcified. Indeed, by today’s standards, there was unheard of agreement across party lines. George H.W. Bush’s EPA chief William Reilly and Republicans like Rhode Island Representative John Chafee were early leaders, even though today we mostly remember the role of then-Tennessee representative Al Gore, who has since become the embodiment of climate change activism.
The early criticisms of the story [...] zero in on Rich’s unwillingness to assign clear blame...
MORE: https://undark.org/article/new-york-time...te-change/
EXCERPT: The New York Times Magazine has just published an ambitious and heavily-promoted issue entitled “Losing Earth,” which is entirely devoted to telling a single complicated story: How the world missed its window to address climate change. Nathaniel Rich’s historical narrative looks at the politicians, scientists, public officials, and others who, from 1979 to 1989, were central to raising the alarm on a subject that scientists had already been studying for years.
In revealing the choices they did and did not make, Rich pinpoints the markers that led us to today, in which the attempt to address climate change is a story of failure. [...] Today we’re in what Rich says is the “second chapter — call it The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.”
Thirty years ago [...] NASA climate scientist James Hansen warned that we were running out of time to address the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions. ‘‘Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,’’ he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.’’
Rich’s story starts even before that testimony, in 1979 when environmental activist Rafe Pomerance discovered mentions of the effect of rising carbon emissions on the future climate in a generally ignored EPA report on coal. He wondered why no one else seemed to be talking about it. From there, Rich unspools a detailed history of how NASA scientist James Hansen and a number of scientists, activists, and politicians, organized around global warming, and how others, namely President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff John Sununu, tried to scuttle progress. Notably, almost everyone in the story is a man with the exception of some peripheral characters [...] Rich concludes with the first major global conference [...] in 1989 [...] became the first in a very long series of meetings that have avoided taking binding action to slash emissions.
This all took place before partisan lines had calcified. Indeed, by today’s standards, there was unheard of agreement across party lines. George H.W. Bush’s EPA chief William Reilly and Republicans like Rhode Island Representative John Chafee were early leaders, even though today we mostly remember the role of then-Tennessee representative Al Gore, who has since become the embodiment of climate change activism.
The early criticisms of the story [...] zero in on Rich’s unwillingness to assign clear blame...
MORE: https://undark.org/article/new-york-time...te-change/