narrative essay about global warming

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

Essay on Global Warming

Updated on
Apr 25, 2024

Being able to write an essay is an integral part of mastering any language. Essays form an integral part of many academic and scholastic exams like the SAT , and UPSC amongst many others. It is a crucial evaluative part of English proficiency tests as well like IELTS , TOEFL , etc. Major essays are meant to emphasize public issues of concern that can have significant consequences on the world. To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we must first examine the many factors that influence the planet’s temperature and what this implies for the world’s future. Here’s an unbiased look at the essay on Global Warming and other essential related topics.

Short Essay on Global Warming and Climate Change?

Since the industrial and scientific revolutions, Earth’s resources have been gradually depleted. Furthermore, the start of the world’s population’s exponential expansion is particularly hard on the environment. Simply put, as the population’s need for consumption grows, so does the use of natural resources , as well as the waste generated by that consumption.

Climate change has been one of the most significant long-term consequences of this. Climate change is more than just the rise or fall of global temperatures; it also affects rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, and other factors. It has an impact on all major life groupings on the planet.

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century, primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels . The greenhouse gases consist of methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and chlorofluorocarbons. The weather prediction has been becoming more complex with every passing year, with seasons more indistinguishable, and the general temperatures hotter.

The number of hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, etc., has risen steadily since the onset of the 21st century. The supervillain behind all these changes is Global Warming. The name is quite self-explanatory; it means the rise in the temperature of the Earth.

What are the Causes of Global Warming?

According to recent studies, many scientists believe the following are the primary four causes of global warming:

Deforestation
Greenhouse emissions
Carbon emissions per capita

Extreme global warming is causing natural disasters , which can be seen all around us. One of the causes of global warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases that become trapped on the earth’s surface, causing the temperature to rise. Similarly, volcanoes contribute to global warming by spewing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere.

The increase in population is one of the major causes of Global Warming. This increase in population also leads to increased air pollution . Automobiles emit a lot of CO2, which remains in the atmosphere. This increase in population is also causing deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

The earth’s surface emits energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat, keeping the balance with the incoming energy. Global warming depletes the ozone layer, bringing about the end of the world. There is a clear indication that increased global warming will result in the extinction of all life on Earth’s surface.

Also Read: Land, Soil, Water, Natural Vegetation, and Wildlife Resources

Solutions for Global Warming

Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates emit more carbon than the average citizen. Nonetheless, activism and community effort are the only viable ways to slow the worsening effects of global warming. Furthermore, at the state or government level, world leaders must develop concrete plans and step-by-step programmes to ensure that no further harm is done to the environment in general.

Although we are almost too late to slow the rate of global warming, finding the right solution is critical. Everyone, from individuals to governments, must work together to find a solution to Global Warming. Some of the factors to consider are pollution control, population growth, and the use of natural resources.

One very important contribution you can make is to reduce your use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of global warming, and recycling it takes years. Another factor to consider is deforestation, which will aid in the control of global warming. More tree planting should be encouraged to green the environment. Certain rules should also govern industrialization. Building industries in green zones that affect plants and species should be prohibited.

Effects of Global Warming

Global warming is a real problem that many people want to disprove to gain political advantage. However, as global citizens, we must ensure that only the truth is presented in the media.

This decade has seen a significant impact from global warming. The two most common phenomena observed are glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage. Glaciers are rapidly melting. These are clear manifestations of climate change.

Another significant effect of global warming is the rise in sea level. Flooding is occurring in low-lying areas as a result of sea-level rise. Many countries have experienced extreme weather conditions. Every year, we have unusually heavy rain, extreme heat and cold, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Similarly, as global warming continues, marine life is being severely impacted. This is causing the extinction of marine species as well as other problems. Furthermore, changes are expected in coral reefs, which will face extinction in the coming years. These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming.

Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Here are some sample essays on Global Warming:

Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 – 150 words

Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can’t be ignored and steps have to be taken to tackle the situation globally. The average temperature is constantly rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the last few years.

The best method to prevent future damage to the earth, cutting down more forests should be banned and Afforestation should be encouraged. Start by planting trees near your homes and offices, participate in events, and teach the importance of planting trees. It is impossible to undo the damage but it is possible to stop further harm.

Essay on Global Warming in 250 Words

Over a long period, it is observed that the temperature of the earth is increasing. This affected wildlife, animals, humans, and every living organism on earth. Glaciers have been melting, and many countries have started water shortages, flooding, and erosion and all this is because of global warming.

No one can be blamed for global warming except for humans. Human activities such as gases released from power plants, transportation, and deforestation have increased gases such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere. The main question is how can we control the current situation and build a better world for future generations. It starts with little steps by every individual.

Start using cloth bags made from sustainable materials for all shopping purposes, instead of using high-watt lights use energy-efficient bulbs, switch off the electricity, don’t waste water, abolish deforestation and encourage planting more trees. Shift the use of energy from petroleum or other fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Instead of throwing out the old clothes donate them to someone so that it is recycled.

Donate old books, don’t waste paper. Above all, spread awareness about global warming. Every little thing a person does towards saving the earth will contribute in big or small amounts. We must learn that 1% effort is better than no effort. Pledge to take care of Mother Nature and speak up about global warming.

Essay on Global Warming in 500 Words

Global warming isn’t a prediction, it is happening! A person denying it or unaware of it is in the most simple terms complicit. Do we have another planet to live on? Unfortunately, we have been bestowed with this one planet only that can sustain life yet over the years we have turned a blind eye to the plight it is in. Global warming is not an abstract concept but a global phenomenon occurring ever so slowly even at this moment. Global Warming is a phenomenon that is occurring every minute resulting in a gradual increase in the Earth’s overall climate. Brought about by greenhouse gases that trap the solar radiation in the atmosphere, global warming can change the entire map of the earth, displacing areas, flooding many countries, and destroying multiple lifeforms. Extreme weather is a direct consequence of global warming but it is not an exhaustive consequence. There are virtually limitless effects of global warming which are all harmful to life on earth. The sea level is increasing by 0.12 inches per year worldwide. This is happening because of the melting of polar ice caps because of global warming. This has increased the frequency of floods in many lowland areas and has caused damage to coral reefs. The Arctic is one of the worst-hit areas affected by global warming. Air quality has been adversely affected and the acidity of the seawater has also increased causing severe damage to marine life forms. Severe natural disasters are brought about by global warming which has had dire effects on life and property. As long as mankind produces greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. The consequences are felt at a much smaller scale which will increase to become drastic shortly. The power to save the day lies in the hands of humans, the need is to seize the day. Energy consumption should be reduced on an individual basis. Fuel-efficient cars and other electronics should be encouraged to reduce the wastage of energy sources. This will also improve air quality and reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is an evil that can only be defeated when fought together. It is better late than never. If we all take steps today, we will have a much brighter future tomorrow. Global warming is the bane of our existence and various policies have come up worldwide to fight it but that is not enough. The actual difference is made when we work at an individual level to fight it. Understanding its import now is crucial before it becomes an irrevocable mistake. Exterminating global warming is of utmost importance and each one of us is as responsible for it as the next.

Also Read: Essay on Library: 100, 200 and 250 Words

Essay on Global Warming UPSC

Always hear about global warming everywhere, but do we know what it is? The evil of the worst form, global warming is a phenomenon that can affect life more fatally. Global warming refers to the increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of various human activities. The planet is gradually getting hotter and threatening the existence of lifeforms on it. Despite being relentlessly studied and researched, global warming for the majority of the population remains an abstract concept of science. It is this concept that over the years has culminated in making global warming a stark reality and not a concept covered in books. Global warming is not caused by one sole reason that can be curbed. Multifarious factors cause global warming most of which are a part of an individual’s daily existence. Burning of fuels for cooking, in vehicles, and for other conventional uses, a large amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and methane amongst many others is produced which accelerates global warming. Rampant deforestation also results in global warming as lesser green cover results in an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas. Finding a solution to global warming is of immediate importance. Global warming is a phenomenon that has to be fought unitedly. Planting more trees can be the first step that can be taken toward warding off the severe consequences of global warming. Increasing the green cover will result in regulating the carbon cycle. There should be a shift from using nonrenewable energy to renewable energy such as wind or solar energy which causes less pollution and thereby hinder the acceleration of global warming. Reducing energy needs at an individual level and not wasting energy in any form is the most important step to be taken against global warming. The warning bells are tolling to awaken us from the deep slumber of complacency we have slipped into. Humans can fight against nature and it is high time we acknowledged that. With all our scientific progress and technological inventions, fighting off the negative effects of global warming is implausible. We have to remember that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our future generations and the responsibility lies on our shoulders to bequeath them a healthy planet for life to exist.

Climate Change and Global Warming Essay

Global Warming and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated with each other and are two issues of major concern worldwide. Greenhouse gases released such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere cause Global Warming which leads to climate change. Black holes have started to form in the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays.

Human activities have created climate change and global warming. Industrial waste and fumes are the major contributors to global warming.

Another factor affecting is the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and also one of the reasons for climate change. Global warming has resulted in shrinking mountain glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic and causing climate change. Switching from the use of fossil fuels to energy sources like wind and solar.

When buying any electronic appliance buy the best quality with energy savings stars. Don’t waste water and encourage rainwater harvesting in your community.

Tips to Write an Essay

Writing an effective essay needs skills that few people possess and even fewer know how to implement. While writing an essay can be an assiduous task that can be unnerving at times, some key pointers can be inculcated to draft a successful essay. These involve focusing on the structure of the essay, planning it out well, and emphasizing crucial details. Mentioned below are some pointers that can help you write better structure and more thoughtful essays that will get across to your readers:

Prepare an outline for the essay to ensure continuity and relevance and no break in the structure of the essay
Decide on a thesis statement that will form the basis of your essay. It will be the point of your essay and help readers understand your contention
Follow the structure of an introduction, a detailed body followed by a conclusion so that the readers can comprehend the essay in a particular manner without any dissonance.
Make your beginning catchy and include solutions in your conclusion to make the essay insightful and lucrative to read
Reread before putting it out and add your flair to the essay to make it more personal and thereby unique and intriguing for readers

Also Read: I Love My India Essay: 100 and 500+ Words in English for School Students

Ans. Both natural and man-made factors contribute to global warming. The natural one also contains methane gas, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases. Deforestation, mining, livestock raising, burning fossil fuels, and other man-made causes are next.

Ans. The government and the general public can work together to stop global warming. Trees must be planted more often, and deforestation must be prohibited. Auto usage needs to be curbed, and recycling needs to be promoted.

Ans. Switching to renewable energy sources , adopting sustainable farming, transportation, and energy methods, and conserving water and other natural resources.

Relevant Blogs

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu.

Digvijay Singh

Having 2+ years of experience in educational content writing, withholding a Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Science and a strong interest in writing educational content for students enrolled in domestic and foreign study abroad programmes. I believe in offering a distinct viewpoint to the table, to help students deal with the complexities of both domestic and foreign educational systems. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, I aim to inspire my readers to embark on their educational journeys, whether abroad or at home, and to make the most of every learning opportunity that comes their way.

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

The New York Times

Magazine | losing earth: the decade we almost stopped climate change, losing earth: the decade we almost stopped climate change.

By NATHANIEL RICH AUG. 1, 2018

We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts.

Losing Earth

Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save the planet.

The science of climate change was settled. The world was ready to act.

Almost nothing stood in our way — except ourselves.

By Nathaniel Rich Photographs and Videos by George Steinmetz AUG. 1, 2018

Editor’s Note

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

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.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the “greenhouse effect” — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the “American way of life” in order to drastically increase global carbon emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that “the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division.” If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously that it was “urgently necessary” to act. Four months later, at the Group of 7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world’s seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change’s 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.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.

Part One 1979–1982

1. ‘this is the whole banana’ spring 1979.

The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal, bound in a coal-black cover with beige lettering — one of many such reports that lay in uneven piles around Pomerance’s windowless office on the first floor of the Capitol Hill townhouse that, in the late 1970s, served as the Washington headquarters of Friends of the Earth. In the final paragraph of a chapter on environmental regulation, the coal report’s authors noted that the continued use of fossil fuels might, within two or three decades, bring about “significant and damaging” changes to the global atmosphere.

Pomerance paused, startled, over the orphaned paragraph. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. He reread it. It made no sense to him. Pomerance was not a scientist; he graduated from Cornell 11 years earlier with a degree in history. He had the tweedy appearance of an undernourished doctoral student emerging at dawn from the stacks. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thickish mustache that wilted disapprovingly over the corners of his mouth, though his defining characteristic was his gratuitous height, 6 feet 4 inches, which seemed to embarrass him; he stooped over to accommodate his interlocutors. He had an active face prone to breaking out in wide, even maniacal grins, but in composure, as when he read the coal pamphlet, it projected concern. He struggled with technical reports. He proceeded as a historian might: cautiously, scrutinizing the source material, reading between the lines. When that failed, he made phone calls, often to the authors of the reports, who tended to be surprised to hear from him. Scientists, he had found, were not in the habit of fielding questions from political lobbyists. They were not in the habit of thinking about politics.

The reporting and photography for this project were supported by a major grant from the Pulitzer Center, which has also created lesson plans to bring the climate issue to students everywhere.

Pomerance had one big question about the coal report. If the burning of coal, oil and natural gas could invite global catastrophe, why had nobody told him about it? If anyone in Washington — if anyone in the United States — should have been aware of such a danger, it was Pomerance. As the deputy legislative director of Friends of the Earth, the wily, pugnacious nonprofit that David Brower helped found after resigning from the Sierra Club a decade earlier, Pomerance was one of the nation’s most connected environmental activists. That he was as easily accepted in the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building as at Earth Day rallies might have had something to do with the fact that he was a Morgenthau — the great-grandson of Henry Sr., Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; great-nephew of Henry Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary; second cousin to Robert, district attorney for Manhattan. Or perhaps it was just his charisma — voluble, energetic and obsessive, he seemed to be everywhere, speaking with everyone, in a very loud voice, at once. His chief obsession was air. After working as an organizer for welfare rights, he spent the second half of his 20s laboring to protect and expand the Clean Air Act, the comprehensive law regulating air pollution. That led him to the problem of acid rain, and the coal report.

He showed the unsettling paragraph to his office mate, Betsy Agle. Had she ever heard of the “greenhouse effect”? Was it really possible that human beings were overheating the planet?

Agle shrugged. She hadn’t heard about it, either.

That might have been the end of it, had Agle not greeted Pomerance in the office a few mornings later holding a copy of a newspaper forwarded by Friends of the Earth’s Denver office. Isn’t this what you were talking about the other day? she asked.

Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged. Pomerance hadn’t heard of MacDonald, but he knew all about the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats. The Jasons’ activities had been a secret until the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed their plan to festoon the Ho Chi Minh Trail with motion sensors that signaled to bombers. After the furor that followed — protesters set MacDonald’s garage on fire — the Jasons began to use their powers for peace instead of war.

There was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.

In the decade since then, MacDonald had been alarmed to see humankind begin in earnest to weaponize weather — not out of malice, but unwittingly. During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035. The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.

The Jasons sent the report to dozens of scientists in the United States and abroad; to industry groups like the National Coal Association and the Electric Power Research Institute; and within the government, to the National Academy of Sciences, the Commerce Department, the E.P.A., NASA, the Pentagon, the N.S.A., every branch of the military, the National Security Council and the White House.

Pomerance read about the atmospheric crisis in a state of shock that swelled briskly into outrage. “This,” he told Betsy Agle, “is the whole banana.”

Gordon MacDonald worked at the federally funded Mitre Corporation, a think tank that works with agencies throughout the government. His title was senior research analyst, which was another way of saying senior science adviser to the national-intelligence community. After a single phone call, Pomerance, a former Vietnam War protester and conscientious objector, drove several miles on the Beltway to a group of anonymous white office buildings that more closely resembled the headquarters of a regional banking firm than the solar plexus of the American military-industrial complex. He was shown into the office of a brawny, soft-spoken man in blocky, horn-rimmed frames, who extended a hand like a bear’s paw.

“I’m glad you’re interested in this,” MacDonald said, sizing up the young activist.

“How could I not be?” Pomerance said. “How could anyone not be?”

MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.

MacDonald spoke for two hours. Pomerance was appalled. “If I set up briefings with some people on the Hill,” he asked MacDonald, “will you tell them what you just told me?”

Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging. The men settled into a routine, with MacDonald explaining the science and Pomerance adding the exclamation points. They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.

Press’s office was in the Old Executive Office Building, the granite fortress that stands on the White House grounds just paces away from the West Wing. Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting. He decided to let MacDonald do all the talking. There was no need to emphasize to Press and his lieutenants that this was an issue of profound national significance. The hushed mood in the office told him that this was already understood.

To explain what the carbon-dioxide problem meant for the future, MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.

Consumption increased beyond anything the Swedish chemist could have imagined. Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.

MacDonald’s voice was calm but authoritative, his powerful, heavy hands conveying the force of his argument. He was a geophysicist trapped in the body of an offensive lineman — he had turned down a football scholarship to Rice in order to attend Harvard — and seemed miscast as a preacher of atmospheric physics and existential doom. His audience listened in bowed silence. Pomerance couldn’t read them. Political bureaucrats were skilled at hiding their opinions. Pomerance wasn’t. He shifted restlessly in his chair, glancing between MacDonald and the government suits, trying to see whether they grasped the shape of the behemoth that MacDonald was describing.

MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions. A young geochemist named Charles David Keeling charted the data. Keeling’s graph came to be known as the Keeling curve, though it more closely resembled a jagged lightning bolt hurled toward the firmament. MacDonald had a habit of tracing the Keeling curve in the air, his thick forefinger jabbing toward the ceiling.

After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.

“What would you have us do?” Press asked.

The president’s plan, in the wake of the Saudi oil crisis, to promote solar energy — he had gone so far as to install 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House to heat his family’s water — was a good start, MacDonald thought. But Jimmy Carter’s plan to stimulate production of synthetic fuels — gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands — was a dangerous idea. Nuclear power, despite the recent tragedy at Three Mile Island, should be expanded. But even natural gas and ethanol were preferable to coal. There was no way around it: Coal production would ultimately have to end.

The president’s advisers asked respectful questions, but Pomerance couldn’t tell whether they were persuaded. The men all stood and shook hands, and Press led MacDonald and Pomerance out of his office. After they emerged from the Old Executive Office Building onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Pomerance asked MacDonald what he thought would happen.

Knowing Frank as I do, MacDonald said, I really couldn’t tell you.

In the days that followed, Pomerance grew uneasy. Until this point, he had fixated on the science of the carbon-dioxide issue and its possible political ramifications. But now that his meetings on Capitol Hill had concluded, he began to question what all this might mean for his own future. His wife, Lenore, was eight months pregnant; was it ethical, he wondered, to bring a child onto a planet that before much longer could become inhospitable to life? And he wondered why it had fallen to him, a 32-year-old lobbyist without scientific training, to bring greater attention to this crisis.

Finally, weeks later, MacDonald called to tell him that Press had taken up the issue. On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

Pomerance was amazed by how much momentum had built in such a short time. Scientists at the highest levels of government had known about the dangers of fossil-fuel combustion for decades. Yet they had produced little besides journal articles, academic symposiums, technical reports. Nor had any politician, journalist or activist championed the issue. That, Pomerance figured, was about to change. If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.

2. The Whimsies of The Invisible World Spring 1979

There was a brown velvet love seat in the living room of James and Anniek Hansen, under a bright window looking out on Morningside Park in Manhattan, that nobody ever sat in. Erik, their 2-year-old son, was forbidden to go near it. The ceiling above the couch sagged ominously, as if pregnant with some alien life form, and the bulge grew with each passing week. Jim promised Anniek that he would fix it, which was only fair, because it had been on his insistence that they gave up the prospect of a prewar apartment in Spuyten Duyvil overlooking the Hudson and moved from Riverdale to this two-story walk-up with crumbling walls, police-siren lullabies and gravid ceiling. Jim had resented the 45-minute commute to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan and complained that such a gross waste of his time would soon be unsustainable, once the Pioneer spacecraft reached Venus and began to beam back data. But even after the Hansens moved within a few blocks of the institute, Jim couldn’t make time for the ceiling, and after four months it finally burst, releasing a confetti of browned pipes and splintered wood.

Jim repeated his vow to fix the ceiling as soon as he had a moment free from work. Anniek held him to his word, though it required her to live with a hole in her ceiling until Thanksgiving — seven months of plaster dust powdering the love seat.

Another promise Jim made to Anniek: He would make it home for dinner every night by 7 p.m. By 8:30, however, he was back at his calculations. Anniek did not begrudge him his deep commitment to his work; it was one of the things she loved about him. Still, it baffled her that the subject of his obsession should be the atmospheric conditions of a planet more than 24 million miles away. It baffled Jim, too. His voyage to Venus from Denison, Iowa, the fifth child of a diner waitress and an itinerant farmer turned bartender, had been a series of bizarre twists of fate over which he claimed no agency. It was just something that happened to him.

Hansen figured he was the only scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who, as a child, did not dream of outer space. He dreamed only of baseball. On clear nights, his transistor radio picked up the broadcast of the Kansas City Blues, the New York Yankees’ AAA affiliate. Every morning, he cut out the box scores, pasted them into a notebook and tallied statistics. Hansen found comfort in numbers and equations. He majored in math and physics at the University of Iowa, but he never would have taken an interest in celestial matters were it not for the unlikely coincidence of two events during the year he graduated: the eruption of a volcano in Bali and a total eclipse of the moon.

On the night of Dec. 30, 1963 — whipping wind, 12 degrees below zero — Hansen accompanied his astronomy professor to a cornfield far from town. They set a telescope in an old corncrib and, between 2 and 8 in the morning, made continuous photoelectric recordings of the eclipse, pausing only when the extension cord froze and when they dashed to the car for a few minutes to avoid frostbite.

During an eclipse, the moon resembles a tangerine or, if the eclipse is total, a drop of blood. But this night, the moon vanished altogether. Hansen made the mystery the subject of his master’s thesis, concluding that the moon had been obscured by the dust erupted into the atmosphere by Mount Agung, on the other side of the planet from his corncrib, six months earlier. The discovery led to his fascination with the influence of invisible particles on the visible world. You could not make sense of the visible world until you understood the whimsies of the invisible one.

One of the leading authorities on the invisible world happened to be teaching then at Iowa: James Van Allen made the first major discovery of the space age, identifying the two doughnut-shaped regions of convulsing particles that circle Earth, now known as the Van Allen belts. At Van Allen’s prodding, Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.

Anniek expected Jim’s professional life to resume some semblance of normality once the data from Venus had been collected and analyzed. But shortly after Pioneer entered Venus’s atmosphere, Hansen came home from the office in an uncharacteristic fervor — with an apology. The prospect of two or three more years of intense work had sprung up before him. NASA was expanding its study of Earth’s atmospheric conditions. Hansen had already done some work on Earth’s atmosphere for Jule Charney at the Goddard Institute, helping to develop computerized weather models. Now Hansen would have an opportunity to apply to Earth the lessons he had learned from Venus.

We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. These digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped forward to reveal the future.

Anniek’s disappointment — another several years of distraction, stress, time spent apart from family — was tempered, if only slightly, by the high strain of Jim’s enthusiasm. She thought she understood it. Does this mean, she asked, that you’ll able to predict weather more accurately?

Yes, Jim said. Something like that.

3. Between Catastrophe and Chaos July 1979

The scientists summoned by Jule Charney to judge the fate of civilization arrived on July 23, 1979, with their wives, children and weekend bags at a three-story mansion in Woods Hole, on the southwestern spur of Cape Cod. They would review all the available science and decide whether the White House should take seriously Gordon MacDonald’s prediction of a climate apocalypse. The Jasons had predicted a warming of two or three degrees Celsius by the middle of the 21st century, but like Roger Revelle before them, they emphasized their reasons for uncertainty. Charney’s scientists were asked to quantify that uncertainty. They had to get it right: Their conclusion would be delivered to the president. But first they would hold a clambake.

They gathered with their families on a bluff overlooking Quissett Harbor and took turns tossing mesh produce bags stuffed with lobster, clams and corn into a bubbling caldron. While the children scrambled across the rolling lawn, the scientists mingled with a claque of visiting dignitaries, whose status lay somewhere between chaperone and client — men from the Departments of State, Energy, Defense and Agriculture; the E.P.A.; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They exchanged pleasantries and took in the sunset. It was a hot day, high 80s, but the harbor breeze was salty and cool. It didn’t look like the dawning of an apocalypse. The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.

The hierarchy was made visible during the workshop sessions, held in the carriage house next door: The scientists sat at tables arranged in a rectangle, while their federal observers sat along the room’s perimeter, taking in the action as at a theater in the round. The first two days of meetings didn’t make very good theater, however, as the scientists reviewed the basic principles of the carbon cycle, ocean circulation, radiative transfer. On the third day, Charney introduced a new prop: a black speaker, attached to a telephone. He dialed, and Jim Hansen answered.

Charney called Hansen because he had grasped that in order to determine the exact range of future warming, his group would have to venture into the realm of the Mirror Worlds. Jule Charney himself had used a general circulation model to revolutionize weather prediction. But Hansen was one of just a few modelers who had studied the effects of carbon emissions. When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.

In the carriage house, the disembodied voice of Jim Hansen explained, in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, how his model weighed the influences of clouds, oceans and snow on warming. The older scientists interrupted, shouting questions; when they did not transmit through the telephone, Charney repeated them in a bellow. The questions kept coming, often before their younger respondent could finish his answers, and Hansen wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier for him to drive the five hours and meet with them in person.

Among Charney’s group was Akio Arakawa, a pioneer of computer modeling. On the final night at Woods Hole, Arakawa stayed up in his motel room with printouts from the models by Hansen and Manabe blanketing his double bed. The discrepancy between the models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.

The publication of Jule Charney’s report, “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,” several months later was not accompanied by a banquet, a parade or even a news conference. Yet within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius. The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.

The Charney report left Jim Hansen with more urgent questions. Three degrees would be nightmarish, and unless carbon emissions ceased suddenly, three degrees would be only the beginning. The real question was whether the warming trend could be reversed. Was there time to act? And how would a global commitment to cease burning fossil fuels come about, exactly? Who had the power to make such a thing happen? Hansen didn’t know how to begin to answer these questions. But he would learn.

4. ‘A Very Aggressive Defensive Program’ Summer 1979-Summer 1980

After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.

A senior researcher named Henry Shaw had argued that the company needed a deeper understanding of the issue in order to influence future legislation that might restrict carbon-dioxide emissions. “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”

Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.

The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists. What was new, in 1957, was the effort to quantify what percentage of emissions had been contributed by the oil-and-gas industry.

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas. It was “ironic,” the study’s authors noted, that politicians, regulators and environmentalists fixated on local incidents of air pollution that were immediately observable, while the climate crisis, whose damage would be of far greater severity and scale, went entirely unheeded.

The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried? Besides, as the National Petroleum Council put it in 1972, changes in the climate would probably not be apparent “until at least the turn of the century.” The industry had enough urgent crises: antitrust legislation introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy; concerns about the health effects of gasoline; battles over the Clean Air Act; and the financial shock of benzene regulation, which increased the cost of every gallon of gas sold in America. Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?

But the Charney report had changed industry’s cost-benefit calculus. Now there was a formal consensus about the nature of the crisis. As Henry Shaw emphasized in his conversations with Exxon’s executives, the cost of inattention would rise in step with the Keeling curve.

Wallace Broecker did not think much of one of Exxon’s proposals for its new carbon-dioxide program: testing the corked air in vintage bottles of French wine to demonstrate how much carbon levels had increased over time. But he did help his colleague Taro Takahashi with a more ambitious experiment conducted onboard one of Exxon’s largest supertankers, the Esso Atlantic, to determine how much carbon the oceans could absorb before coughing it back into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the graduate student installed on the tanker botched the job, and the data came back a mess.

Shaw was running out of time. In 1978, an Exxon colleague circulated an internal memo warning that humankind had only five to 10 years before policy action would be necessary. But Congress seemed ready to act a lot sooner than that. On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem. That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.

It seemed that some kind of legislation to restrict carbon combustion was inevitable. The Charney report had confirmed the diagnosis of the problem — a problem that Exxon helped create. Now Exxon would help shape the solution.

5. ‘We Are Flying Blind’ October 1980

Two days before Halloween, Rafe Pomerance traveled to a cotton-candy castle on the Gulf of Mexico, near St. Petersburg, Fla, that locals called the Pink Palace. The Don CeSar hotel was a child’s daydream with cantilevered planes of bubble-gum stucco and vanilla-white cupolas that appeared to melt in the sunshine like scoops of ice cream. The hotel stood amid blooms of poisonwood and gumbo limbo on a narrow spit of porous limestone that rose no higher than five feet above the sea. In its carnival of historical amnesia and childlike faith in the power of fantasy, the Pink Palace was a fine setting for the first rehearsal of a conversation that would be earnestly restaged, with little variation and increasing desperation, for the next 40 years.

In the year and a half since he had read the coal report, Pomerance had attended countless conferences and briefings about the science of global warming. But until now, nobody had shown much interest in the only subject that he cared about, the only subject that mattered — how to prevent warming. In a sense, he had himself to thank: During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were being met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report had made clear that goal was not being met, and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility, and the two dozen experts invited to the Pink Palace — policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist and an environmental activist — had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible. The conference room looked better suited to hosting a wedding party than a bureaucratic meeting, its tall windows framing postcard views of the beach. The sands were blindingly white, the surf was idle, the air unseasonably hot and the dress code relaxed: sunglasses and guayaberas, jackets frowned upon.

“I have a very vested interest in this,” said State Representative Tom McPherson, a Florida Democrat, introducing himself to the delegation, “because I own substantial holdings 15 miles inland of the coast, and any beachfront property appreciates in value.” There was no formal agenda, just a young moderator from the E.P.A. named Thomas Jorling and a few handouts left on every seat, including a copy of the Charney report. Jorling acknowledged the vagueness of their mission.

“We are flying blind, with little or no idea where the mountains are,” he said. But the stakes couldn’t be higher: A failure to recommend policy, he said, would be the same as endorsing the present policy — which was no policy. He asked who wanted “to break the ice,” not quite appreciating the pun.

“We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program. “The question is fundamental to being a human being: Do we care?”

This provoked huffy consternation. “In caring or not caring,” said John Laurmann, a Stanford engineer, “I would think the main thing is the timing.” It was not an emotional question, in other words, but an economic one: How much did we value the future?

We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘ Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani? ’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It was a promising beginning, Pomerance thought. Urgent, detailed, cleareyed. The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was.

William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the United States stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If Western nations somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by only eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.

“Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a congressional science consultant. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem.” He doubted that any scientific report, no matter how ominous its predictions, would persuade politicians to act.

Pomerance glanced out at the beach, where the occasional tourist dawdled in the surf. Beyond the conference room, few Americans realized that the planet would soon cease to resemble itself.

What if the problem was that they were thinking of it as a problem? “What I am saying,” Scoville continued, “is that in a sense we are making a transition not only in energy but the economy as a whole.” Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, renewable technologies like solar energy would take their place. Jimmy Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuel. “My God,” Scoville said, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”

The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” Henry Shaw said. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”

“We are talking about some major fights in this country,” said Waltz, the economist. “We had better be thinking this thing through.”

But first — lunch. It was a bright day, low 80s, and the group voted to break for three hours to enjoy the Florida sun. Pomerance couldn’t — he was restless. He had refrained from speaking, happy to let others lead the discussion, provided it moved in the right direction. But the high-minded talk had soon stalled into fecklessness and pusillanimity. He reflected that he was just about the only participant without an advanced degree. But few of these policy geniuses were showing much sense. They understood what was at stake, but they hadn’t taken it to heart. They remained cool, detached — pragmatists overmatched by a problem that had no pragmatic resolution. “Prudence,” Jorling said, “is essential.”

After lunch, Jorling tried to focus the conversation. What did they need to know in order to take action?

David Slade, who as the director of the Energy Department’s $200 million Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects had probably considered the question more deeply than anyone else in the room, said he figured that at some point, probably within their lifetimes, they would see the warming themselves.

“And at that time,” Pomerance bellowed, “it will be too late to do anything about it.”

Yet nobody could agree what to do. John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staff member on the Charney report, suggested that American energy policy merely “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.”

“It is so weak,” Pomerance said, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.”

Reading the indecision in the room, Jorling reversed himself and wondered if it might be best to avoid proposing any specific policy. “Let’s not load ourselves down with that burden,” he said. “We’ll let others worry.”

Pomerance begged Jorling to reconsider. The commission had asked for hard proposals. But why stop there? Why not propose a new national energy plan? “There is no single action that is going to solve the problem,” Pomerance said. “You can’t keep saying, That isn’t going to do it, and This isn’t going to do it, because then we end up doing nothing.”

Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of global carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.” One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure?

The Charney report did exactly that, Pomerance said. He was beginning to lose his patience, his civility, his stamina. “Now, if everybody wants to sit around and wait until the world warms up more than it has warmed up since there have been humans around — fine. But I would like to have a shot at avoiding it.”

Most everybody else seemed content to sit around. Some of the attendees confused uncertainty around the margins of the issue (whether warming would be three or four degrees Celsius in 50 or 75 years) for uncertainty about the severity of the problem. As Gordon MacDonald liked to say, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would rise; the only question was when. The lag between the emission of a gas and the warming it produced could be several decades. It was like adding an extra blanket on a mild night: It took a few minutes before you started to sweat.

Yet Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for a decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?

“ You’re the problem,” Pomerance said. Because of the lag between cause and effect, it was unlikely that humankind would detect hard evidence of warming until it was too late to reverse it. The lag would doom them. “The U.S. has to do something to gain some credibility,” he said.

“So it is a moral stand,” Slade replied, sensing an advantage.

“Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the United States could organize an international summit meeting to address climate change. This was his closing plea to the group. The next day, they would have to draft policy proposals.

But when the group reconvened after breakfast, they immediately became stuck on a sentence in their prefatory paragraph declaring that climatic changes were “likely to occur.”

“Will occur,” proposed Laurmann, the Stanford engineer.

“What about the words: highly likely to occur?” Scoville asked.

“Almost sure,” said David Rose, the nuclear engineer from M.I.T.

“Almost surely,” another said.

“Changes of an undetermined — ”

“Changes as yet of a little-understood nature?”

“Highly or extremely likely to occur,” Pomerance said.

“Almost surely to occur?”

“No,” Pomerance said.

“I would like to make one statement,” said Annemarie Crocetti, a public-health scholar who sat on the National Commission on Air Quality and had barely spoken all week. “I have noticed that very often when we as scientists are cautious in our statements, everybody else misses the point, because they don’t understand our qualifications.”

“As a nonscientist,” said Tom McPherson, the Florida legislator, “I really concur.”

Yet these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.

“It is very emotional,” Crocetti said, succumbing to her frustration. “What we have asked is to get people from different disciplines to come together and tell us what you agree on and what your problems are. And you have only made vague statements — ”

She was interrupted by Waltz, the economist, who wanted simply to note that climate change would have profound effects. Crocetti waited until he exhausted himself, before resuming in a calm voice. “All I am asking you to say is: ‘We got ourselves a bunch of experts, and by God, they all endorse this point of view and think it is very important. They have disagreements about the details of this and that, but they feel that it behooves us to intervene at this point and try to prevent it.’ ”

They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”

Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice. Pomerance knew he wasn’t that person: He was an organizer, a strategist, a fixer — which meant he was an optimist and even, perhaps, a romantic. His job was to assemble a movement. And every movement, even one backed by widespread consensus, needed a hero. He just had to find one.

6. ‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981

The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And Rafe Pomerance soon found himself wondering whether what had seemed to have been a beginning had actually been the end.

After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter. In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.

At the Pink Palace, Anthony Scoville had said that the problem was not atmospheric but political. That was only half right, Pomerance thought. For behind every political problem, there lay a publicity problem. And the climate crisis had a publicity nightmare. The Florida meeting had failed to prepare a coherent statement, let alone legislation, and now everything was going backward. Even Pomerance couldn’t devote much time to climate change; Friends of the Earth was busier than ever. The campaigns to defeat the nominations of James Watt and Anne Gorsuch were just the beginning; there were also efforts to block mining in wilderness areas, maintain the Clean Air Act’s standards for air pollutants and preserve funding for renewable energy (Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

Reagan’s violence to environmental regulations alarmed even members of his own party. Senator Robert Stafford, a Vermont Republican and chairman of the committee that held confirmation hearings on Gorsuch, took the unusual step of lecturing her from the dais about her moral obligation to protect the nation’s air and water. Watt’s plan to open the waters off California for oil drilling was denounced by the state’s Republican senator, and Reagan’s proposal to eliminate the position of science adviser was roundly derided by the scientists and engineers who advised him during his presidential campaign. When Reagan considered closing the Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer federal subsidies?

Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’ ” People magazine had profiled Gordon MacDonald, photographing him standing on the steps of the Capitol and pointing above his head to the level the water would reach when the polar ice caps melted. “If Gordon MacDonald is wrong, they’ll laugh,” the article read. “Otherwise, they’ll gurgle.”

But Pomerance understood that in order to sustain major coverage, you needed major events. Studies were fine; speeches were good; news conferences were better. Hearings, however, were best. The ritual’s theatrical trappings — the members of Congress holding forth on the dais, their aides decorously passing notes, the witnesses sipping nervously from their water glasses, the audience transfixed in the gallery — offered antagonists, dramatic tension, narrative. But you couldn’t have a hearing without a scandal, or at least a scientific breakthrough. And two years after the Charney group met at Woods Hole, it seemed there was no more science to break through.

It was with a shiver of optimism, then, that Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.

Pomerance called Hansen to ask for a meeting. He explained to Hansen that he wanted to make sure he understood the paper’s conclusions. But more than that, he wanted to understand James Hansen.

At the Goddard Institute, Pomerance entered Hansen’s office, maneuvering through some 30 piles of documents arrayed across the floor like the skyscrapers of a model city, some as high as his waist. On top of many of the stacks lay a scrap of cardboard on which had been scrawled words like Trace Gases, Ocean, Jupiter, Venus. At the desk, Pomerance found, hidden behind another paper metropolis, a quiet, composed man with a heavy brow and implacable green eyes. Hansen’s speech was soft, equable, deliberate to the point of halting. He would have no trouble passing for a small-town accountant, insurance-claims manager or actuary. In a sense he held all of those jobs, only his client was the global atmosphere. Pomerance’s political sensitivities sparked. He liked what he saw.

As Hansen spoke, Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English. Though he was something of a wunderkind — at 40, he was about to be named director of the Goddard Institute — he spoke with the plain-spoken Midwestern forthrightness that played on Capitol Hill. He presented like a heartland voter, the kind of man interviewed on the evening news about the state of the American dream or photographed in the dying sun against a blurry agricultural landscape in a campaign ad. And unlike most scientists in the field, he was not afraid to follow his research to its policy implications. He was perfect.

“What you have to say needs to be heard,” Pomerance said. “Are you willing to be a witness?”

7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982

Though few people other than Rafe Pomerance seemed to have noticed amid Reagan’s environmental blitzkrieg, another hearing on the greenhouse effect was held several weeks earlier, on July 31, 1981. It was led by Representative James Scheuer, a New York Democrat — who lived at sea level on the Rockaway Peninsula, in a neighborhood no more than four blocks wide, sandwiched between two beaches — and a canny, 33-year-old congressman named Albert Gore Jr.

Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this? He had no memory of hearing it from his father, a three-term senator from Tennessee who later served as chairman of an Ohio coal company. Once in office, Gore figured that if Revelle gave Congress the same lecture, his colleagues would be moved to act. Or at least that the hearing would get picked up by one of the three major national news broadcasts.

Gore’s hearing was part of a larger campaign he had designed with his staff director, Tom Grumbly. After winning his third term in 1980, Gore was granted his first leadership position, albeit a modest one: chairman of an oversight subcommittee within the Committee on Science and Technology — a subcommittee that he had lobbied to create. Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.

It was like storyboarding episodes of a weekly procedural drama. Grumbly assembled a list of subjects that possessed the necessary dramatic elements: a Massachusetts cancer researcher who faked his results, the dangers of excessive salt in the American diet, the disappearance of an airplane on Long Island. All fit Gore’s template; all had sizzle. But Gore wondered why Grumbly hadn’t included the greenhouse effect.

There are no villains, Grumbly said. Besides, who’s your victim?

If we don’t do something, Gore replied, we’re all going to be the victims.

He didn’t say: If we don’t do something, we’ll be the villains too .

The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.” That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.

But Gore soon found another opening. Congressional staff members on the science committee heard that the White House planned to eliminate the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program. If they could put a hearing together quickly enough, they could shame the White House before it could go through with its plan. The Times article about Hansen’s paper had proved that there was a national audience for the carbon-dioxide problem — it just had to be framed correctly. Hansen could occupy the role of hero: a mild-mannered scientist who had seen the future and now sought to rouse the world to action. A villain was emerging, too: Fred Koomanoff, Reagan’s new director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, a Bronx native with the manner of a sergeant major and an unconstrained passion for budget-cutting. Each man would testify.

Hansen did not disclose to Gore’s staff that, in late November, he received a letter from Koomanoff declining to fund his climate-modeling research despite a promise from Koomanoff’s predecessor. Koomanoff left open the possibility of funding other carbon-dioxide research, but Hansen was not optimistic, and when his funding lapsed, he had to release five employees, half his staff. Koomanoff, it seemed, would not be moved. But the hearing would give Hansen the chance to appeal directly to the congressmen who oversaw Koomanoff’s budget.

Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy. Bob Shamansky, a Democrat from Ohio, objected to the use of the term “greenhouse effect” for such a horrifying phenomenon, because he had always enjoyed visiting greenhouses. “Everything,” he said, “seems to flourish in there.” He suggested that they call it the “microwave oven” effect, “because we are not flourishing too well under this; apparently, we are getting cooked.”

There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”

Gore disagreed: A higher degree of certainty was required, he believed, in order to persuade a majority of Congress to restrict the use of fossil fuels. The reforms required were of such magnitude and sweep that they “would challenge the political will of our civilization.”

Yet the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”

Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s. Most disturbing of all, century-old glass astronomy plates had revealed a new problem: Some of the more obscure greenhouse gases — especially chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a class of man-made substances used in refrigerators and spray cans — had proliferated wildly in recent years. “We may already have in the pipeline a larger amount of climate change than people generally realize,” Hansen told the nearly empty room.

Gore asked when the planet would reach a point of no return — a “trigger point,” after which temperatures would spike. “I want to know,” Gore said, “whether I am going to face it or my kids are going to face it.”

“Your kids are likely to face it,” Calvin replied. “I don’t know whether you will or not. You look pretty young.”

It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.

“Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.”

James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.”

“Yes,” Hansen said.

How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy production?

Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions.

“That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally.

“My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone.

“It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”

8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982

From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.

But Hansen did not get new funding for his carbon-dioxide research. He wondered whether he had been doomed by his testimony or by his conclusion, in the Science paper, that full exploitation of coal resources — a stated goal of Reagan’s energy policy — was “undesirable.” Whatever the cause, he found himself alone. He knew he had done nothing wrong — he had only done diligent research and reported his findings, first to his peers, then to the American people. But now it seemed as if he was being punished for it.

Anniek could read his disappointment, but she was not entirely displeased. Jim cut down on his work hours, leaving the Goddard Institute at 5 o’clock each day, which allowed him to coach his children’s basketball and baseball teams. (He was a patient, committed coach, detail-oriented, if a touch too competitive for his wife’s liking.) At home, Jim spoke only about the teams and their fortunes, keeping to himself his musings — whether he would be able to secure federal funding for his climate experiments, whether the institute would be forced to move its office to Maryland to cut costs.

But perhaps there were other ways forward. Not long after Hansen laid off five of his assistants, a major symposium he was helping to organize received overtures from a funding partner far wealthier and less ideologically blinkered than the Reagan administration: Exxon. Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.

As an indication of the seriousness with which Exxon took the issue, Shaw sent Edward David Jr., the president of the research division and the former science adviser to Nixon. Hansen was glad for the support. He figured that Exxon’s contributions might go well beyond picking up the bill for travel expenses, lodging and a dinner for dozens of scientists at the colonial-style Clinton Inn in Tenafly, N.J. As a gesture of appreciation, David was invited to give the keynote address.

There were moments in David’s speech in which he seemed to channel Rafe Pomerance. David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.

Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.

It seemed that something was beginning to turn. With the carbon-dioxide problem as with other environmental crises, the Reagan administration had alienated many of its own supporters. The early demonstrations of autocratic force had retreated into compromise and deference. By the end of 1982, multiple congressional committees were investigating Anne Gorsuch for her indifference to enforcing the cleanup of Superfund sites, and the House voted to hold her in contempt of Congress; Republicans in Congress turned on James Watt after he eliminated thousands of acres of land from consideration for wilderness designation. Each cabinet member would resign within a year.

The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story. This prospect would have alarmed Hansen several years earlier; it still made him uneasy. But he was beginning to understand that politics offered freedoms that the rigors of the scientific ethic denied. The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that crudely mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.

Part Two 1983–1989

1. ‘caution, not panic’ 1983-1984.

From a stray comment in an obscure coal report to portentous front-page headlines in the national press and hearings on Capitol Hill — in just three years, Rafe Pomerance had watched as an issue considered esoteric even within the scientific community rose nearly to the level of action, the level at which congressmen made statements like, “It is up to us now to summon the political will.” Then, overnight, it died. Pomerance knew, from tired experience, that politics didn’t move in a straight line, but jaggedly, like the Keeling curve — a slow progression interrupted by sharp seasonal declines. But in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.

After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies. Then Reagan won the White House.

For the next three years, as the commission continued its work — drawing upon the help of about 70 experts from the fields of atmospheric chemistry, economics and political science, including veterans of the Charney group and the Manhattan Project — the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.

On Oct. 19, 1983, the commission finally announced its findings at a formal gala, preceded by cocktails and dinner in the academy’s cruciform Great Hall, a secular Sistine Chapel, with vaulted ceilings soaring to a dome painted as the sun. An inscription encircling the sun honored science as the “pilot of industry,” and the academy had invited the nation’s foremost pilots of industry: Andrew Callegari, the head of Exxon’s carbon-dioxide research program, and vice presidents from Peabody Coal, General Motors and the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. They were eager to learn how the United States planned to act, so they could prepare for the inevitable policy debates. Rafe Pomerance was eager, too. But he wasn’t invited.

He did manage, however, to get into a crowded press briefing earlier that day, where he grabbed a copy of the 500-page report, “Changing Climate,” and scanned its contents. Its scope was impressive: It was the first study to encompass the causes, effects and geopolitical consequences of climate change. But as he flipped through, Pomerance surmised that it offered no significant new findings — nothing that wasn’t in the Charney report or the blue-ribbon studies that had been published since. “We are deeply concerned about environmental changes of this magnitude,” read the executive summary. “We may get into trouble in ways that we have barely imagined.”

The authors did try to imagine some of them: an ice-free Arctic, for instance, and Boston sinking into its harbor, Beacon Hill an island two miles off the coast. There was speculation about political revolution, trade wars and a long quotation from “A Distant Mirror,” a medieval history written by Pomerance’s aunt, Barbara Tuchman, describing how climate changes in the 14th century led to “people eating their own children” and “feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet.” The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.

That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see. Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.

As Pomerance listened at the briefing to the commission’s appeasements, he glanced, baffled, around the room. The reporters and staff members listened politely to the presentation and took dutiful notes, as at any technical briefing. Government officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide. Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views — optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.

Pomerance, who came of age during the Vietnam War and the birth of the environmental movement, shared none of Nierenberg’s Procrustean faith in American ingenuity. He worried about the dark undertow of industrial advancement, the way every new technological superpower carried within it unintended consequences that, if unchecked over time, eroded the foundations of society. New technologies had not solved the clean-air and clean-water crises of the 1970s. Activism and organization, leading to robust government regulation, had. Listening to the commission’s equivocations, Pomerance shook his head, rolled his eyes, groaned. He felt that he was the only sane person in a briefing room gone mad. It was wrong . A colleague told him to calm down.

The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.” The effusiveness of Nierenberg’s reassurances invited derision. On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word, was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.”

On its front page, The New York Times published its most prominent piece on global warming to date, under the headline “Haste on Global Warming Trend Is Opposed.” Although the paper included an excerpt from “Changing Climate” that detailed some of the report’s gloomier predictions, the article itself gave the greatest weight to a statement, heavily workshopped by the White House’s senior staff, from George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no actions recommended other than continued research.”

Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest? Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.

A few months after the publication of “Changing Climate,” Pomerance announced his resignation from Friends of the Earth. He had various reasons: He had struggled with the politics of managing a staff and a board, and the environmental movement from which the organization had emerged in the early ’70s was in crisis. It lacked a unifying cause. Climate change, Pomerance believed, could be that cause. But its insubstantiality made it difficult to rally the older activists, whose strategic model relied on protests at sites of horrific degradation — Love Canal, Hetch Hetchy, Three Mile Island. How did you protest when the toxic waste dump was the entire planet or, worse, its invisible atmosphere?

Observing her husband, Lenore Pomerance was reminded of an old Philadelphia Bulletin ad campaign: “In Philadelphia — nearly everyone reads The Bulletin.” On a crowded beach, all the sunbathers have their faces buried in their newspapers, except for one man, who stares off into the distance. Here the scenario was reversed: Rafe, the loner, was staring down the world’s largest problem while everyone else was distracted by the minutiae of daily life. Pomerance acted cheerful at home, fooling his kids. But he couldn’t fool Lenore. She worried about his health. Near the end of his tenure at Friends of the Earth, a doctor found that he had an abnormally high heart rate.

Pomerance planned to take a couple of months to reflect on what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Two months stretched to about a year. He brooded; he checked out. He spent weeks at a time at an old farmhouse that he and Lenore owned in West Virginia, near Seneca Rocks. When they bought it in the early ’70s, the house had a wood-burning stove and no running water. To make a phone call on a private line, you had drive to the operator’s house and hope she was in. Pomerance sat in the cold house and thought.

The winter took him back to his childhood in Greenwich. He had a vivid memory of being taught by his mother to ice skate on a frozen pond a short walk from their home. He remembered the muffled hush of twilight, the snow dusting the ice, the ghostly clearing encircled by a wood darker than the night. Their house was designed by his father, an architect whose glass-enveloped buildings mocked the vanity of humankind’s efforts to improve on nature; the windows invited the elements inside, the trees and the ice and, in the rattling of the broad panes, the wind. Winter, Pomerance believed, was part of his soul. When he thought about the future, he worried about the loss of ice, the loss of the spiky Connecticut January mornings. He worried about the loss of some irreplaceable part of himself.

He wanted to recommit himself to the fight but couldn’t figure out how. If science, industry and the press could not move the government to act, then who could? He didn’t see what was left for him, or anyone else, to do. He didn’t see that the answer was at that moment floating over his head, about 10 miles above his West Virginian farmhouse, just above the highest clouds in the sky.

2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985

It was as if, without warning, the sky opened and the sun burst through in all its irradiating, blinding fury. The mental image was of a pin stuck through a balloon, a chink in an eggshell, a crack in the ceiling — Armageddon descending from above. It was a sudden global emergency: There was a hole in the ozone layer.

The klaxon was rung by a team of British government scientists, until then little known in the field, who made regular visits to research stations in Antarctica — one on the Argentine Islands, the other on a sheet of ice floating into the sea at the rate of a quarter mile per year. At each site, the scientists had set up a machine invented in the 1920s called the Dobson spectrophotometer, which resembled a large slide projector turned with its eye staring straight up. After several years of results so alarming that they disbelieved their own evidence, the British scientists at last reported their discovery in an article published in May 1985 by Nature. “The spring values of total O₃ in Antarctica have now fallen considerably,” the abstract read. But by the time the news filtered into national headlines and television broadcasts several months later, it had transfigured into something far more terrifying: a substantial increase in skin cancer, a sharp decline in the global agricultural yield and the mass death of fish larva, near the base of the marine food chain. Later came fears of atrophied immune systems and blindness.

The urgency of the alarm seemed to have everything to do with the phrase “a hole in the ozone layer,” which, charitably put, was a mixed metaphor. For there was no hole, and there was no layer. Ozone, which shielded Earth from ultraviolet radiation, was distributed throughout the atmosphere, settling mostly in the middle stratosphere and never in a concentration higher than 15 parts per million. As for the “hole” — while the amount of ozone over Antarctica had declined drastically, the depletion was a temporary phenomenon, lasting about two months a year. In satellite images colorized to show ozone density, however, the darker region appeared to depict a void. When F.Sherwood Rowland, one of the chemists who identified the problem in 1974, spoke of the “ozone hole” in a university slide lecture in November 1985, the crisis found its catchphrase. The New York Times used it that same day in its article about the British team’s findings, and while scientific journals initially refused to use the term, within a year it was unavoidable. The ozone crisis had its signal, which was also a symbol: a hole.

It was already understood, thanks to the work of Rowland and his colleague Mario Molina, that the damage was largely caused by the man-made CFCs used in refrigerators, spray bottles and plastic foams, which escaped into the stratosphere and devoured ozone molecules. It was also understood that the ozone problem and the greenhouse-gas problem were linked. CFCs were unusually potent greenhouse gases. Though CFCs had been mass-produced only since the 1930s, they were already responsible, by Jim Hansen’s calculation, for nearly half of Earth’s warming during the 1970s. But nobody was worried about CFCs because of their warming potential. They were worried about getting skin cancer.

The United Nations, through two of its intergovernmental agencies — the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization — had in 1977 established a World Plan of Action on the Ozone Layer. In 1985, UNEP adopted a framework for a global treaty, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. The negotiators failed to agree upon any specific CFC regulations in Vienna, but after the British scientists reported their findings from the Antarctic two months later, the Reagan administration proposed a reduction in CFC emissions of 95 percent. The speed of the reversal was all the more remarkable because CFC regulation faced virulent opposition. Dozens of American businesses with the word “refrigeration” in their names, together with hundreds involved in the production, manufacture and consumption of chemicals, plastics, paper goods and frozen food — around 500 companies in total, from DuPont and the American Petroleum Institute to Mrs. Smith’s Frozen Food Company of Pottstown, Pa. — had united in 1980 as the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy. The alliance hounded the E.P.A., members of Congress and Reagan himself, insisting that ozone science was uncertain. The few concessions the alliance won, like forcing the E.P.A. to withdraw a plan to regulate CFCs, were swiftly overturned by lawsuits, and once the public discovered the “ozone hole,” every relevant government agency and every sitting United States senator urged the president to endorse the United Nations’ plans for a treaty. When Reagan finally submitted the Vienna Convention to the Senate for ratification, he praised the “leading role” played by the United States, fooling nobody.

Senior members of the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, including Bert Bolin, a veteran of the Charney group, began to wonder whether they could do for the carbon-dioxide problem what they had done for ozone policy. The organizations had been holding semiannual conferences on global warming since the early 1970s. But in 1985, just several months after the bad news from the Antarctic, at an otherwise sleepy meeting in Villach, Austria, the assembled 89 scientists from 29 countries began to discuss a subject that fell wildly outside their discipline: politics.

An Irish hydrology expert asked if his country should reconsider the location of its dams. A Dutch seacoast engineer questioned the wisdom of rebuilding dikes that had been destroyed by recent floods. And the conference’s chairman, James Bruce, an unassuming, pragmatic hydrometeorologist from Ontario, posed a question that shocked his audience.

Bruce was a minister of the Canadian environmental agency, a position that conferred him the esteem that his American counterparts had forfeited when Reagan won the White House. Just before leaving for Villach, he met with provincial dam and hydropower managers. O.K., one of them said, you scientists win. You’ve convinced me that the climate is changing. Well, tell me how it’s changing. In 20 years, will the rain be falling somewhere else?

Bruce took this challenge to Villach: You’re the experts. What am I supposed to tell him? People are hearing the message, and they want to hear more. So how do we, in the scientific world, begin a dialogue with the world of action?

The world of action . For a room of scientists who prided themselves as belonging to a specialized guild of monkish austerity, this was a startling provocation. On a bus tour of the countryside, commissioned by their Austrian hosts, Bruce sat with Roger Revelle, ignoring the Alps, speaking animatedly about the need for scientists to demand political remedies in times of existential crisis.

The formal report ratified at Villach contained the most forceful warnings yet issued by a scientific body. Most major economic decisions undertaken by nations, it pointed out, were based on the assumption that past climate conditions were a reliable guide to the future. But the future would not look like the past. Though some warming was inevitable, the scientists wrote, the extent of the disaster could be “profoundly affected” by aggressive, coordinated government policies. Fortunately there was a new model in place to achieve just that. The balloon could be patched, the eggshell bandaged, the ceiling replastered. There was still time.

3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986

It was the spring of 1986, and Curtis Moore, a Republican staff member on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, was telling Rafe Pomerance that the greenhouse effect wasn’t a problem.

With his last ounce of patience, Pomerance begged to disagree.

Yes, Moore clarified — of course, it was an existential problem, the fate of the civilization depended on it, the oceans would boil, all of that. But it wasn’t a political problem. Know how you could tell? Political problems had solutions. And the climate issue had none. Without a solution — an obvious, attainable one — any policy could only fail. No elected politician desired to come within shouting distance of failure. So when it came to the dangers of despoiling our planet beyond the range of habitability, most politicians didn’t see a problem. Which meant that Pomerance had a very big problem indeed.

He had followed the rapid ascension of the ozone issue with the rueful admiration of a competitor. He was thrilled for its success — however inadvertently, the treaty would serve as the world’s first action to delay climate change. But it offered an especially acute challenge for Pomerance, who after his yearlong hiatus had become, as far as he knew, the nation’s first, and only, full-time global-warming lobbyist. At the suggestion of Gordon MacDonald, Pomerance joined the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit begun by Gus Speth, a senior environmental official in Jimmy Carter’s White House and a founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Unlike Friends of the Earth, W.R.I. was not an activist organization; it occupied the nebulous intersection of politics, international relations and energy policy. Its mission was expansive enough to allow Pomerance to work without interference. Yet the only thing that anyone on Capitol Hill wanted to talk about was ozone.

That was Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.

Moore came through. At his suggestion, Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986. F.Sherwood Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the Charney group, would testify about climate change. As soon as the first witness appeared, Pomerance realized that Moore’s instincts had been right. The ozone gang was good.

Robert Watson dimmed the lights in the hearing room. On a flimsy screen, he projected footage with the staticky, low-budget quality of a slasher flick. It showed a bird’s-eye view of the Antarctic, partly obscured by spiraling clouds. The footage was so convincing that Chafee had to ask whether it was an actual satellite image. Watson acknowledged that though created by satellite data, it was, in fact, a simulation. An animation, to be precise. The three-minute video showed every day of October — the month during which the ozone thinned most drastically — for seven consecutive years. (The other months, conveniently, were omitted.) A canny filmmaker had colored the “ozone hole” pink. As the years sped forward, the polar vortex madly gyroscoping, the hole expanded until it obscured most of Antarctica. The smudge turned mauve, representing an even thinner density of ozone, and then the dark purple of a hemorrhaging wound. The data represented in the video wasn’t new, but nobody had thought to represent it in this medium. If F.Sherwood Rowland’s earlier colorized images were crime-scene photographs, Watson’s video was a surveillance camera catching the killer red-handed.

As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”

The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times). On the second day of the Senate hearing, devoted to global warming, every seat in the gallery was occupied; four men squeezed together on a broad window sill.

Pomerance had suggested that Chafee, instead of opening with the typical statement about the need for more research, deliver a call for action. But Chafee went further: He called for the State Department to begin negotiations on an international solution with the Soviet Union. It was the kind of proposal that would have been unthinkable even a year earlier, but the ozone issue had established a precedent for global environmental problems: high-level meetings among the world’s most powerful nations, followed by a global summit meeting to negotiate a framework for a treaty to restrict emissions.

After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”

The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.

The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.

4. ‘Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.’ Fall 1987-Spring 1988

Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate. It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement. Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 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 convivial mood had something to do with its host. John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A. in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, 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. After leaving the administration, he founded a nonprofit organization, the Climate Institute, to bring together scientists, politicians and businesspeople to discuss policy solutions. He didn’t have any difficulty raising $150,000 to hold “Preparing for Climate Change”; the major sponsors included BP America, General Electric and the American Gas Association. Topping’s 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 issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.

It was not entirely surprising to see envoys from Exxon, the Gas Research Institute and the electrical-grid trade groups, even if they had been silent since “Changing Climate.” But they were joined by executives from General Electric, AT&T and the American Petroleum Institute, which that spring had invited a leading government scientist to make the case for a transition to renewable energy at the industry’s annual world conference in Houston. Even Richard Barnett was there, the chairman of the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, the face of the campaign to defeat an ozone treaty. Barnett’s retreat had been humiliating and swift: After DuPont, by far the world’s single largest manufacturer of CFCs, realized that it stood to profit from the transition to replacement chemicals, the alliance abruptly reversed its position, demanding that the United States sign a treaty as soon as possible. Now Barnett, at the Quality Inn, was speaking about how “we bask in the glory of the Montreal Protocol” and quoting Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to express his hope for a renewed alliance between industry and environmentalists. There were more than 250 people in all in the old ballroom, and if the concentric rings extended any further, you would have needed a larger hotel.

That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.

It was perhaps because of all this good cheer that it was Hansen’s instinct to shrug off a peculiar series of events that took place just a week later. He was scheduled to appear before another Senate hearing, this time devoted entirely to climate change. It was called by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources after Rafe Pomerance and Gordon MacDonald persuaded its chairman, Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana, of the issue’s significance for the future of the oil-and-gas industry (Louisiana ranked third among states in oil production). Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”

The process appeared entirely perfunctory, but this time, on the Friday evening before his appearance that Monday, he was informed that the White House demanded changes to his testimony. No rationale was provided. Nor did Hansen understand by what authority it could censor scientific findings. He told the administrator in NASA’s legislative-affairs office that he refused to make the changes. If that meant he couldn’t testify, so be it.

The NASA administrator had another idea. The Office of Management and Budget had the authority to approve government witnesses, she explained. But it couldn’t censor a private citizen.

At the hearing three days later, on Monday, Nov. 9, Hansen was listed as “Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y. ” — as if he were a crank with a telescope who had stumbled into the Senate off the street. He was careful to emphasize the absurdity of the situation in his opening remarks, at least to the degree that his Midwestern reserve would allow: “Before I begin, I would like to state that although I direct the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I am appearing here as a private citizen.” In the most understated terms available to him, Hansen provided his credentials: “Ten years’ experience in terrestrial climate studies and more than 10 years’ experience in the exploration and study of other planetary atmospheres.”

Assuming that one of the senators would immediately ask about this odd introduction, Hansen had prepared an elegant response. He planned to say that although his NASA colleagues endorsed his findings, the White House had insisted he utter false statements that would have distorted his conclusions. He figured this would lead to an uproar. But no senator thought to ask about his title. So the atmospheric scientist from New York City said nothing else about it.

After the hearing, he went to lunch with John Topping, who was stunned to hear of the White House’s ham-handed attempt to silence him. “Uh, oh,” Topping joked, “Jim is a dangerous man. We’re going to have to rally the troops to protect him.” The idea that quiet, sober Jim Hansen could be seen as a threat to anyone, let alone national security — well, it was enough to make him laugh.

But the brush with state censorship stayed with Hansen in the months ahead. It confirmed that even after the political triumph of the Montreal Protocol and the bipartisan support of climate policy, there were still people within the White House who hoped to prevent a debate. In its public statements, the administration showed no such reluctance: By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy policy.

In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.

But a pledge didn’t reduce emissions. Hansen was learning to think more strategically — less like a scientist, more like a politician. Despite the efforts of Wirth, there was as yet no serious plan nationally or internationally to address climate change. Even Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.

Hansen told Pomerance that the biggest problem with the Johnston hearing, at least apart from the whole censorship business, had been the month in which it was held: November. “This business of having global-warming hearings in such cool weather is never going to get attention,” he said. He wasn’t joking. At first he assumed that it was enough to publish studies about global warming and that the government would spring into action. Then he figured that his statements to Congress would do it. It had seemed, at least momentarily, that industry, understanding what was at stake, might lead. But nothing had worked.

As spring turned to summer, Anniek Hansen noticed a change in her husband’s disposition. He grew pale and unusually thin. When she asked him about his day, Hansen replied with some ambiguity and turned the conversation to sports: the Yankees, his daughter’s basketball team, his son’s baseball team. But even for him, he was unusually quiet, serious, distracted. Anniek would begin a conversation and find that he hadn’t heard a word she said. She knew what he was thinking: He was running out of time. We were running out of time. Then came the summer of 1988, and Jim Hansen wasn’t the only one who could tell that time was running out.

5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988

It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly one million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.

In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert. “The dang heat,” said a farmer in Grinnell. “Farming has so many perils, but climate is 99 percent of it.” In parts of Wisconsin, where Gov. Tommy Thompson banned fireworks and smoking cigarettes outdoors, the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers evaporated completely. “At that point,” said an official from the Department of Natural Resources, “we must just sit back and watch the fish die.”

Harvard University, for the first time, closed because of heat. New York City’s streets melted, its mosquito population quadrupled and its murder rate reached a record high. “It’s a chore just to walk,” a former hostage negotiator told a reporter. “You want to be left alone.” The 28th floor of Los Angeles’s second-tallest building burst into flames; the cause, the Fire Department concluded, was spontaneous combustion. Ducks fled the continental United States in search of wetlands, many ending up in Alaska, swelling the pintail population there to 1.5 million from 100,000. “How do you spell relief?” asked a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “If you are a duck from America’s parched prairies, this year you may spell it A-L-A-S-K-A.”

Nineteen Miss Indiana contestants, outfitted with raincoats and umbrellas, sang “Come Rain or Come Shine,” but it did not rain. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Democratic presidential candidate, stood in an Illinois cornfield and prayed for rain, but it did not rain. Cliff Doebel, the owner of a gardening store in Clyde, Ohio, paid $2,000 to import Leonard Crow Dog, a Sioux Indian medicine man from Rosebud, S.D. Crow Dog claimed to have performed 127 rain dances, all successful. “You will see things that you shall believe,” he told the townspeople of Clyde. “You will feel there is a chance for us all.” After three days of dancing, it rained less than a quarter of an inch.

Texas farmers fed their cattle cactus. Stretches of the Mississippi River flowed at less than one-fifth of normal capacity. Roughly 1,700 barges beached at Greenville, Miss.; an additional 2,000 were marooned at St. Louis and Memphis. The on-field thermometer at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, where the Phillies were hosting the Chicago Cubs for a matinee, read 130 degrees. During a pitching change, every player, coach and umpire, save the catcher and the entering reliever, Todd Frohwirth, fled into the dugouts. (Frohwirth would earn the victory.) In the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood on June 21, yet another record-smasher, a roofer working with 600-degree tar exclaimed, “Will this madness ever end?”

On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth.

“I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.

This amused Pomerance. He was the one who tended to worry about press; Hansen usually claimed indifference to such vulgar considerations. “Why’s that?” Pomerance asked.

Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise.

“I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.

6. ‘The Signal Has Emerged’ June 1988

The night before the hearing, Hansen flew to Washington to give himself enough time to prepare his oral testimony in his hotel room. But he couldn’t focus — the ballgame was on the radio. The slumping Yankees, who had fallen behind the Tigers for first place, were trying to avoid a sweep in Detroit, and the game went to extra innings. Hansen fell asleep without finishing his statement. He awoke to bright sunlight, high humidity, choking heat. It was signal weather in Washington: the hottest June 23 in history.

Before going to the Capitol, he attended a meeting at NASA headquarters. One of his early champions at the agency, Ichtiaque Rasool, was announcing the creation of a new carbon-dioxide program. Hansen, sitting in a room with dozens of scientists, continued to scribble his testimony under the table, barely listening. But he heard Rasool say that the goal of the new program was to determine when a warming signal might emerge. As you all know, Rasool said, no respectable scientist would say that you already have a signal.

Hansen interrupted.

“I don’t know if he’s respectable or not,” he said, “but I do know one scientist who is about to tell the U.S. Senate that the signal has emerged.”

The other scientists looked up in surprise, but Rasool ignored Hansen and continued his presentation. Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

By 2:10 p.m., when the session began, it was 98 degrees, and not much cooler in Room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, thanks to the two rows of television-camera lights. Timothy Wirth’s office had told reporters that the plain-spoken NASA scientist was going to make a major statement. After the staff members saw the cameras, even those senators who hadn’t planned to attend appeared at the dais, hastily reviewing the remarks their aides had drafted for them. Half an hour before the hearing, Wirth pulled Hansen aside. He wanted to change the order of speakers, placing Hansen first. The senator wanted to make sure that Hansen’s statement got the proper amount of attention. Hansen agreed.

“We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”

Wirth asked those standing in the gallery to claim the few remaining seats available. “There is no point in standing up through this on a hot day,” he said, happy for the occasion to emphasize the historical heat. Then he introduced the star witness.

Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

But Hansen had no time to dwell on any of this. As soon as he got home to New York, Anniek told him she had breast cancer. She had found out two weeks earlier, but she didn’t want to upset him before the hearing. In the following days, while the entire world tried to learn about James Hansen, he tried to learn about Anniek’s illness. After he absorbed the initial shock and made a truce with the fear — his grandmother died from the disease — he dedicated himself to his wife’s treatment with all the rigor of his profession. As they weighed treatment options and analyzed medical data, Anniek noticed him begin to change. The frustration of the last year began to fall away. It yielded, in those doctor’s offices, to a steady coolness, an obsession for detail, a dogged optimism. He began to look like himself again.

7. ‘Woodstock For Climate Change’ June 1988-April 1989

In the immediate flush of optimism after the Wirth hearing — henceforth known as the Hansen hearing — Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”

Pomerance hastily arranged a meeting with, among others, David Harwood, the architect of Wirth’s climate legislation; Roger Dower in the Congressional Budget Office, who was calculating the plausibility of a national carbon tax; and Irving Mintzer, a colleague at the World Resources Institute who had a deep knowledge of energy economics. Wirth was scheduled to give the keynote address at Toronto — Harwood would write it — and could propose a number then. But which one?

Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000.

Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.

What really mattered wasn’t the number itself, Dower said, but simply that they settle on one. He agreed that a hard target was the only way to push the issue forward. Though his job at the C.B.O. required him to come up with precise estimates of speculative, complex policy, there wasn’t time for yet another academic study to arrive at the exact right number. Pomerance’s unscientific suggestion sounded fine to him.

Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices. Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.

Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.

In Toronto a few days later, Pomerance talked up his idea with everyone he met — environmental ministers, scientists, journalists. Nobody thought it sounded crazy. He took that as an encouraging sign. Other delegates soon proposed the number to him independently, as if they had come up with it themselves. That was an even better sign.

Wirth, in his keynote on June 27, called for the world to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2000, with an eventual reduction of 50 percent. Other speakers likened the ramifications of climate change to a global nuclear war, but it was the emissions target that was heard in Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow. The conference’s final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.

Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent.

At the end of the sulfurous summer, several months after Gore ended his candidacy, global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.” His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to the issue at the vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”

This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist” candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”

By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually pass significant legislation after Bush took office.

The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions. The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax; and Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”

It was at this time — at a moment when the environmental movement was, in the words of one energy lobbyist, “on a tear” — that the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy. One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration. James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.” Much of Congress agreed: On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.

8. ‘You Never Beat The White House’ April 1989

After Jim Baker gave his boisterous address to the I.P.C.C. working group at the State Department, he received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. Leave the science to the scientists, Sununu told Baker. Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff, didn’t speak about the subject again. He later told the White House that he was recusing himself from energy-policy issues, on account of his previous career as a Houston oil-and-gas lawyer.

Sununu, an enthusiastic contrarian, delighted in defying any lazy characterizations of himself. His father was a Lebanese exporter from Boston, and his mother was a Salvadoran of Greek ancestry; he was born in Havana. In his three terms as governor of New Hampshire, he had come, in the epithets of national political columnists, to embody Yankee conservatism: pragmatic, business-friendly, technocratic, “no-nonsense.” He had fought angrily against local environmentalists to open a nuclear power plant, but he had also signed the nation’s first acid-rain legislation and lobbied Reagan directly for a reduction of sulfur-dioxide pollution by 50 percent, the target sought by the Audubon Society. He was perceived as more conservative than the president, a budget hawk who had turned a $44 million state deficit into a surplus without raising taxes, and openly insulted Republican politicians and the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when they drifted, however tentatively, from his anti-tax doctrinairism. Yet he increased spending on mental health care and public-land preservation in New Hampshire, and in the White House he would help negotiate a tax increase and secure the Supreme Court nomination of David Souter.

Bush had chosen Sununu for his political instincts — he was credited with having won Bush the New Hampshire primary, after Bush came in third in Iowa, all but securing him the nomination. But despite his reputation as a political wolf, he still thought of himself as a scientist — an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. decades earlier. He lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the class of elite government scientists. Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world took no step to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an organization of European scientists, heads of state and economists, which similarly warned that the world would run out of natural resources; and as recently as the mid-’70s, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s most celebrated scientists — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider and Ichtiaque Rasool — that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of man-made aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress.

Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” Mead wrote, “the whole planet may become endangered.” Her conclusions were stark, immediate and absent the caveats that hobbled the scientific literature. Or as Sununu saw it, she showed her hand: “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” Mead wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.” When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

In April, the director of the O.M.B., Richard Darman, a close ally of Sununu’s, mentioned that the NASA scientist James Hansen, who had forced the issue of global warming onto the national agenda the previous summer, was going to testify again — this time at a hearing called by Al Gore. Darman had the testimony and described it. Sununu was appalled: Hansen’s language seemed extreme, based on scientific arguments that he considered, as he later put it, like “technical garbage.”

While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

Sununu disagreed. It would be foolish, he said, to let the nation stumble into a binding agreement on questionable scientific merits, especially as it would compel some unknown quantity of economic pain. They went back and forth. Reilly didn’t want to cede leadership on the issue to the European powers; after all, the first high-level diplomatic meeting on climate change, to which Reilly was invited, would take place just a few months later in the Netherlands. Statements of caution would make the “environmental president” look like a hypocrite and hurt the United States’ leverage in a negotiation. But Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.

Sununu, blaming Reilly, was furious. When accounts of his argument with Reilly appeared in The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post ahead of the Geneva I.P.C.C. meeting, they made the White House look as if it didn’t know what it was doing.

A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”

9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ May 1989

In the first week of May 1989, when Hansen received his proposed testimony back from the O.M.B., it was disfigured by deletions and, more incredible, additions. Gore had called the hearing to increase the pressure on Bush to sign major climate legislation; Hansen had wanted to use the occasion to clarify one major point that, in the hubbub following the 1988 hearing, had been misunderstood. Global warming would not only cause more heat waves and droughts like those of the previous summer but would also lead to more extreme rain events. This was crucial — he didn’t want the public to conclude, the next time there was a mild summer, that global warming wasn’t real.

But the edited text was a mess. For a couple of days, Hansen played along, accepting the more innocuous edits. But he couldn’t accept some of the howlers proposed by the O.M.B. With the hearing only two days away, he gave up. He told NASA’s congressional liaison to stop fighting. Let the White House have its way, he said.

But Hansen would have his way, too. As soon as he hung up, he drafted a letter to Gore. He explained that the O.M.B. wanted him to demote his own scientific findings to “estimates” from models that were “evolving” and unreliable. His anonymous censor wanted him to say that the causes of global warming were “scientifically unknown” and might be attributable to “natural processes,” caveats that would not only render his testimony meaningless but make him sound like a moron. The most bizarre addition, however, was a statement of a different kind. He was asked to argue that Congress should only pass climate legislation that immediately benefited the economy, “independent of concerns about an increasing greenhouse effect” — a sentence that no scientist would ever utter, unless perhaps he were employed by the American Petroleum Institute. Hansen faxed his letter to Gore and left the office.

When he arrived home, Anniek told him Gore had called. Would it be all right, Gore asked when Hansen spoke with him, if I tell a couple of reporters about this?

The New York Times’s Philip Shabecoff called the next morning. “I should be allowed to say what is my scientific position,” Hansen told him. “I can understand changing policy, but not science.”

On Monday, May 8, the morning of the hearing, he left early for his flight to Washington and did not see the newspaper until he arrived at Dirksen, where Gore showed it to him. The front-page headline read: “Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His Testimony.” They agreed that Hansen would give his testimony as planned, after which Gore would ask about the passages that the O.M.B. had rewritten.

Gore stopped at the door. “We better go separately,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll be able to get both of us with one hand grenade.”

In the crowded hearing room, the cameras fixed on Hansen. He held his statement in one hand and a single Christmas tree bulb in the other — a prop to help explain, however shakily, that the warming already created by fossil-fuel combustion was equivalent to placing a Christmas light over every square meter of Earth’s surface. After Hansen read his sanitized testimony, Gore pounced. He was puzzled by inconsistencies in the distinguished scientist’s presentation, he said in a tone thick with mock confusion. “Why do you directly contradict yourself?”

Hansen explained that he had not written those contradictory statements. “The Bush administration is acting as if it is scared of the truth,” Gore said. “If they forced you to change a scientific conclusion, it is a form of science fraud.”

Another government scientist testifying at the hearing, Jerry Mahlman from NOAA, acknowledged that the White House had previously tried to change his conclusions too. Mahlman had managed to deflect the worst of it, however — “objectionable and also unscientific” recommendations, he said, that would have been “severely embarrassing to me in the face of my scientific colleagues.”

Gore called it “an outrage of the first order of magnitude.” The 1988 hearing had created a hero out of Jim Hansen. Now Gore had a real villain, one far more treacherous than Fred Koomanoff — a nameless censor in the White House, hiding behind O.M.B. letterhead.

The cameras followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore focused on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”

10. The White House Effect Fall 1989

The censorship did more to publicize Hansen’s testimony and the dangers of global warming than anything he could have possibly said. At the White House briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Hansen’s statement had been changed. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation. Hansen, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”

The Los Angeles Times called the censorship “an outrageous assault.” The Chicago Tribune said it was the beginning of “a cold war on global warming,” and The New York Times warned that the White House’s “heavy-handed intervention sends the signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem.”

The day after the hearing, Gore received an unannounced visit from the O.M.B. director, Richard Darman. He came alone, without aides. He said he wanted to apologize to Gore in person. He was sorry, and he wanted Gore to know it; the O.M.B. would not try to censor anyone again. Gore, stunned, thanked Darman. Something about his apology — the effusiveness, the mortified tone or perhaps the fact that he had come by himself, as if in secret — left Gore with the impression that the idea to censor Hansen didn’t come from someone five levels down from the top, or even below Darman. It had come from someone above Darman.

Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to ask if he had any ideas. We could start, Reilly said, by recommitting to a global climate treaty. The United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.

Sununu sent a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.” He proposed an international workshop to improve the accuracy of the science and calculate the economic costs of emissions reductions. Sununu signed the telegram himself. A day later, the president pledged to host a climate workshop at the White House. Rafe Pomerance was unconvinced, telling the press that this belated effort to save face was a “waffle” that fell short of real action: “We should be able to complete a treaty by the end of 1990,” he said, “not be starting one.” But the general response from the press was relief and praise.

Still, Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to study more deeply the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided that the models promoted by Jim Hansen were a lot of bunk. They were horribly imprecise in scale and underestimated the ocean’s ability to mitigate warming. Sununu complained about Hansen to D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale who, at Sununu’s recommendation, was named Bush’s science adviser. Hansen’s findings were “technical poppycock” that didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements that “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be attributed to global warming, let alone serve as the basis for national economic policy.

When a junior staff member in the Energy Department, in a meeting at the White House with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil-fuel use, Sununu interrupted her. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” he asked. “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied.

“I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.” After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staff member in the hallway. She was shaken. Don’t take it personally, Reilly told her. Sununu might have been looking at you, but that was directed at me.

Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly, Sununu thought, was a creature of the environmental lobby. He was trying to impress his friends at the E.P.A. without having a basic grasp of the science himself. Most unforgivable of all was what Sununu saw as Reilly’s propensity to leak to the press. Whenever Reilly sent the White House names of candidates he wanted to hire for openings at the E.P.A., Sununu vetoed them. When it came time for the high-level diplomatic meeting in November, a gathering of environmental ministers in the Netherlands, Sununu didn’t trust Reilly to negotiate on behalf of the White House. So he sent Allan Bromley to accompany him.

Reilly, for his part, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on the prospect of a climate treaty. The president had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by nonscientists. Bush had brought up the subject on the campaign trail, in his speech about the White House effect, after leafing through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might generate some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, he said. Let me know when you decide. But by the time Reilly got to the Noordwijk Ministerial Conference in the Netherlands, he suspected that it was already too late.

11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ November 1989

Rafe Pomerance awoke at sunlight and stole out of his hotel, making for the flagpoles. It was nearly freezing — Nov. 6, 1989, on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk — but the wind had yet to rise and the photographer was waiting. More than 60 flags lined the strand between the hotel and the beach, one for each nation in attendance at the first major diplomatic meeting on global warming. The delegations would review the progress made by the I.P.C.C. and decide whether to endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would, at minimum, agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch environmental minister, more modest than the Toronto number: a freezing of greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Some believed that if the meeting was a success, it would encourage the I.P.C.C. to accelerate its negotiations and reach a decision about a treaty sooner. But at the very least, the world’s environmental ministers should sign a statement endorsing a hard, binding target of emissions reductions. The mood among the delegates was electric, nearly giddy — after more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they could finally sign an agreement that meant something.

Pomerance had not been among the 400 delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists — Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth — he had formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest global target yet proposed.

The activists booked their own travel and doubled up in rooms at a beat-up motel down the beach. They managed to secure all-access credentials from the Dutch environmental ministry’s press secretary. He was inclined to be sympathetic toward the activists because it had been rumored that Allan Bromley, one of the United States’ lead delegates, would try to persuade the delegates from Japan and the Soviet Union to join him in resisting the idea of a binding agreement, despite the fact that Bush had again claimed just earlier that week that the United States would “play a leadership role in global warming.” The Dutch were especially concerned about this development, as even a minor rise in sea level would swamp much of their nation.

The activists planned to stage a stunt each day to embarrass Bromley and galvanize support for a hard treaty. The first took place at the flagpoles, where they met a photographer from Agence France-Presse at dawn. Performing for the photographer, Boyle and Becker lowered the Japanese, Soviet and American flags to half-staff. Becker gave a reporter an outraged statement, accusing the three nations of conspiring to block the one action necessary to save the planet. The article appeared on front pages across Europe.

On the second day, Pomerance and Becker met an official from Kiribati, an island nation of 33 atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. They asked if he was Kiribati’s environmental minister.

Kiribati is a very small place, the man said. I do everything. I’m the environmental minister. I’m the science minister. I’m everything. If the sea rises, he said, my entire nation will be underwater.

Pomerance and Becker exchanged a look. “If we set up a news conference,” Pomerance asked, “will you tell them what you just told us?”

Within minutes, they had assembled a couple dozen journalists.

There is no place on Kiribati taller than my head, began the minister, who seemed barely more than five feet tall. So when we talk about one-foot sea-level rise, that means the water is up to my shin.

He pointed to his shin.

Two feet, he said, that’s my thigh.

He pointed to his thigh.

Three feet, that’s my waist.

He pointed to his waist.

Am I making myself clear?

Pomerance and Becker were ecstatic. The minister came over to them. Is that what you had in mind? he asked.

It was a good start, and necessary too — Pomerance had the sinking feeling that the momentum of the previous year was beginning to flag. The censoring of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were ominous signs. So were the findings of a report Pomerance had commissioned, published in September by the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse-gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every other country. Bush’s indecision, or perhaps inattention, had already managed to delay the negotiation of a global climate treaty until 1990 at the earliest, perhaps even 1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.

The one meeting to which Pomerance’s atmospheric delegation could not gain admittance was the only one that mattered: the final negotiation. The scientists and I.P.C.C. staff members were asked to leave; just the environmental ministers remained. Pomerance and the other activists haunted the carpeted hallway outside the conference room, waiting and thinking. A decade earlier, Pomerance helped warn the White House of the dangers posed by fossil-fuel combustion; nine years earlier, at a fairy-tale castle on the Gulf of Mexico, he tried to persuade Congress to write climate legislation, reshape American energy policy and demand that the United States lead an international process to arrest climate change. Just one year ago, he devised the first emissions target to be proposed at a major international conference. Now, at the end of the decade, senior diplomats from all over the world were debating the merits of a binding climate treaty. Only he was powerless to participate. He could only trust, as he stared at the wall separating him from the diplomats and their muffled debate, that all his work had been enough.

The meeting began in the morning and continued into the night, much longer than expected; most of the delegates had come to the conference ready to sign the Dutch proposal. Each time the doors opened and a minister headed to the bathroom at the other end of the hall, the activists leapt up, asking for an update. The ministers maintained a studied silence, but as the negotiations went past midnight, their aggravation was recorded in their stricken faces and opened collars.

“What’s happening?” Becker shouted, for the hundredth time, as the Swedish minister surfaced.

“Your government,” the minister said, “is fucking this thing up!”

When the beaten delegates finally emerged from the conference room, Becker and Pomerance learned what happened. Bromley, at the urging of John Sununu and with the acquiescence of Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union, had forced the conference to abandon the commitment to freeze emissions. The final statement noted only that “many” nations supported stabilizing emissions — but did not indicate which nations or at what emissions level. And with that, a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.

The environmentalists spent the morning giving interviews and writing news releases. “You must conclude the conference is a failure,” Becker said, calling the dissenting nations “the skunks at the garden party.” Greenpeace called it a “disaster.” Timothy Wirth, in Washington, said the outcome was proof that the United States was “not a leader but a delinquent partner.”

Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated. “There are some good building blocks here,” Pomerance said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol on CFCs wasn’t perfect at first, either — it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress.

Before leaving the Netherlands, he joined the other activists for a final round of drinks and commiseration. He would have to return to Washington the next day and start all over again. The I.P.C.C.’s next policy-group meeting would take place in Edinburgh in two months, and there was concern that the Noordwijk failure might influence the group members into lowering their expectations for a treaty. But Pomerance refused to be dejected — there was no point to it. His companions, though more openly disappointed, shared his determination. One of them, Daniel Becker, had just found out that his wife was pregnant with their first child.

She had traveled with Becker to the Netherlands to visit friends before the conference started. One day, their hosts took them on a day trip to Zeeland, a southwestern province where three rivers emptied into the sea. All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn’t stop talking about what he had seen in Zeeland. After a flood in 1953, when the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than 2,000 people, the Dutch began to build the Delta Works, a vast concrete-and-steel fortress of movable barriers, dams and sluice gates — a masterpiece of human engineering. The whole system could be locked into place within 90 minutes, defending the land against storm surge. It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 700 kilometers, Becker explained. The United States coastline was about 153,000 kilometers long. How long, he asked, was the entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world was going to need this. In Zeeland, he said, he had seen the future.

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; estimates solidify into observational data. Where there have been inaccuracies, they have tended to be in the direction of understatement. Caldeira and a colleague recently published a paper in Nature finding that the world is warming more quickly than most climate models predict. The toughest emissions reductions now being proposed, even by the most committed nations, will probably fail to achieve “any given global temperature stabilization target.”

More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly, except in its particulars. Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.

The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the oil-and-gas industry always operated thus; while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would. It was James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 that, for the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, made oil-and-gas executives begin to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits. Exxon, as ever, led the field. Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own.

The American Petroleum Institute, after holding a series of internal briefings on the subject in the fall and winter of 1988, including one for the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, took a similar, if slightly more diplomatic, line. It set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy — about $100,000, a fraction of the millions it was spending on the health effects of benzene, but enough to establish a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of newspeak, the Global Climate Coalition. It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries. The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, but on a whim, it added a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed skepticism about global warming. The A.P.I.’s payment for an original op-ed was $2,000.

The chance to enact meaningful measures to prevent climate change was vanishing, but the industry had just begun. In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear in articles on climate change.

Cheap and useful, G.C.C.-like groups started to proliferate, but it was not until international negotiations in preparation for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit began that investments in persuasion peddling rose to the level of a line item. At Rio, George H.W. Bush refused to commit to specific emissions reductions. The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won control of both houses in 40 years. The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.

The G.C.C. disbanded in 2002 after the defection of various members who were embarrassed by its tactics. But Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) continued its disinformation campaign for another half decade. This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly since 1979 — the assignment of blame.

A major lawsuit has targeted the federal government. A consortium of 21 American children and young adults — one of whom, Sophie Kivlehan of Allentown, Pa., is Jim Hansen’s granddaughter — claims that the government, by “creating a national energy system that causes climate change,” has violated its duty to protect the natural resources to which all Americans are entitled.

In 2015, after reports by the website InsideClimate News and The Los Angeles Times documented the climate studies performed by Exxon for decades, the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York began fraud investigations. The Securities and Exchange Commission separately started to investigate whether Exxon Mobil’s valuation depended on the burning of all its known oil-and-gas reserves. (Exxon Mobil has denied any wrongdoing and stands by its valuation method.)

The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is “Exxon Knew.” It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.

The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.

Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, “The Bell Science Hour” — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired “The Unchained Goddess,” a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” warning that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate” through the release of carbon dioxide. “A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,” says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. “An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.

Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.

Could it have been any other way? In the late 1970s, a small group of philosophers, economists and political scientists began to debate, largely among themselves, whether a human solution to this human problem was even possible. They did not trouble themselves about the details of warming, taking the worst-case scenario as a given. They asked instead whether humankind, when presented with this particular existential crisis, was willing to prevent it. We worry about the future. But how much, exactly?

The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, a member of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in the 1970s that the most appropriate remedy was a global carbon tax. But that required an international agreement, which Nordhaus didn’t think was likely. Michael Glantz, a political scientist who was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time, argued in 1979 that democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem. The competition for resources means that no single crisis can ever command the public interest for long, yet climate change requires sustained, disciplined efforts over decades. And the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich argued that any global agreement would inevitably favor the most minimal action. Adaptation, Meyer-Abich concluded, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

If human beings really were able to take the long view — to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths — we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.

Like most human questions, the carbon-dioxide question will come down to fear. At some point, the fears of young people will overwhelm the fears of the old. Some time after that, the young will amass enough power to act. It will be too late to avoid some catastrophes, but perhaps not others. Humankind is nothing if not optimistic, even to the point of blindness. We are also an adaptable species. That will help.

The distant perils of climate change are no longer very distant, however. Many have already begun to occur. We are capable of good works, altruism and wisdom, and a growing number of people have devoted their lives to helping civilization avoid the worst. We have a solution in hand: carbon taxes, increased investment in renewable and nuclear energy and decarbonization technology. As Jim Hansen told me, “From a technology and economics standpoint, it is still readily possible to stay under two degrees Celsius.” We can trust the technology and the economics. It’s harder to trust human nature. Keeping the planet to two degrees of warming, let alone 1.5 degrees, would require transformative action. It will take more than good works and voluntary commitments; it will take a revolution. But in order to become a revolutionary, you need first to suffer.

Hansen’s most recent paper, published last year, announced that Earth is now as warm as it was before the last ice age, 115,000 years ago, when the seas were more than six meters higher than they are today. He and his team have concluded that the only way to avoid dangerous levels of warming is to bend the emissions arc below the x-axis. We must, in other words, find our way to “negative emissions,” extracting more carbon dioxide from the air than we contribute to it. If emissions, by miracle, do rapidly decline, most of the necessary carbon absorption could be handled by replanting forests and improving agricultural practices. If not, “massive technological CO₂ extraction,” using some combination of technologies as yet unperfected or uninvented, will be required. Hansen estimates that this will incur costs of $89 trillion to $535 trillion this century, and may even be impossible at the necessary scale. He is not optimistic.

Like Hansen, Rafe Pomerance is close to his granddaughter. When he feels low, he wears a bracelet she made for him. He finds it difficult to explain the future to her. During the Clinton administration, Pomerance worked on environmental issues for the State Department; he is now a consultant for Rethink Energy Florida, which hopes to alert the state to the threat of rising seas, and the chairman of Arctic 21, a network of scientists and research organizations that hope “to communicate the ongoing unraveling of the Arctic.” Every two months, he has lunch with fellow veterans of the climate wars — E.P.A. officials, congressional staff members and colleagues from the World Resources Institute. They bemoan the lost opportunities, the false starts, the strategic blunders. But they also remember their achievements. In a single decade, they turned a crisis that was studied by no more than several dozen scientists into the subject of Senate hearings, front-page headlines and the largest diplomatic negotiation in world history. They helped summon into being the world’s climate watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and initiated the negotiations for a treaty signed by nearly all of the world’s nations.

It is true that much of the damage that might have been avoided is now inevitable. And Pomerance is not the romantic he once was. But he still believes that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it. Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope.

Correction August 2, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the type of solar panels installed by President Jimmy Carter on the White House roof. They were solar-thermal panels, not photovoltaic panels.

Correction August 7, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of acres that burned in Yellowstone National Park in 1988. Yellowstone lost 793,880 acres, not four million.

Correction August 16, 2018

An earlier version of this article erroneously cited a 1974 C.I.A. study. The study was about climate change; it was not specifically about global warming caused by carbon dioxide.

Nathaniel Rich is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine, for which he has written about immortal jellyfish , a 47-hour train ride between New Orleans and Los Angeles and a lawyer’s campaign to expose DuPont’s profligate use of a toxic chemical. He is the author of three novels, including “King Zeno,” which was published in January. George Steinmetz is a photographer who specializes in aerial imagery. He has won numerous awards including three prizes from World Press Photo and the Environmental Vision Award for his work on large-scale agriculture. He has published four books of photography, including his latest, “New York Air: The View From Above.” With additional reporting by Jaime Lowe, who is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘‘Mental: Lithium, Love and Losing My Mind.’’ She previously wrote a feature about the incarcerated women who fight California wildfires.

The new climate narrative

Subscribe to global connection, kemal derviş kemal derviş senior fellow.

June 7, 2021

This op-ed was originally published by Project Syndicate .

As the Nobel laureate economists Robert Shiller , Abhijit Banerjee , and Esther Duflo have argued eloquently in recent books , political debate and economic policy are driven much more by simple “narratives” than by complex and nuanced theories or models. What counts are plausible “stories” that have broad intuitive appeal and can thus sway public opinion.

This is certainly true of climate policy. Modeling global warming is an immensely complicated undertaking based on “probabilistic” physical relationships and huge amounts of data about natural and human activities over many decades or centuries . But relatively straightforward messages continue to dominate policy discussions.

When the climate policy debate began, the prevailing narrative was that economic growth faced a new constraint in the form of a carbon budget, and exceeding it would bring about an undesirable amount of global warming. Policymakers would therefore have to consider a trade-off between more economic output in the near term and the damage caused by global warming in the longer term.

What previously appeared to be a political suicide mission could now yield substantial benefits for those who lead it.

Unsurprisingly, the academic debate—epitomized by the work of Nicholas Stern , William Nordhaus , and Martin Weitzman —concentrated heavily on how to compare climate-change mitigation costs paid in the present with benefits accrued in the future. The so-called “ social discount rate ” depends on two components: a rate of “pure time preference” that generally gives future generations’ welfare less weight than that of current ones (although some believe that ethical considerations require it to be zero), and a term reflecting the degree of diminishing returns to welfare with respect to consumption. A higher discount rate makes ambitious near-term mitigation policies appear less desirable.

Another dimension of the story was the fact that climate-change mitigation is a textbook example of a global public good. Because there is only one atmosphere, any country’s emissions reductions cause the same reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide and therefore the same mitigation, from which no country can be excluded. This gives rise to a free-rider problem: Every country has an incentive to let others mitigate, and thereby reap the benefits without incurring the costs.

Besides the discount rate, therefore, much of the climate debate centered on how to deal with the free-rider issue—for example, by trying to negotiate a binding international agreement tying rewards and penalties to mitigation performance. The bottom line was that limiting climate change was necessary but involved some important upfront costs that would—for a while at least—result in lower growth.

Fareed Zakaria on an Age of Revolutions

Ones and tooze, foreign policy live.

Spring 2024 Issue

Print Archive

FP Analytics

In-depth Special Reports
Issue Briefs
Power Maps and Interactive Microsites
FP Simulations & PeaceGames
Graphics Database

From Resistance to Resilience

The atlantic & pacific forum, redefining multilateralism, principles of humanity under pressure, fp security forum.

By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.

Your guide to the most important world stories of the day

Essential analysis of the stories shaping geopolitics on the continent

The latest news, analysis, and data from the country each week

Weekly update on what’s driving U.S. national security policy

Evening roundup with our editors’ favorite stories of the day

One-stop digest of politics, economics, and culture

Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors

A curated selection of our very best long reads

The Tragedy of Stopping Climate Change

The race is on to tell—or sell—the right story about global warming..

Climate Change

As nations everywhere struggle to decide how best to salvage Earth, perhaps it’s only to be expected that our global generalized anxiety disorder has reached the fever pitch of a writer under deadline: How should the plot to save the world proceed?

The 2051 Munich Climate Conference, organized by the Munich-based Büro Grandezza theater troupe and hosted by the Bellevue di Monaco center for refugees, met in September of this year to reverse-engineer an answer to this question. The conference invited scholars from around the world to present on climate attitudes in 2021 as if it were 30 years in the future, exactly one year after the carbon neutrality deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Such a unique call for papers promised an event at once wholly academic and wholly “fictional.” As Andreas Kohn, a founding member of Büro Grandezza, told me over Zoom a few days before I arrived for the gathering, the basic structure of the conference-cum-performance amounted to an urgent thought experiment in 20/20 hindsight: In 2051 people will look back on what we knew about curbing emissions and say, “Why didn’t they do that?’”

In the popular imagination, projections of climate futures tend to fall into one of two categories: utopia or dystopia. The fictional framework of the 2051 Munich Climate Conference is of a piece with a recent swell of interest in reshaping the public imagination for climate adaptation in ways that break through existing cliches, broadening the range of outcomes to include the vast gradient of possibilities that fall between extremes. Climate scientists have been marching more or less to the same, urgent drumbeat since the 1960s, when the first conclusive reports linking fossil fuels to the greenhouse effect were published. The discourse about how that science should be communicated, however, has taken a decisive turn. As part of a greater trend toward storytelling in the social and hard sciences in general, the emphasis has shifted from pumping the public with facts to furnishing voters with actionable climate narratives.

Evidence of the storytelling shift is now everywhere discussions of climate change are found. The Pulitzer Prize-winning climate journalist Dan Fagin has argued that storytelling is part of the solution to the climate crisis and that journalism about it needs to be packaged “in the form of a story, in the form of narrative, with characters, drama, and a connecting thread.” Political scientists, economists, and sociologists also increasingly place climate change in the context of the meaning-making narratives by which societies organize themselves. In Climate Change and Storytelling , Annika Arnold of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation situates climate narratives amid overwhelming evidence that climate adaptation will require cultural change, media coherence, and sidestepping the public paralysis that apocalyptic stories and images promote. A 2017 edition of the journal Energy Research & Social Science devoted an entire issue to “Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research.” This emphasis on narrative and imagination has trickled from academia into popular discourse by way of public exhibitions like the one in Munich and by way of policymakers who have begun to listen; in 2016, the German Advisory Council on Global Change put these ideas into practice in its outline for a “normative compass” promoting cultural cohesion in matters of nature management and economic inequality.

The consensus couldn’t be clearer: The world is far behind emissions goals, and the right narratives can help to bridge the gap. As a novelist myself, this fascinates me. The greatest challenge of the century has been framed as a kind of writer’s block: What kind of story should we tell? And just how tragic or extreme does it need to be?

Coral and mangrove grows at the protected Bunaken Island Marine National Park in Manado on May 14, 2006. Foreign Policy illustration/ROMEO GACAD/AFP via Getty Images

On the first day of the 2051 climate conference, Munich epitomized the spatial-temporal paradox that makes motivating energy transformation so difficult: The skies were clear; the sun was out; balmy temperatures drew brunchgoers out to sidewalk cafes and picnic blankets, and yours truly into a pharmacy for a travel-sized bottle of sunscreen. Though devastating floods had ravaged southern Germany only a few months prior, on this mild afternoon, imminent disaster could not have seemed farther away.

The conference was organized around the key emissions target set by the Paris Agreement—to restrict global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius—which tends to map to the kind of binary thinking reflected in popular climate narratives. On the first day, presenters spoke from a dystopic 2051 where the world had surpassed the 1.5- or even 2-degree mark; on the second, they heralded from a far rosier future where emissions had been curbed. The dystopian version of 2051 saw the Maldives sink underwater and feasible adaptation strategies thwarted by populist political opportunism; in the more optimistic version, residents of American Samoa had successfully sued oil companies to fund climate adaptation efforts, and carbon capture had proved itself a cost-effective silver bullet. The fact that these scientists were speaking to us from any future at all suggested that, in either world, some iteration of civilized life had survived.

The range of presentations shed light on why talk of “reimagining” climate change can feel so attractive.

The range of presentations shed light on why talk of “reimagining” climate change can feel so attractive. (Indeed, one of the better-attended talks on the first afternoon was titled “The transformative potential of sociological imagination for eco-social change.”) As a voter, and in the face of overwhelming ecological uncertainty, it’s hard not to feel as if you’ve taken a seat at a craps table, and even then that someone else is rolling the dice. Hypothetical accounts of 2051 breathe reality into a variety of potential policy pathways, making an unstable and seemingly distant future less abstract.

Notably, the most engaging of those accounts—like most engaging 20th-century novels—tended to focus on national, as opposed to global, frameworks. In “Locked-in: Revisiting coastal adaptation policies in the Maldives,” Geronimo Gussmann, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin specializing in oceanographic adaptation, historicized the resilience and innovation of a Maldivian people whose chance for climate preparedness had slipped through the cracks of politicians’ opportunism. Forgone solutions included planting mangrove forests, building sea walls, and diverting resources to the islands most in need, rather than to the islands most likely to vote for a particular candidate. Another performance by the English artist Nico Powell took the form of letters to newspaper advice columnists, and was delivered from a future where a stagnant Gulf Stream has left England under a permanent gray cloud, and automation and fear have eliminated the need for citizens to ever leave their homes. (The COVID-19 lockdown is itself increasingly a reference point for possible climate futures.) These imagined pathways—which also featured some of the best role-playing of the sessions I saw—rested on specificity and detail, on ethical nuance, and, crucially, on problems dramatized at the national, as opposed to global, scale.

There’s No Wake-Up Moment on Climate in America

Even as disasters strike daily, politics will keep obstructing solutions.

Throughout the presentations, scholars became characters of themselves. They spoke of the research they were doing “back in 2021,” revised their ages, referred to their creaking joints. They were acting—and not without a hint of irony. No wonder: In many ways, they were also adopting the perspective of the literary climate novel or the Hollywood disaster film, works of fiction set in ecologically altered futures that explore the dystopian or utopian consequences of environmental neglect. As with any modeling exercise, adapting the techniques and assumptions of a discipline like fiction-making to the purpose of extrapolating real-world outcomes—and climate change narratives have an especially pressing mandate to do so—is a tricky business. The results can be confusing, even fraught. During a Q&A with another scholar who’d called for more abstract renovations of the “eco-sociological imagination,” Gussmann broke character to pose an impassioned query of his own: “But who are we telling these stories to? The public? Multinational corporations? Who is the ‘we’?” The silence that followed marked one of those moments when fiction can begin to strain against the urgency of the real.

Gussmann’s question touched on a problem perennial to all storytellers in a globalized moment. Narratives thrive on the specificity of national and local communities (nationalists, of course, have also been known to leverage the power of storytelling); climate change, by contrast, is terrifyingly global. But for a phenomenon that so readily invites imaginative extremes, equally challenging for climate storytellers is the question of how such narratives ought to end. There is overwhelming evidence that apocalyptic alarmism and utopic techno-optimism alike fail to foster necessary change, instead engendering public paralysis and procrastination. And according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, it is also no longer possible to avoid measurable effects of climate change. While there is still a great deal that humans can and must do, those activities might in fact be best framed in terms of avoiding extremes: We have entered the mitigation phase.

And mitigation can pose a problem, as far as climate storytelling goes. Falling short of either overwhelming victory or disaster, mitigation narratives aim to capture a global audience with the varieties of tragedy that lie in between. When was the last time you saw a blockbuster premiere under the tagline “Well, it could have been worse…”?

Water runs down the melting Northern Schneeferner glacier into a small lake on the Zugspitze plateau near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on on Sept. 8, 2020. Foreign Policy illustration/Sean Gallup/Getty Images

“All of writing is a huge lake,” the British novelist Jean Rhys reportedly told a friend . “There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake.” From the social sciences to marketing studies, the call for narrative often evokes Rhys’s literary sensibility: We are each a little tributary to the collective sea of human experience.

With the rise of digital advertising, however, literary storytelling has ceded ground to corporate strategists who borrow the language and techniques of spinning yarns in order to sell: All that matters is here is real-world outcomes. In the digital space, businesses and individuals have become brands, moving beyond satisfying basic consumer needs and desires to inviting prospective buyers to join their stories. As the self-fashioned marketing guru Joe Pulizzi wrote in a widely distributed 2012 paper “The Rise of Storytelling as the New Marketing,” “Who would have ever guessed that the future of marketing is, in fact, not marketing at all, but publishing?” The most famous adman of the 20th century, David Ogilvy, laid the groundwork for marketing-as-publishing with his “soft sell” approach; by leveraging nuanced narrative to entertain consumers and hold attention, the salesperson forgoes the immediate transaction today to influence long-term buying habits tomorrow. The “hard sell,” by contrast, goes in for the impulse buy and favors alarmist, insistent language. You might say that the discourse on climate change storytelling has recently undergone a shift from hard sell to soft.

With the rise of digital advertising, however, literary storytelling has ceded ground to corporate strategists who borrow the language and techniques of spinning yarns in order to sell.

There’s a reason that the kind of storyteller interested in motivating action—to buy a ticket, to make a purchase, to support a political cause—is attracted to narrating extremes. Narratives of disaster or the victory of good over evil unfold according to simplified moral schema and in realms beyond individual control; support comes easily because the villains and the heroes are made clear, as are the stakes for the reader. Any practitioner of fiction aiming for rapid, popular, emotional engagement might therefore wonder about the dramatic potential of mitigation as a narrative arc. Novelists call this a problem of content and form: The formal narrative structures that seem best equipped to capture the public eco-imagination—dystopian thrillers, techno-utopias, ad campaigns, or policy platforms promising instant gratification—aren’t necessarily those best suited to describing the potential realities we face. This is a recipe for writer’s block indeed.

Climate change is not without its own streamlined moral schema. Oil companies and politicians who actively lobby against energy transformation really do serve the world a serious evil, while inspiration for climate activism is claimed by new technologies and the young. From this view, the ethics of energy transformation seem rather straightforward after all. In the kickoff session to the 2051 Munich Climate Conference, keynote speaker Saleemul Huq, a climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, imagined that a world of mitigated climate change will have young people, fossil fuel-free economic development, and the leadership of women and people of color to thank. Who could argue against the social and ecological value of that future or the redistributed decision-making power it portends? And yet, one suspects that between the oil companies and the charismatic, ambitious new generation of leaders on which we might hang our hopes, there lies a large, diverse sector of the global population for whom climate adaptation will not feel like an immediate victory: In no successful ecological future can a coal worker in West Virginia or South Africa keep their job; in no climate future will citizens of low-lying atoll islands like the Maldives or American Samoa evade an existential threat to their national sovereignty and physical survival. A more complex narrative anticipates long-term, achievable success while also recognizing the short-term pain that attends economic transformation.

When I asked Büro Grandezza about the role of mitigation narratives that clear space for outcomes falling somewhere in between wholesale victory and disaster, there was some reluctance to accept the implication that more sanguine futures have been foreclosed. “I don’t think that we need to think about the in-between,” Kohn said, “because I think at the moment we are only telling this story.” He emphasized that staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius is still technically possible, only “nobody seems to believe it will happen.” The goal of the second day of the conference, he emphasized, was to make that 1.5 degree scenario credible without glossing social inequities. After a pause, however, his colleague Christiane Pfau added, “It’s good for some, it’s bad for others. And that is somehow dystopic and utopic at the same time.”

A 1794 engraving of King Lear. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

If marketing narratives are explicitly designed to incite targeted action (the sale) and reshape reality (consumer perceptions), literary fictions, by contrast—and to borrow a concept from the novelist Henry James—tend to exist in competition with reality. With such an urgent need to change course on climate, what could an approach prioritizing aesthetics over action possibly have to add?

In the effort to loot existing narrative modes for a climate match, one quasi-literary narrative model that has emerged is the Narrative Policy Framework, which argues that scientific data and facts ought to be presented to the public enmeshed in narratives that tell the story of policy pathways. The framework includes four main elements: characters (victims, villains, and heroes), a political setting in which a problem is contextualized, a moral presented in the form of a solution to the political problem, and a plot linking these elements through relations of cause and effect. It’s a welcome innovation that should and is being introduced in real-world situations.

But it might also be useful to recall that for the modern fiction writer, over and above paradigms of character, setting, moral, and plot, the craft of storytelling comes down to the art of managing reader expectations. In writing workshops, this idea of managing expectations is a veritable cliche. It carries through to other well-worn tropes, such as the idea that a story’s end ought to be both inevitable and surprising: inevitable insofar as we expected something like it to come along; surprising in that the denouement undercuts those expectations just enough to keep the finale from seeming predetermined or contrived. The explanatory power of these stories lies not in furnishing actionable, real-world purpose (truth and beauty, James argued, are “purpose enough”), but in modeling how we prepare ourselves for, and make sense of, endings that cannot possibly be predicted.

Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending , now considered one of the most important works of Western literary criticism of the 20th century, argued that all literature, diverse as it is, bears the trace of the ancient human desire to “make sense” of endings, in particular of the apocalypse. This long-standing need to anticipate and negotiate crisis through narrative is reflected in the history of our fictional frameworks, which, like scientific models, are continually updated as our understanding of the world evolves. As humans began to recognize their own historical agency, narratives drifted away from paradigmatic, ancient story structures of the apocalypse—the Bible, the myth—to embrace uncircumscribed structures that sidestep any resolution at all; “they have become more ‘open,’” Kermode writes. The argument here is that apocalypse is no longer viewed as “imminent,” a conclusion to be anticipated, but “immanent,” a permanent state “stretched” across the present; it has already arrived in the form of genocide, the hydrogen bomb, ecological crisis. This clears a wide, unpredictable space for what lies ahead, given that we’re already living “in the middest” of extremes.

“In their general character our fictions have certainly moved away from the simplicity of the paradigm,” Kermode writes. And loosening those genre conventions fundamentally changes the narrative experience for reader and writer both. The reader has fewer genre cues to set expectations from the get-go, while the writer, meanwhile, bears the responsibility of discovering new narrative forms that prepare the reader for a more moderate kind of close—one that concludes the story but not, necessarily, the narrative world. As an example, consider that the reader of a classical tragedy knows the play must end in a death even before they open the text. What we tend to call modern literature, by contrast, has fewer signposts. The writer has to teach the reader how to read the plot from scratch, incorporating a “sense of an ending” into every stage of the story.

That the reader isn’t able to fully anticipate the bloody culmination or even explicate its significance is part of what lends the play its quality of truth.

The American critic Francine Prose recalls discovering the power of managing reader expectations in this way during a school exercise in which she was asked to track the mention of eyes in Shakespeare’s King Lear , leading up to the famous scene where Gloucester’s own are gouged: “[T]he language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations.” The gore is shocking when it arrives—yet in retrospect, it’s clear Shakespeare took care to prepare us for this outcome all along. That the reader isn’t able to fully anticipate the bloody culmination or even explicate its significance is part of what lends the play its quality of truth. The more a story imitates the contingencies and unpredictability of real life, the more it seems to belong, Kermode says, to one of those tales “which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naïve expectations, is finding something out for us, something real. ”

Perhaps one of the reasons climate change is so difficult to “make sense” of through narrative is that this most modern of crises so clearly reflects ancient structures of apocalyptic prophecy. Business-as-usual climate models predict the end of the world quite as literally and conclusively as medieval Christendom’s anticipation of the Second Coming of A.D. 1000. This prophetic structure—backed, like earlier prophecies, by experts and data—invites intuitive, ancient story arcs that dramatize the exploitative dynamic between godlike powers and human mortals. At the same time, climate change couldn’t be more contemporary, nor could the attitude needed to avert its most terrifying manifestations; preparing ourselves for less tragic endings requires the open-endedness of continual compromise.

A few weeks after the Munich conference, I found myself on a Zoom seminar hosted by the Climate Transparency Report discussing how much the World Bank ought to lend a coal-dependent, middle-income, segregated country like South Africa, where some 80,000 miners—most of them living in rural districts, most of them Black—stand to lose their jobs. It is far too costly to keep coal plants open—and yet to close them also comes with costs.

The modern novel models this kind of modern consciousness, one whose expectations are tied not so much to foreclosed temporal ends but to the negotiation of a present in permanent crisis: How hard are these characters’ lives going to be in the immediate term? The world did not end in A.D. 1000, just as it did not end on so many other occasions it was supposed to have. Even still, “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited,” Kermode writes. The raison d’être of modern literature, maybe, is precisely to disconfirm apocalyptic narratives, so comforting in their simplicity and yet terrifying in their finality. The End will always wield authority over the human imagination, but combating the attitude of knowingness that frames it as imminent clears space for the anxious-making range of outcomes where life, in fact, goes on.

Polar bears feed at a garbage dump near the village of Belushya Guba, on the remote Russian northern Novaya Zemlya archipelago, on Oct. 31, 2018. Foreign Policy illustration/ALEXANDER GRIR/AFP via Getty Images

So, how do you sell compromise? I went into the Munich Climate Conference as a novelist expecting to write about exercises in imagining varieties of tragedy. The longer I spent in 2051, the more I became convinced that what we are after here isn’t storytelling at all, but marketing. The more important that question of audience action is for the story you’re telling, the more it seems to me that we move from “feeding the lake” to pushing action in the real world—in particular, to selling people on short-term costs for long-term gains.

This isn’t to say that writers, novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights don’t think about audience, activism, or real-world outcomes. Quite to the contrary: Büro Grandezza’s interventionist theater methods intentionally blur the line between political activism and art. As member Benno Heisel said of the troupe’s own artistic relationship to the 2051 conference, “It is an arts project, because that’s what we do. However, the starting point and the goal of the project are political ideas.” But while artists may be politically motivated, most do not tell stories with the primary aim of influencing the audience’s behavior or spending patterns in specific, measurable, and reproduceable ways. Even the climate novelist, journalist, and activist Kim Stanley Robinson, whose recent novel The Ministry for the Future is perhaps one of the most popular examples of climate mitigation narratives to date, has said that above all, he sets out “first, to write a good novel.” A salesperson, by contrast, is motivated solely to persuade you to buy—or buy into—something you never previously imagined. They tell stories not merely to captivate but to persuade.

When I asked a young father attending the first day of the conference if the morning’s sessions had inspired any hope, he reached for Franz Kafka: “He said something about how there’s plenty of hope, just not for us.”

And yet, there is something fundamentally dissatisfying, if not inappropriate, in importing the corporate strategist’s point of view wholesale. The ethical complexities of energy transformation extend up and down social and class hierarchies at the national and global scales, complicating the roles of protagonist and antagonist, and inviting uncathartic limbos—mitigation requires enduring what novelists call “peripeteia,” or sudden reversals in fortunes, which energy transition will require. Perhaps that’s why novels kept coming up at the Munich conference. “In order for everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” the climate economist Michael Pahle paraphrased from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a modern Italian classic of a decadent Sicilian family in decline. When I asked a young father attending the first day of the conference if the morning’s sessions had inspired any hope, he reached for Franz Kafka: “He said something about how there’s plenty of hope, just not for us.”

Luckily, it isn’t the job of a storyteller to provide hope but simply to aim for truth—or at least so says Henry James. The collective writer’s block for climate narratives might therefore seem less insurmountable if the goal is scaled back from saving the life on Earth to providing credible models for how humans manage expectations in a world that has profoundly disappointed them—first by repeatedly disconfirming the arrival of imminent apocalypse, then by allowing apocalypse to slip in nevertheless through the back door of the present and, furthermore, to distribute its effects so unequally. Climate change is one of the greatest regressive taxes the world has ever faced. For policymakers who find themselves in the uncomfortable position of drafting plots to solve it while still remaining open to a range of mitigation efforts, a good place to start might be promising to minimize losses for those who will be required to give something up. This likely means selling us on the truth: In the short term, some will lose.

“The consumer is not a moron,” Ogilvy famously said, in what turned out to be the best sales pitch the soft sell ever had.

Here’s how a novelist might tell a story about rapidly changing course: If you ever take the 6:37 p.m. train from the Berlin Südkreuz railway station to Munich, as I did to attend the 2051 conference, you should know that it splits in Leipzig. One half goes on to Munich; the other, to Jena, a city hundreds of miles to the north. If you choose the wrong half, you’re in for a long night.

To correct my mistake, I backtracked to a regional hub where I could catch another high-speed train. En route, I met a young doctor from Mexico looking to make the same connection. We talked about vaccines. We talked about Haruki Murakami fan fiction. (He’d written some.) Our regional train was delayed, and the transfer would be tight. A third passenger walked up and down the aisles, looking for a conductor who might call ahead. Didn’t anybody work here? Who the hell was in charge? As we pulled into the station and shouldered our bags, readying ourselves to sprint, I joked, “ Wer als Erster kommt an, halte die Tür auf. ”

Whoever gets there first, hold the door.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a writer of fiction and criticism. She is the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and the forthcoming novel The Visitors .

Join the Conversation

Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription.

Already a subscriber? Log In .

Subscribe Subscribe

View Comments

Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now.

Not your account? Log out

Please follow our comment guidelines , stay on topic, and be civil, courteous, and respectful of others’ beliefs.

Change your username:

I agree to abide by FP’s comment guidelines . (Required)

Confirm your username to get started.

The default username below has been generated using the first name and last initial on your FP subscriber account. Usernames may be updated at any time and must not contain inappropriate or offensive language.

More from Foreign Policy

Arab countries have israel’s back—for their own sake.

Last weekend’s security cooperation in the Middle East doesn’t indicate a new future for the region.

Forget About Chips—China Is Coming for Ships

Beijing’s grab for hegemony in a critical sector follows a familiar playbook.

‘The Regime’ Misunderstands Autocracy

HBO’s new miniseries displays an undeniably American nonchalance toward power.

Washington’s Failed Africa Policy Needs a Reset

Instead of trying to put out security fires, U.S. policy should focus on governance and growth.

What Columbia’s Protests Reveal About America

Xi jinping has tough economic choices ahead, the u.s. military is getting kicked out of niger, congress helps steer taiwan toward the ‘porcupine strategy’, ukraine’s cheap drones are decimating russia’s tanks, blinken-xi talks highlight continued areas of disagreement, what a real civil war would do to the u.s. economy, what in the world.

FP’s flagship evening newsletter guiding you through the most important world stories of the day, written by Alexandra Sharp . Delivered weekdays.

Published daily by the Lowy Institute

Changing the narrative of climate change

Social identity, not scientific evidence, drives many people’s attitudes on climate change.

The Orroral Valley fire burns near Canberra, 31 January 2020 (Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images)

Australian Public Opinion
Climate change

Few people would recognise respiratory failure as a critical threat to their health without also placing Covid-19 – an amplifier of respiratory failure – in the same category. Yet, this is essentially the way many Australians view climate change and its impacts, according to the 2020 Lowy Institute Poll .

While “drought and water shortages” and “environmental disasters such as bushfires and floods” are considered critical threats by 77% and 67% of the Australian population, respectively, only 59% say the same of climate change. We know that global warming is amplifying Australia’s risk of severe drought and bushfires along with other extreme weather events and rising sea levels. This disconnect presents us with a puzzle.

If we are fearful of those threats, logic would suggest we should seek to minimise them. The world’s best expertise has told us that if we want to minimise the threat of drought and bushfire, we need to take action on climate change .

Why, then, do we rate amplified symptoms as more threatening than the very causes for their amplification? Part of the answer lies in how we perceive threats. Humans are prone to appraising threats based on their availability to our minds, meaning we will rate threats we can perceive or recall as more urgent than those we cannot. The ability to remember the experience of drought and bushfire, versus needing to imagine the nebulous and multifaceted climate change, is an important factor.

We are not ideological partisans – we are expressive partisans seeking belonging and coherence with our identity group and cultivating points of hostility to and difference from outsiders.

But that’s not the whole story. For the vast majority of people in Australia, just as in many other nations , climate change is not an issue of science. Instead, climate change is a social object . As a social object, it is something we come to understand through our interactions in our social worlds and via observing discourse in the mass-mediated public sphere. Climate change occupies our minds not as the latest synthesis of the best available evidence from the IPCC , but as a narrative about causes, effects and solutions produced by our conversations with family and friends, our observations of the media and politics, and our exchanges on social media.

The Lowy Institute Poll nicely illustrates archetypical climate narratives . If your climate narrative is “Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”, chances are high you read the drought, fires, smoke and hail during the horror summer of 2019–20 as the latest chapter in Australia’s experience of the effects of climate change. During the fires, it seemed there was no place left for narratives of climate action delay and science denial. But sure enough, those narratives emerged. The #ClimateEmergency narrative was challenged by the #ArsonEmergency , despite no evidence to support the latter.

Why were some Australians so eager to adopt the so-called arson emergency as their narrative explaining the fires? US political scientist Deva Woodly’s insights on resonance suggest a way to understand. By this concept, new information, if it is to stick and become part of our narrative, must resonate with what we already know – our “common-sense” understanding of the world.

If our common-sense understanding of the world is that “the problem of global warming should be addressed, but its effects will be gradual, so we can deal with the problem gradually by taking steps that are low in cost”, then the idea of the fires as a catalyst for revolution in Australian climate politics and policy is unlikely to resonate. But the fires as a crisis spurred by individual bad actors probably will. And for those folks, the “arson emergency” narrative allows climate change to remain a comparatively minor threat, compared to the threats it amplifies, despite the horror fires.

We must also recognise that climate narratives are not randomly distributed across the Australian population. In Australia, acceptance of the reality of climate change divides along left-right political lines – the intensity of left-right political polarisation on climate change is second only to the United States . So, our climate narratives are closely wrapped up not just in our social worlds, but also in our political worlds, and they come to be part of our identity . Our climate narrative signals the social groups to which we belong, just as our signals of social belonging can indicate our climate narrative.

For many people, climate narratives are far less connected to appraisal of the science of climate change than they are to expressing social belonging in relation to climate change. We are not ideological partisans – we are expressive partisans seeking belonging and coherence with our identity group and cultivating points of hostility to and difference from outsiders.

If we are to see better alignment between the best available scientific evidence and how Australians gauge the threat of climate change to the nation’s interest, we have to recognise that climate narratives are deeply intertwined with our social-political identities. New understandings will only stick if they resonate with existing narratives. And existing narratives are most likely to change if led from within the identity group.

To that end, we can look to groups that are advocating for climate action from outside of the “usual suspects”, such as Farmers for Climate Action , the Investor Group on Climate Change , the Hunter Jobs Alliance , and the Blueprint Institute . These are the social spaces in which a reorientation of climate narratives may occur.

Chart of the week: Trump and the US-Australia alliance

You may also be interested in, china eyes its next prize – the mekong, hong kong: the finishing blow, the fight to repeal anti-gay laws in singapore.

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Global warming.

The causes, effects, and complexities of global warming are important to understand so that we can fight for the health of our planet.

Earth Science, Climatology

Tennessee Power Plant

Ash spews from a coal-fueled power plant in New Johnsonville, Tennessee, United States.

Photograph by Emory Kristof/ National Geographic

Global warming is the long-term warming of the planet’s overall temperature. Though this warming trend has been going on for a long time, its pace has significantly increased in the last hundred years due to the burning of fossil fuels . As the human population has increased, so has the volume of fossil fuels burned. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and natural gas, and burning them causes what is known as the “greenhouse effect” in Earth’s atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is when the sun’s rays penetrate the atmosphere, but when that heat is reflected off the surface cannot escape back into space. Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels prevent the heat from leaving the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide , chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor , methane , and nitrous oxide . The excess heat in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to rise overtime, otherwise known as global warming.

Global warming has presented another issue called climate change. Sometimes these phrases are used interchangeably, however, they are different. Climate change refers to changes in weather patterns and growing seasons around the world. It also refers to sea level rise caused by the expansion of warmer seas and melting ice sheets and glaciers . Global warming causes climate change, which poses a serious threat to life on Earth in the forms of widespread flooding and extreme weather. Scientists continue to study global warming and its impact on Earth.

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Production Managers

Program specialists, last updated.

February 21, 2024

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

Want people to notice your climate research? Learn how to write.

Research with a narrative is shared more widely

By Marlene Cimons | Published Jan 12, 2017 9:22 PM EST

Environment

Pretend for a moment you are a climate scientist, or maybe a layperson curious about climate change research. Which of the following intro sentences would prompt you to keep reading a study?

Empirical critical loads for N deposition effects and maps showing areas projected to be in exceedance of the critical load (CL) are given for seven major vegetation types in California.

The capture of carbon dioxide at the point of emission from coal- or gas-burning power plants is an attractive route to reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

Unless you already know what “N deposition effects” are (nitrogen deposits from human activities that threaten plant diversity), you’d probably be more inclined to stick with the second one. The writing is clear, simple, and to the point—unlike the first, which is dense, weighty and, for some readers, might require some additional explanation.

These are actual examples of the opening sentences of climate change research abstracts that were published in well-regarded scientific journals ( Journal of Environmental Management and Science , respectively) and were among those studied by researchers trying to determine whether good science writing can have more of an impact than the dull and expository.

Their study , published in the journal PLOS ONE , found that climate change papers written in a more narrative style — those that tell a story — were the most highly cited by other scientists, an important measure of their influence in the field.

Their findings support beliefs long-held in the humanities that narrative writing holds more power than expository writing, and that telling a story — rather than describing observations in an objective detached way — can improve communication, especially when it comes to climate change.

Nevertheless, the dry and cumbersome style still prevails within the vast majority of journal articles. Academic journals are notorious for publishing research findings written in stilted, eye-glazing fashion, often making them unpalatable to the public (and even to many scientists).

“It’s a vestige of 18th/19th-century views in which the scientist was merely an observer who did not influence the outcome of an experiment,” says Ryan Kelly, a co-author of the study and assistant professor in the University of Washington School of Marine and Environmental Affairs.

“Hence, ‘the experiment was done,’ rather than ‘I did the experiment,’” he adds. “The 20th century showed us that the experimenter and the experiment are inextricably intertwined, and — in my view — this should have killed off the older style of scientific writing. But science changes slowly.”

To be sure, “jargon has a function,” he says. “It’s shorthand, intelligible by the narrow target audience for which it is intended. The problem is that the narrow target audience probably is far narrower than the authors would like.”

The authors, who also included Annie Hillier, a recent graduate of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, and Terrie Klinger, the school’s director, examined abstracts from more than 700 scientific papers about climate change, focusing on writing style rather than scientific content.

They used a crowdsourcing website to evaluate the narrative components of the articles, asking participants a series of questions about each abstract to gauge whether papers took a narrative approach, such as having language that was attractive to the senses and emotions.

Papers that were cited most by other scientists were those incorporating sensory language as well as those that described cause-and-effect and made a direct appeal to readers to engage in specific follow-up behavior. “The results were especially surprising given that we often think of scientific influence as being driven by science itself, rather than the form in which it is presented,” Hillier says.

In another surprise, the researchers also found that the highest-rated journals tended to feature articles with more narrative content. “We don’t know if the really top journals pick the most readable articles, and that’s why those articles are more influential, or if the more narrative papers would be influential no matter what journal they are in,” Kelly says.

The study already has received considerable attention, although not from traditional media. Rather, there has been “a ton of Twitter posts from scientists, which is remarkable in my experience of academic publishing,” Kelly says. “So, I suppose it remains to be seen what the more formal reaction is… but we certainly seem to have struck a chord within the community of scientists who have been told that communication style matters, but who wanted some data to test that idea.”

These include tweets from Jane Lubchenco , former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and marine ecologist Andrew Thaler .

The reaction has extended beyond the borders of science, Kelly said. “I’ve seen at least one blog post for trial lawyers, for example,” he says.

Kelly acknowledges that he and his co-authors strived to make their own study readable, but admitted that, paradoxically, they were bound by many of the restraints they were seeking to challenge.

“Obviously we were aware that we were writing a paper about writing, and so it needed to be good and clear, and that sentences flowed logically into one another,” he says. Still, “we were aiming for a peer-reviewed scientific publication, and so we did have to write the piece accordingly. As I say, science changes slowly.

“If we had started the piece with ‘it was a dark and stormy night,’ we wouldn’t have even gotten to peer review, probably,” he adds. Although, “ it was a dark and stormy night “ — the opening lines of an 1830 novel by Englishman Edward Bulwer-Lytton — is a phrase now synonymous with florid, overly melodramatic writing.

“That said, Annie did, in fact, start her masters’ presentation with the phrase ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ and it totally captured the audience,” Kelly says. “I wish we could’ve written it up that way, but we didn’t feel we could get away with it.”

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media , a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

Like science, tech, and DIY projects?

Utility Menu

Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed but Still Beautiful

Writers Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams offer new perspectives on how to remake the world

By Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette

Stories can drive action, but perhaps the most damaging climate change story we can tell is the tall tale that we can simply opt for the stability and safety of the status quo, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said Wednesday evening at Harvard’s Memorial Church.

That’s because there is no status quo, as the effects of climate change are multiplying around us, Solnit said. And those changes are going to keep coming — and worsening — regardless of the path we take. The choice is between the uncertainty of a transition from fossil fuels that results in more manageable changes or to continue on the path we’re on, fostering what are likely to be more sweeping and dangerous disruptions.

Solnit, the author of 24 books, including the recently released anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility,” spoke as part of Harvard Divinity School ’s Climate Justice Week, designed to promote thinking around climate justice and highlight the roles that religion and spirituality play in the conversation. The event, “Stories Are Cages, Stories Are Wings — So What Stories Do We Tell About Climate?,” featured Solnit in conversation with Terry Tempest Williams , Divinity School writer-in-residence, as well as a poetry reading and a musical performance of Beethoven.

“Like the chassis of a car or the framing of a house or the skeleton of our own body, assumptions lurk under the stories we tell, giving them their structure or limiting the shapes they can take,” Solnit said. “And one of the biggest, wrongest ones that seems to shape — or misshape — the collective imagination is this idea that there’s an option not to change, and that change is just something we should aspire to or demand, that there’s some sort of stability we can choose instead of changing everything.”

Solnit, who spoke for about 30 minutes and took questions afterward, was described by Williams as “singular, original, defiant, and loving.” Through her work, which spans human rights, women’s rights, the environment, and climate change, Solnit is “building a constituency for change,” Williams said. That effort is continuing with her latest book, “Not Too Late,” which seeks to combat climate change despair and defeatism with stories of hope and change.

Another damaging idea, Williams said in her talk, is that we have to have a perfect solution before we act. People hold up the promise of energy generation by nuclear fusion — the clean source that powers the sun — or of carbon capture and sequestration technology, which will permit continued fossil fuel burning by stripping and storing carbon dioxide from emissions, as ideals that will cause much less disruption to the current energy system.

But Solnit cautioned against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Instead of waiting for those technologies to mature, she said, we should take advantage of the solutions available now. There has been a revolution in renewable energy in recent decades, with efficiency climbing and prices dropping for solar and wind power to the extent that wind is supplanting coal in the Texas energy grid on the basis of price alone.

Addressing climate change, she said, may best be viewed not as merely achieving a goal, but rather as embarking on a process, one that will best get us where we’re going if we start now, using the tools we have at hand. That means embracing renewables and widespread electrification and then adjusting as we go, as newer, better tools become available.

No solution is perfect, however, including renewable energy sources, which have been criticized because of the mining practices employed in extracting chemicals important for battery production to store the energy. While a real problem, that doesn’t invalidate a strategy that still has significantly lower impact than fossil fuel extraction, Solnit said.

“We don’t know how to get there, but we know to take the next step and the next step,” Solnit said, quoting E.L. Doctorow’s description of writing as an apt analogy: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

A key element of the trip into our climate-changed future, Solnit said, is that it should be taken together. Those who resist change would like us to focus on ourselves, on our individual carbon footprints, despairing of achieving broader change.

But Solnit said the complexity of the world’s natural systems means climate change is, by its nature, a problem of networks and connectedness. Viewing climate change as a collective problem requiring cooperation, imagination, and creativity, she said, gives us the power to devise solutions that lift up those who are disadvantaged in the present, like the billions of global poor, living in places most likely to feel climate-related impacts.

Solnit invoked the Japanese art of kintsugi as an analogy for the future. Kintsugi repairs broken pottery not to its original functionality or appearance, but rather uses golden glue to highlight the breaks, enhance the beauty, and transform the piece into something different, but nonetheless valuable.

“I think that there’s a tendency to think that when something is broken, all it will ever be is shards,” Solnit said. “I’ve used it as a metaphor: Life will happen to you. You won’t be young forever. Sorrow will carve its pattern on our face. If you live, if you love, you will lose. But it can still be beautiful, still be strong, and go forward. The bowl can still hold something. The person can still find beauty, find meaning, have strength.”

Today, Solnit said, we don’t need stories of “the climate crisis” so much as we need stories of meeting the crisis, stories that reframe our view of the decades to come in a way similar to reassembling broken ceramics into something else, something perhaps more beautiful.

“I say to you we are making a new world and I believe it can be, in crucial ways, a better one,” Solnit said.

Filter by Type

Faculty in the News (148) Apply Faculty in the News filter
General (85) Apply General filter
HUCE Headlines (10) Apply HUCE Headlines filter

Research Areas

Architecture & Environmental Design (14) Apply Architecture & Environmental Design filter
Arts & Humanities (27) Apply Arts & Humanities filter
Business, Law & Policy (80) Apply Business, Law & Policy filter
Ecology & Biodiversity (60) Apply Ecology & Biodiversity filter
Climate Change (106) Apply Climate Change filter
Energy (42) Apply Energy filter
Human Health (41) Apply Human Health filter
Social Sciences (26) Apply Social Sciences filter
Faculty of Arts and Sciences (67) Apply Faculty of Arts and Sciences filter
Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (53) Apply Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences filter
Harvard Kennedy School (37) Apply Harvard Kennedy School filter
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (25) Apply Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health filter
Harvard Law School (20) Apply Harvard Law School filter
Harvard Business School (17) Apply Harvard Business School filter
Graduate School of Design (12) Apply Graduate School of Design filter
University-Wide (11) Apply University-Wide filter
Harvard Medical School (9) Apply Harvard Medical School filter
Harvard Divinity School (6) Apply Harvard Divinity School filter
Harvard Extension School (5) Apply Harvard Extension School filter
Harvard Graduate School of Education (5) Apply Harvard Graduate School of Education filter
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (1) Apply Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study filter

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

Global Warming Essay

Essay on Global Warming

The last few decades have been monumental when it comes to technological development. Humans have developed systems and machines that make our lives easier. Especially during the early modern period from the early 16th century to as far as the late 18the century, also commonly referred to as “The Scientific Revolution” or “The Enlightenment”, modern technology leapt ahead in development in such a short time frame compared to all of history.

However, with the development of society, there has been a severe detriment to the quality of Earth’s environment. One of the most massive threats to the condition of the planet is climate change. Inadequate research and reckless misuse of natural resources are some of the core reasons for the deteriorating condition of the planet.

To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we need to take an in-depth look into many factors that affect the temperature of the planet and what that means for the future of the world. Here is an objective look at the topic of Global Warming and other important related topics.

What is Climate Change?

Ever since the industrial and scientific revolution, Earth is slowly being used up for its resources. Moreover, the onset of the exponential increase in the world’s population is also very taxing on the environment.

Simply put, as the need for consumption of the population increases, both the utilisation of natural resources and the waste generated from the use of said resources have also increased massively.

One of the main results of this over the many years has become climate change. Climate change is not just the rise or fall of temperature of different areas of the world; it is also a change in the rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, etc. It affects all major life groups on the planet in some way or the other.

What is Global Warming?

Global Warming is often considered an effect of Climate change. Global Warming is the rapid increase in the temperature of the Earth’s environment that is causing many life-threatening issues to arise.

Global Warming is a dangerous effect on our environment that we are facing these days. Rapid industrialization, increase in the population growth and pollution are causing a rise in Global Warming. Global Warming refers to the increase in the average temperature of the earth's surface during the last century. One of the reasons why Global Warming is dangerous is because it disturbs the overall ecology of the planet. This results in floods, famine, cyclones and other issues. There are many causes and results of this warming and is a danger for the existence of life on earth.

The sign of Global Warming is already visible with many natural phenomena happening around globally, affecting each living species.

Here is some data that can help to give a more precise understanding of the reality of Global Warming in the last few years:

On average, the world’s temperature is about 1.5°C higher than during the start of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s. That may not seem a lot to you, but that is an average estimate. This number is only increasing. Many parts of the world face far more severe changes in temperature that affect the planet’s overall health.

In 1950, the world’s CO 2 emissions were at 6 billion tonnes which had quadrupled in volume until 1990, just 40 years later to 22 billion tonnes. Not only that, unchecked CO 2 emissions today have reached a whopping 35 billion tonnes.

The most evident causes of Global Warming are industrialization, urbanization, deforestation, and sophisticated human activities. These human activities have led to an increase in the emission of Greenhouse Gases, including CO₂, Nitrous Oxide, Methane, and others.

Causes of Global Warming

A variety of reasons causes Global Warming. Some of which can be controlled personally by individuals but others are only expected to be solved by communities and the world leaders and activists at the global level.

Many scientists believe the main four reasons for Global Warming, according to recent studies, are:

Greenhouse gases

Deforestation

Per capita carbon emissions

Global Warming is certainly an alarming situation, which is causing a significant impact on life existence. Extreme Global Warming is resulting in natural calamities, which is quite evident happening around. One of the reasons behind Global Warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases stuck on the earth surface, resulting in the temperature increase.

Similarly, volcanoes are also leading to Global Warming because they spew too much CO₂ in the air. One of the significant causes behind Global Warming is the increase in the population. This increase in the population also results in air pollution. Automobiles release a lot of CO₂, which remains stuck in the earth.

This increase in the population is also leading to deforestation, which further results in Global Warming. More and more trees are being cut, increasing the concentration of CO₂.

The greenhouse is the natural process where the sunlight passes through the area, thus warming the earth's surface. The earth surface releases energy in the form of heat in the atmosphere maintaining the balance with the incoming energy. Global Warming depletes the ozone layer leading to the doom's day.

There is a clear indication that the increase in Global Warming will lead to the complete extinction of life from the earth surface.

Solution for Global Warming

Global Warming can not be blamed on individuals; however, it can be tackled and maintained from worsening starting at the individual level. Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates have higher carbon emissions levels than an average citizen. Still, activism and community effort are the only feasible ways to control the worsening state of Global Warming.

Additionally, at the state or government level, world leaders need to create concrete plans and step programmes to ensure that no further harm is being caused to the environment in general.

Although we are almost late in slowing down the Global Warming rate, it is crucial to find the right solution. From individuals to governments, everyone has to work upon a solution for Global Warming. Controlling pollution, population and use of natural resources are some of the factors to consider. Switching over to the electric and hybrid car is the best way to bring down the carbon dioxide.

As a citizen, it is best to switch over to the hybrid car and to use public transport. This will reduce pollution and congestion. Another significant contribution you can make is to minimize the use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of Global Warming taking years to recycle.

Deforestation is another thing to consider that will help in controlling Global Warming. Planting of more trees should be encouraged to make the environment go green.

Industrialization should be under certain norms. The building of industries should be banned in green zones affecting plants and species. Hefty penalties should be levied on such sectors contributing towards Global Warming.

Effects of Global Warming

Global Warming is a real problem that many want to prove as a hoax for their political benefit. However, as aware citizens of the world, we must make sure only the truth is presented in the media.

Various parts of the environment, both flora and fauna, are directly adversely affected by the damages caused by Global Warming. Wildlife being in danger is ultimately a serious threat to the survival of humanity as we know it and its future.

The effect of Global Warming is widely seen in this decade. Glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage are the two common phenomena seen. Glaciers are melting in a fast way. These are pure examples of climate change.

Rise in sea level is another significant effect of Global Warming. This sea-level rise is leading to floods in low-lying areas. Extreme weather conditions are witnessed in many countries. Unseasonal rainfall, extreme heat and cold, wildfires and others are common every year. The number of these cases is increasing. This will indeed imbalance the ecosystem bringing the result of the extinction of species.

Similarly, marine life is also widely getting affected due to the increase in Global Warming. This is resulting in the death of marine species and other issues. Moreover, changes are expected in coral reefs, which are going to face the end in coming years.

These effects will take a steep rise in coming years, bringing the expansion of species to a halt. Moreover, humans too will witness the negative impact of Global Warming in the end.

FAQs on Global Warming Essay

1. What Global Warming will Cause?

Global warming will have a massive impact on our earth in the end. Flood, extreme weather conditions, famine, wildfire and many more will be the result. There will be hotter days, which will also increase the wildfire and famine. In the past years, many meteorological bureaus have added purple and magenta to the forecast.

Another impact of global warming will be rising sea levels. Increased ocean temperatures will lead to the melting of glaciers and ice caps. Increase in the sea level will lead to floods in many low-lying areas.

The overall ecosystem of nature will be an imbalance. This will affect nature in the long-term.

2. Why Does Global Warming Happen?

There are many reasons for the cause of global warming. There are certain gases in the atmosphere called greenhouse gases. The energy then radiates from the surface; the greenhouse gases trap longwave radiation. We humans have added to the atmospheric blanket of greenhouse affecting the living species. Warming of air, oceans, and land is how global warming happens.

Global Warming Essay and the Main Types of Pollution for Writing Essays

Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, dying cloud forests, and extinction of wildlife - all these phenomena are clear signs of the global warming process that has already been launched. But, what do we know about it?

What we call global warming is actually a very broad term. In a nutshell, it means fluctuations in the climate of our planet as a whole or in its individual regions over time, caused by a variety of different factors. Apart from changes in temperatures, global warming also results in a whole range of changes in long-term weather patterns and even causes extreme weather events, which bring irreparable damage to our entire ecosystem.

For centuries, human activities have been taking us closer and closer to the point of no return, and, now, global warming is already a major problem. Today, when changes are already occurring, the entire humanity is wondering how to stop global warming. While the answer is not clear yet, this issue became a common topic for debates and even academic papers.

Pretty much every student faces the need to write my essay about global warming at least once in a lifetime. If you are studying in one of the best colleges for astrophysics working on one now, you’ve come to the right place! Our article will tell you what types of pollution there are, share handy examples, and help you choose the best topic for your essay on global warming that will be interesting for you. Let’s dive in!

Causes of Global Warming

Most of the causes are there because of people and their activities. But, it’s also worth noting that there are some natural causes of global warming. Typically, writing an environmental pollution essay, you’ll have to cover both human-caused and natural reasons. To help you get started, let’s look at the biggest ones.

Burning fossil fuels - probably the biggest cause that leads to faster global warming is a mass burning of various fossil fuels that results in large emissions of CO2 into our atmosphere. The activities that bring the most emissions include transportation, electricity production, and industrial activity.
Clearing of forests and woods - the next big cause is deforestation, whether natural or human-made. As you may already know, trees play a huge role in restoring the atmosphere and, respectively, regulating the climate as they absorb CO2 emitted into the air and release oxygen back to replace it.
Farming - this may surprise you, but the biggest natural cause of global warming is animals that also release greenhouse gases. Thus, a significant percentage of emissions is caused by agriculture and farming.
Resource extraction - another reason for climate change is the extraction of natural materials that can’t be restored naturally for human use.
Pollution - finally, one last cause that speeds up the process of global warming is pollution. This spans air and water pollution, as well as the big share of plastic waste - all the pollution types we are going to discuss further.

Effect of Global Warming

Apart from analyzing some core causes, writing essays about global warming will also require you to delve into the effects it can have. Needless to say that the emaciation of natural resources, pollution, deforestation, and changes in the atmosphere can’t go unnoticed. But, what exactly will happen after global warming?

The primary negative effect of global warming is the drastic change in our planet’s climate. This includes rising temperatures, unpredictable weather patterns, and an increase in extreme weather events. But, this is not all that is there. Due to a changing climate and more extreme weather conditions, some side effects of global warming can include:

Rising sea levels;
Land degradation;
Loss of biodiversity;
Loss of wildlife.

These are the primary effects on our environment that can be caused by global warming.

Apart from that, there are also some possible social effects that we will feel on ourselves. The lack of natural resources and land degradation will likely lead to a significant shortage of water and food and, as a result, will trigger global hunger. Some other negative impacts on our lives can include the loss of livelihood and shorter lifespans, poverty, malnutrition, increased risks of diseases, and mass displacement of people.

Global Warming Solutions

Another important point to cover in essays on climate change and global warming is the possibility of solving the problem. So, let’s take a moment to talk about some of the solutions.

First and foremost, in an attempt to stop global warming, people are already trying to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Some of the most common solutions include a switch to alternative energy resources, transportation methods, and alternative industrial and other activities.

Apart from that, people are becoming more conscious about their everyday consumption behavior. For example, some opt for reusable bottles, shoppers, cups, and other items to reduce the use of plastic.

Finally, we can already observe a global trend for eco-friendliness in various spheres of our lives. People strive to make their homes, offices, and lives in general “greener” to help save the planet.

At this point, the solutions we discussed earlier are all that we can do for now. However, there is still a need for more innovative and effective solutions. So let this serve you as motivation. After all, who knows, maybe while writing your essay about global warming, you will suddenly discover more innovative solutions that will help us save the planet.

Now that you know everything about the definition, causes and effects, and possible solutions for global warming, let’s move on and consider different types of pollution that can cause it and that students can use as the base for essays global warming.

Glitter Pollution Essay Sample

Water pollution essay.

The first type of pollution and, concurrently, a great topic for an essay on global warming is water pollution. It shouldn’t be a secret for you that the world ocean covers 90% of the entire surface of our planet. It also shouldn’t be a secret that every living organism needs clean water to support vital functions. Given that, we can confidently say that mass pollution of water is a huge problem that we must drive attention to. So, there is no wonder why students are often assigned to write essay for me about water pollution.

If you are wondering what you can write about in your essay on water pollution, the ideas are countless. The pollution of the world ocean has been a pressing issue for decades, so there is plenty of information and examples to cover in an essay.

One great example for your essay is a worldwide famous oil company. Not so long ago, it became known that one of the oil-production leaders has been polluting rivers in Nigeria for many decades. The pollution had affected the lives, environment, and health of many locals, which made this case so high-profile. So, be sure to use it as an example in your paper.

Another good point to cover in an essay is the process of cleaning the world’s oceans from plastic waste. You can use this idea if you are planning to write a how to prevent water pollution essay.

Air Pollution Essay

We have already said a lot about gas emissions and how it affects the quality of air. So, here you have another type of pollution.

Just like water pollution, the rapid pollution of the air is also a big problem. Apart from natural causes of gas emissions, there are also many human-made reasons that make the problem worse. Namely, if you will be writing a causes of air pollution essay, you can write about the rising number of gasoline cars that boost emissions.

Also, you can tell your readers about different manufacturing and industrial activities that also harm our environment by producing too much CO2.

Another great idea is to write an essay for me answering the question, “how does air pollution affect our health?” Some of the negative effects include the risk of diseases and shorter lifespans. Not to mention a poor quality of life that results from air pollution.

Finally, you can write a solution of air pollution essay. With air pollution being a big issue in the modern world, we can already see humanity trying to resolve it. Some of the best-known solutions that are already there are alternative energy resources such as solar panels and alternative means of transport such as electric cars. But, you can definitely discover more solutions if you research the problem well. There are tons of helpful materials on the web, including air pollution articles for students that can be used for your essay.

Plastic Pollution Essay

Another common type of academic assignment is an essay on plastic pollution. So, this is the last type of pollution we are going to discuss here.

The issue is real. For decades, people have been trapped in the endless circle of large-scale plastic production and no-lesser plastic consumption. Each of us uses lots of plastic in our household. Not to mention that this material is generally used in all areas of our lives.

If you are planning to write my essay for me on this type of pollution, we would recommend you to write plastic pollution in the ocean essay. As for 2021, there are already over 5 trillion micro and macro pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans. The total weight of this plastic can reach 269,000 tonnes. About 8 million pieces are being thrown into the oceans every single day. And, the amount of plastic in the form of garbage is also huge.

To beat plastic pollution, it is vital that we learn how to recycle and reuse it instead of throwing all the waste away. So, here you have another possible topic for your essay. You can write about the global campaigns on cleaning the oceans and our planet from plastic.

Finally, one more topic you can cover is the Plastic Pollution Coalition. In case you haven’t heard of it, it is an existing social organization and advocacy group that found its mission in reducing plastic pollution.

After reading this article, you should agree that global warming is one of the biggest issues we’re facing in the 21st century. After decades of pollution, thoughtless consumption of resources, and blatant disdain for our environment, humanity finally begins to recognize the issues. And that is why essays on global warming and climate change are so important to write.

Global warming essays can help us drive more attention to the problems that we are already facing and the negative effects we can have. Also, writing such papers is a great way to inform students and other people about the solutions we can adopt to make a positive change.

If you are still hesitating whether it is worth writing a pollution essay or not, leave all the doubts behind. First of all, by writing such essays, you are doing a good deed. And, secondly, writing such papers isn’t as hard as it can seem. Though we still have many unresolved problems in this area, there is lots of information on this topic. If you research it well, you can find plenty of books, articles, scientific papers, and other materials on global warming. It is also possible to find a documentary on global warming, as well as many feature films. So rest assured that you won’t face a shortage of information. So, don’t hesitate and start writing your essay on global warming, and don’t neglect the tips and examples we shared here!

Frequently asked questions

She was flawless! first time using a website like this, I've ordered article review and i totally adored it! grammar punctuation, content - everything was on point

This writer is my go to, because whenever I need someone who I can trust my task to - I hire Joy. She wrote almost every paper for me for the last 2 years

Term paper done up to a highest standard, no revisions, perfect communication. 10s across the board!!!!!!!

I send him instructions and that's it. my paper was done 10 hours later, no stupid questions, he nailed it.

Sometimes I wonder if Michael is secretly a professor because he literally knows everything. HE DID SO WELL THAT MY PROF SHOWED MY PAPER AS AN EXAMPLE. unbelievable, many thanks

New Posts to Your Inbox!

Stay in touch

CUNY Academic Commons

Climate change narrative essay..

This Doc can be read by: Anyone
This Doc can be edited by: The Doc author only
Comments are visible to: Anyone
Comments can be posted by: Logged-in Users
History can be viewed by: Anyone

Everyday we hear these two words “ climate change” either in the news ( TV) or some social media apps and some of us care and others it’s what it is. Climate change can be described simply as a change in weather over a period of time but the truth is it has destroyed many lives, killed thousands, wild life included and it is at your door at the moment. Humans have created a monster that is bigger than any we ever faced; yes you heard right we are destroying ourselves.

Climate change affects our health by increasing water and air pollution which increase the risk of respiratory disease. These are caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and farming. With an increase in the earth’s planet due to global warming, there is likely to be an increase in poor air quality which can also increase complications from underlying diseases like asthma and renal failure. None of this is a prediction but something that is already happening. For example, in my own case my sister who is 22 years old and has been dealing with asthma since she was 7 years old, has noticed that over the past 5 years it has gotten worse. Now she is unable to do some jobs which has caused her a lot of problems and our family has suffered financially for quite some time because we all chip in to provide for everyone. A likely reason for the severity of her disease could be the increase of pollution in the air, water and increase in ocean temperature caused by climate change. Not too long ago I was wondering to myself how come I don’t see any stars in the sky because I was comparing it to back when I was in Africa (Togo). To be honest it bothers me a lot not just the difference but the fact that I came to realize that late; human activities have destroyed little things like this that brought us memories of the past. ( Some people want to see their favorite wild life, some want to visit historical places and some have their small but beautiful homes destroyed.)

Furthermore climate change is affecting wildlife which is also harming our society indirectly because wildlife and ocean animals are very important to our society. These animals produce sustainability in our society, help our economy and provide us with food. Many people still depend on wildlife for their food and primary source of income, and a decrease in wildlife will affect their economy severely. For instance let’s talk about countries such Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique which are all part of the coastal east of Africa. These countries depend on the region’s natural resources—clean freshwater, and abundant fish and wildlife. To ensure the future of the people living there, the resources need to be protected.

Climate change is causing havoc to people’s livelihood. Due to the rise in sea level, a lot of people are moving from places and leaving their precious home behind. Places filled with their childhood memories because of man made climate change. Climate change increases the intensity of weather disasters like hurricanes which have killed thousands of people and made others homeless. Just recently there was flooding in New York and New Jersey that killed some people and others got injured. These phenomena won’t stop any time soon and I’m afraid to say it’s probably too late as studies have shown that with the frequent occurrence of flooding and hurricanes which provides more rain thus increasing sea level, many countries will continue to suffer major flooding. One recent study that was conducted by climate central using analytical data, shows that by the year 2050 major cities such London, Bruges ( belgium), tabasco ( mexico) bahamas and more are projected to be underwater.

If we are worrying about aliens destroying our planet then we have created one already. Climate change is knocking on your door to get in and it is up to you and us to make sure we don’t let it in. Climate change is destroying our planet, threatening our health, it has killed many of our people, thrown many of us to poverty, and destroyed our homes. So my people we have to lock our door and fight for ourselves.

Tags: burning fossils , climate change , destruction , human activities. , major cities , the year 2050 , threatening our health

Parent: “ Literary Narrative Essay Reflection”

Need help with the Commons?

Email us at [email protected] so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:

Terms of Service
Accessibility
Creative Commons (CC) license unless otherwise noted

Biology Article
Essay on Global Warming

Essay On Global Warming

Essay on global warming is an important topic for students to understand. The essay brings to light the plight of the environment and the repercussion of anthropogenic activities. Continue reading to discover tips and tricks for writing an engaging and interesting essay on global warming.

Essay On Global Warming in 300 Words

Global warming is a phenomenon where the earth’s average temperature rises due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone trap the incoming radiation from the sun. This effect creates a natural “blanket”, which prevents the heat from escaping back into the atmosphere. This effect is called the greenhouse effect.

Contrary to popular belief, greenhouse gases are not inherently bad. In fact, the greenhouse effect is quite important for life on earth. Without this effect, the sun’s radiation would be reflected back into the atmosphere, freezing the surface and making life impossible. However, when greenhouse gases in excess amounts get trapped, serious repercussions begin to appear. The polar ice caps begin to melt, leading to a rise in sea levels. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect is accelerated when polar ice caps and sea ice melts. This is due to the fact the ice reflects 50% to 70% of the sun’s rays back into space, but without ice, the solar radiation gets absorbed. Seawater reflects only 6% of the sun’s radiation back into space. What’s more frightening is the fact that the poles contain large amounts of carbon dioxide trapped within the ice. If this ice melts, it will significantly contribute to global warming.

A related scenario when this phenomenon goes out of control is the runaway-greenhouse effect. This scenario is essentially similar to an apocalypse, but it is all too real. Though this has never happened in the earth’s entire history, it is speculated to have occurred on Venus. Millions of years ago, Venus was thought to have an atmosphere similar to that of the earth. But due to the runaway greenhouse effect, surface temperatures around the planet began rising.

If this occurs on the earth, the runaway greenhouse effect will lead to many unpleasant scenarios – temperatures will rise hot enough for oceans to evaporate. Once the oceans evaporate, the rocks will start to sublimate under heat. In order to prevent such a scenario, proper measures have to be taken to stop climate change.

More to Read: Learn How Greenhouse Effect works

Tips To Writing the Perfect Essay

Consider adopting the following strategies when writing an essay. These are proven methods of securing more marks in an exam or assignment.

Begin the essay with an introductory paragraph detailing the history or origin of the given topic.
Try to reduce the use of jargons. Use sparingly if the topic requires it.
Ensure that the content is presented in bulleted points wherever appropriate.
Insert and highlight factual data, such as dates, names and places.
Remember to break up the content into smaller paragraphs. 100-120 words per paragraph should suffice.
Always conclude the essay with a closing paragraph.

Explore more essays on biology or other related fields at BYJU’S.

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

About YPCCC
Yale Climate Connections
Student Employment
For The Media
Past Events
YPCCC in the News
Climate Change in the American Mind (CCAM)

Publications

Climate Opinion Maps
Climate Opinion Factsheets
Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY)
Resources for Educators
All Tools & Interactives
Partner with YPCCC

Home / Reading Environmental Literature Can Persuade on Climate

Climate Note · Oct 1, 2020

Reading environmental literature can persuade on climate, by abel gustafson , matthew goldberg , matthew ballew , seth rosenthal and anthony leiserowitz, filed under: beliefs & attitudes.

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new research article “Environmental Literature as Persuasion: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Reading Climate Fiction” in the journal Environmental Communication .

In this study, we tested the persuasive effects of reading short stories of climate fiction. Climate fiction (“cli-fi”) is a growing literary trend. These works range from dramatic tales set in imagined apocalyptic futures to realistic portrayals of characters responding to climate change in the present day.

Much empirical social science in the field of “narrative persuasion” has demonstrated that storytelling is an effective way to shift beliefs and attitudes regarding science and environmental issues. In part, this is because narratives promote a sense of identification with the story characters and immersion into the world of the story.

Despite the rising popularity of climate fiction and prior research on narrative persuasion, research had not yet tested the persuasive effects of climate fiction. Our study provides the first experimental investigation of these effects — merging the fields of literary Ecocriticism with empirical social science.

In this study, participants in the Concerned and Cautious audience segments of Global Warming’s Six Americas were randomly assigned to read one of three short stories: “ The Tamarisk Hunter ” (a dystopian tale by Paolo Bacigalupi of climate catastrophe, set in a drought-ridden American Southwest), “ In-Flight Entertainment ” (a realist tale by Helen Simpson of climate denial in a conversation between airplane passengers). Participants in the control condition read “ Good People ” (a short story by David Foster Wallace, unrelated to climate change).

We found that reading “The Tamarisk Hunter” or “In-Flight Entertainment” had significant positive effects on readers’ climate change beliefs and attitudes, including that global warming will cause more natural disasters and poverty, as well as levels of worry, perceived importance, and the perceptions that global warming will harm readers personally, as well as future generations. Consistent with prior research on narrative persuasion, we found that many of these effects are mediated by feelings of transportation by the story and identification with the characters.

After one month, we recontacted the study participants in order to assess whether these persuasive effects remained over time. We found that the effect of reading these stories was no longer statistically significant, suggesting that the persuasive effects faded over time.

Together, these findings highlight the importance of storytelling about climate change in general and of climate fiction in particular. However, we also underscore the importance of repeated exposure to multiple messages from different sources, because the persuasive effects of any one message can be transient.

The full article is available here to those with a subscription to Environmental Communication . If you would like to request a copy, please send an email to [email protected] with the subject line: Climate Fiction Persuasion paper.

Schneider-Mayerson, M., Gustafson, A., Leiserowitz, A., Goldberg, M. H., Rosenthal, S. A., & Ballew, M. T. (2020). Environmental literature as persuasion: An experimental test of the effects of reading climate fiction. Environmental Communication. DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2020.1814377

Funding Sources

This research was supported by a Yale-NUS College Large Research Grant and Singapore’s Ministry of Education.

Related Work

Climate note · apr 16, 2024, what do americans want to know about cli..., peer-reviewed article · apr 3, 2024, climate change belief systems across pol..., peer-reviewed article · mar 28, 2024, emotional signatures of climate policy s..., report · mar 26, 2024, international public opinion on climate ..., climate note · mar 21, 2024, the attitude-behavior gap on climate act..., report · mar 7, 2024, climate change in the irish mind, 2023, climate note · jan 17, 2024, support for climate justice across globa..., report · jan 11, 2024, climate change in the american mind: bel..., climate note · dec 14, 2023, global warming’s six americas, fall 20..., peer-reviewed article · dec 13, 2023, what predicts u.s. public support for cl..., climate note · nov 16, 2023, how many americans want an electric home..., report · nov 14, 2023, climate note · nov 7, 2023, who supports climate justice in the u.s...., climate note · oct 26, 2023, which republicans are worried about glob..., climate note · oct 18, 2023, what do americans think is the biggest t..., report · oct 3, 2023, climate change in the indonesian mind, report · sep 12, 2023, climate change in the american mind: cli..., climate note · aug 3, 2023, is distress about climate change associa..., climate note · aug 1, 2023, global warming’s six audiences: a cros..., climate note · jul 27, 2023, americans are becoming more worried abou..., climate note · jul 25, 2023, the prevalence of climate change psychol..., climate note · jul 20, 2023, messages about harms of fossil fuels inc..., climate note · jul 11, 2023, does climate change make you sneeze, report · jun 8, 2023, subscribe to our mailing list.

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Yale Program on Climate Change Communication:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Newsletters

Site search

Israel-Hamas war
Home Planet
2024 election
Supreme Court
TikTok’s fate
All explainers
Future Perfect

Filed under:

The big lie we’re told about climate change is that it’s our own fault

How to deal with despair over climate change.

Share this story

Share this on Facebook
Share this on Twitter
Share this on Reddit
Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: The big lie we’re told about climate change is that it’s our own fault

Ice in West Antarctica meets the ocean. The continent’s ice is melting at an accelerating rate.

The National Climate Assessment released a report last week with a startling warning: climate change could cause more damage to the American economy by 2100 than the 2008 Great Recession. It’s the second report in the last few months with dire predictions for our planet’s future due to global warming: In early October, the revered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued an equally damning report — more like a prognosis — on our impending climate crisis.

It’s bleak, y’all. The planet has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. We’d actually passed that threshold right around the time of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. The Paris agreement was meant to keep us from surpassing 2 degrees, and to make best efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees. Between every single fraction of a degree lies untold levels of death and disease and generalized destruction.

America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different by 2050.

Things are already bad. They are already getting worse. This report reveals — and, for many of us, confirms — that we’re not doing nearly enough to stop things from getting damn apocalyptic.

Many people who don’t think about climate change on a daily basis, or who thought it lived on some distant horizon they would never have to face, are now coming to terms with its terrifying reality. I get it. I’ve worked in the environmental field as a policy editor for nearly five years now.

People like me, and others in “the climate-verse” — activists on the ground, experts in the field, professionals at big greens — have all had that moment when we had to face the reality of climate change. For most of us, that moment hurt. I know it did for me.

I started working in the climate change advocacy world somewhat by accident when I got a job editing policy for an environmental advocacy organization. I cared about the earth, of course, but I wasn’t a hardcore environmentalist.

I spent my first year deeply immersed in detailed reports on climate policy. No detail was spared. Day in and day out, I read about the reckless course we were on and all the foolish ways we were digging our hole even deeper. It was terrifying.

I had known climate change was real. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I didn’t know just how bad it was. I didn’t know how many innocent people were already suffering hideously. Pick a natural disaster — wildfire, hurricane, mudslide, or heat wave, many of which research shows have already been exacerbated by climate change — it’s always the people with the least to lose who get hurt the most. I didn’t know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances. Right at that very moment.

I knew I would see bad things accelerate in my lifetime, but I didn’t know it was going to happen before I turned 50. Nor did I realize how many of them I’d actually already seen. After all, I was with my mother in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina and here in New York during Sandy. And if you’re thinking that climate change and hurricanes aren’t related, they’re not exactly divorced either .

My stages of grief

I didn’t know it then, but that first year I spent reading policy papers, I went into mourning. I skipped denial and went right to shock. I floated around on a dark, dark cloud. I frequently and randomly burst into tears, and I’d refuse to admit to myself that I knew exactly why I was crying.

When I was around bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. When I walked on dry land, I saw floods. I imagined wild animals, especially snakes, getting out of the zoos in the aftermath of natural disasters. I worried about how we would treat each other in the face of such calamity. I doubted it would be kind. (I still doubt that, actually.)

I kept editing, but I tried to dissociate, pretending that none of it was real, as ridiculous as it sounds. That didn’t work either. The craft of editing demands empathy. You have to be present.

Then I went into depression. My social life turned into fits and spurts of intense engagement followed by equally intense withdrawal. I was deeply afraid of telling even the people closest to me what I knew and why I was so scared. I couldn’t sleep. The crying fits continued. They didn’t become more predictable.

I’d silently been asking myself: What am I fighting for? What am I trying for? Why am I paying my student loans? Hell, why am I saving for retirement? I was heading into a desperate space.

What are we fighting for?

One day at work, I came across the book that saved me: What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other , a book by environmental journalist Wen Stephenson that chronicles his transformation from reporter to climate activist. The prose was beautiful, and each page oozed with compassion without layering the issue with coats of sugar. It looked climate change squarely in the face.

One of the many, many things that book taught me was that I was not crazy. That my broken heart was normal. I was not the only one feeling it, and the best thing I could do was get out and talk to people who had already stood in front of this same emotional abyss and found the nerve to carry forward.

Then I moved from depression to anger. And I’m still in anger because, in this context, acceptance is bullshit.

We’re all in mourning

Whether we admit it or not, we’re all in the middle of one big, giant mourning process. We’re mourning our futures. We’re mourning the children we’re afraid to have. Our bucket lists. Our travel plans. Some of us are mourning homes already lost to fires or flood, or savings accounts wiped out helping relatives recover from hurricanes. Some of us are mourning our todays, even our yesterdays.

Denial is part of the traditional mourning process, but we have collectively spent way too long there. It’s time to snap out of it.

Given the sheer enormity of climate change, it’s okay to be depressed, to grieve. But please, don’t stay there too long. Join me in pure, unadulterated, righteous anger.

The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. If the light switch was connected to clean energy, who the hell cares if you left it on? The problem is not so much the consumption — it’s the supply. And your scrap paper did not hasten the end of the world.

Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you.

That same IPCC report revealed that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global climate emissions . These people are locking you and everything you love into a tomb. You have every right to be pissed all the way off. And we have to make them hear about it.

It’s time to grow up

I grew a lot during that first year. And that’s why I say this with no intention of condescension: In order to face climate change, to truly look it in the eye, we have to grow up.

We can’t pretend this isn’t happening anymore. Especially for us Americans, our general privilege and relative comfort compared to so many in the world can make it easy to turn a blind eye. But we can’t pretend that some unnamed cavalry is coming to save us. We are the adults in this room. We have to save ourselves .

It’s not our fault, but it is very much our problem. It’s dire, but we have to dig in our heels and fight — for each other.

This essay is adapted from a Medium post .

Mary Annaise Heglar is the senior policy publications editor at a prominent environmental advocacy organization. She is based in New York City. Find her on Twitter @MaryHeglar .

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

Next Up In Climate

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

Thanks for signing up!

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Pro-Palestinian protesters holding a sign that says “Liberated Zone” in New York.

What the backlash to student protests over Gaza is really about

You need $500. How should you get it?

Close-up photo of someone looking at a burger on a food delivery app on their phone.

Food delivery fees have soared. How much of it goes to workers?

So you’ve found research fraud. Now what?

JoJo Siwa holding a half-mic stand while performing at Miami Beach Pride Festival 2024. She wears a sparkly silver bodysuit and silver face-paint around her eyes.

How JoJo Siwa’s “rebrand” got so messy

Students at a pro-Palestinian college encampment.

Student protests are testing US colleges’ commitment to free speech

Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Global Warming — Argumentative Essay On Global Warming

Argumentative Essay on Global Warming

Categories: Climate Change Environmental Issues Global Warming

About this sample

Words: 879 |

Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 879 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof Ernest (PhD)

Verified writer

Expert in: Environment

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 627 words

3 pages / 1370 words

2 pages / 695 words

4 pages / 1974 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Global Warming

In a world facing unprecedented environmental challenges, the search for sustainable energy sources has become more urgent than ever before. One promising solution that has gained significant attention in recent years is solar [...]

Global warming is a phenomenon that has been affecting the planet for decades, and its impact on biodiversity and ecosystems has become increasingly concerning. The purpose of this essay is to analyze current research on the [...]

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, with far-reaching consequences for the environment, economies, and societies worldwide. As the global community grapples with the devastating impacts of a [...]

Global warming refers to the long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system, primarily caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This phenomenon has become a pressing issue in recent [...]

It is a melancholy object to those who have been unfortunate enough to inhabit this once great planet. These individuals, instead of searching for cooler, healthier planets, are forced to employ all of their resources and [...]

The short story “Diary of an Interesting Year” by Helen Simpson is delivered to readers in the form of a diary entries. It is the year 2040, and the main character, a 30-year-old women, writes entries regarding her decrepit [...]

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

Instructions Followed To The Letter
Deadlines Met At Every Stage
Unique And Plagiarism Free

Please wait while we process your request

Writing Papers about Global Warming

Academic writing

Essay paper writing

The humanity is and has always been connected with all the life cycles of the surrounding world. But since the emergence of highly industrialized society, the scope of damage that people do to nature has grown rapidly. Consumption of non-renewable mineral resources constantly intensifies. More and more arable lands drop out of use as cities and factories are built on them.

As a result of the population increase, intensive industrialization and urbanization of our planet, economic pressure began to exceed the ability of ecological systems to self-purification and regeneration. A natural cycle of substances in the biosphere was disrupted.The health of present and future generations of people is under threat! This is one of the most important and frequent global warming thesis statement ideas.

Ecological problems of the modern world are not only acute but also multifaceted. They are caused by virtually all branches of material production and are relevant to all regions of the planet. The Earth’s biosphere is currently exposed to serious anthropogenic impact. There is a number of processes worsening the ecological situation: in particular, the world is getting warmer and humanity is largely responsible for this, experts say. But many factors affecting climate change have not yet been studied. Scientists and students analyze this topic thoroughly. If you also got a global warming essay assignment, the facts listed below may be useful for your academic work.

Causes of warming to be described in research papers on climate change

The greenhouse effect has been a serious problem for several decades now. Without it, the temperature of the atmospheric surface layers would be on average 30 degrees lower than the actual one. However, in the last decades, the content of some greenhouse gases in the air has significantly increased: the percentage of methane has grown 2.5 times and that of carbon dioxide – by more than 1/3 of its previous volume.

There are also new harmful substances which simply did not exist earlier; primarily, these are chlorine- and fluorine-hydrocarbons including the notorious freons. The link between global warming and air composition change is quite obvious. Moreover, the reason for the rapid growth in the amount of greenhouse gases is also clear: our entire civilization, since the bonfires of primitive hunters to modern gas stoves and cars, has utilized the rapid oxidation of carbon compounds, the final product of which is CO2.

Human activity is associated with an increase in the content of methane (rice fields, livestock, leaks from gas pipelines) and nitrogen oxides. Perhaps, people do not yet have a noticeable direct effect only on the content of water vapor in the atmosphere.

CO2 problem

Among the global environmental issues facing humanity, the problem of CO2 is one of the most controversial. Many consider it to be a far-fetched one. Yet, there are real signs of global warming and forecasts by some climatologists and physicists who affirm that the situation is about to get a lot worse. In their opinion, it should happen because of the accumulation of carbon dioxide of anthropogenic origin in the atmosphere.

In the Quaternary period, which includes our time, the content of CO2 in the air is very low. But the pace of accumulation of this gas in the atmosphere is unprecedentedly high. That’s why most of the climate change essay topics revolve around this issue.

Nowadays, most researchers consider the combustion of fossil fuels as almost the single reason for the CO2 volume increase in the air in the X - XX centuries. In the XXI century however, there are deforestation, agricultural pollution, overgrazing, and a number of other factors that have negative effect on the and vegetation cover of the Earth.

Deforestation

One should pay special attention to this phenomenon when writing a reasons of global warming essay. Deforestation for the sake of building construction, mining, creation of water reservoirs, and repurposing of forest lands into agricultural ones is considered the most significant factor leading to the permanent loss of organic matter in the biosphere. Up to 25% of the carbon dioxide got to the atmosphere due to deforestation. The issue of deforestation and burning of fossil fuels are roughly equal now as for the scopes of ecological damage they do to our planet.

Degradation of forests occurs on the background of excessive recreation activities and tourism, air pollution, and a number of other cases (intensive grazing, flooding of the terrain, drainage of nearby swamps, etc.).

Through the observations it was established that even an insignificant load causes changes in the soil-vegetation cover. Soil compression carried out in forests and parks leads to a decrease in the mass of roots due to which the trees’ growth stops. As a result, they become smaller and the branches become thin and short.

Mechanical damage to forests leads to the development of diseases and increase in the population of pests. When natural territories are visited by large groups of people, the lower tiers of vegetation die, the soil litter is trampled, and the humus layer suffers. Organic matter is reduced by 50% or more in parking and recreational areas.

Significant air pollution is one of the main reasons for serious forest degradation. Fly ash together with coal and coke dust clog the pores of leaves, reduce the access of light to plants, and weaken the process of assimilation. Poisoning of the soil by the emissions of metal/arsenic dust in combination with superphosphate or sulfuric acid affects the root system slowing down its growth. Sulfurous anhydrite is toxic to plants. The vegetation is completely destroyed under the influence of smokes and gases of copper smelters in close proximity.

Significant damage to the forests is caused by the acid precipitation connected with the spread of sulfur compounds into hundreds and thousands of kilometers. A great decrease in forest biomass is also associated with fires.

Agriculture

Nowadays, agricultural activities include processes leading to a rapid reduction of humus in soil and the release of CO2. Agriculture-provoked pollution can be considered as one of the most significant factors that lead to global warming and one of the main climate change research topics.

Most of humus is lost as a result of severe erosion and weathering. In addition, the cultivated lands lose this natural fertilizer due to its oxidation during the plowing and burning of vegetation in the framework of the slash-and-burn agriculture system. The constant loss of humus is also observed when nitrogen reserves are depleted in the soil. In developed countries, nitrogen depletion is compensated by using mineral nitrogen fertilizers and cultivation of leguminous crops.

Overgrazing

Excessive grazing in tundra, forests, and especially in meadows leads to the destruction of the land. This problem can also be discussed in a causes of global warming essay. Currently, overgrazing is particularly damaging the ecosystems of Africa, Eurasia, Latin America, and Australia. Simultaneously with the desertification, the soil with its organic matter is gradually removed.

Bogs drainage

Drainage leads to the oxidation of organic substances accumulated in peat bogs. This also leds to greenhouse effect and may be mentioned in your global climate change essay outline. When removing the 1-meter layer of marsh water from 1-hectare area, dozens of tons of dissolved organic matter are released.

Irrigation of lands

In some cases, this practice causes losses of crucial elements of soil as a result of irrigation erosion. At the same time, the correct melioration of poor desert areas increases the resources of organic matter in the soil. This is one of the most actively discussed environmental science research paper topics. Today, 0.2-0.3 million hectares of irrigated lands are annually turned into wastelands due to salinization and waterlogging. After that, they become completely damaged, uninhabitable, and unfit for agricultural use.

Construction works

Construction and growth of cities, the creation of communications, and mining generally lead to massive destruction of the soil and vegetation cover; sometimes, in order to partially lessen the damage, parks are created on the areas that have been subjected to human influence. Every year, construction works and mining operations destroy the soil and vegetation cover on an area of 5-10 million hectares that leads to a decrease in the organic matter stocks of the biosphere. Even the most approximate calculation will give the total figure of annual losses equal to several hundred million tons of organic matter.

Ways of solving the greenhouse effect problem to highlight in essays on global warming

Your how to prevent global warming essay should contain specific proposals aimed at helping mankind to avoid the impending danger. The main measure to prevent climate changes can be formulated as follows: to find a new type of fuel or to change the technology of using current fuels. This means that humanity needs:

to identify the causes of climate change, monitor them and eliminate their consequences.
to reduce fossil fuel consumption, especially coal and oil, which emit 60% more carbon dioxide per unit of produced energy than any other fossil fuel;
to use special tools (filters, catalysts) to remove carbon dioxide from the automobile exhausts, emissions of smoke pipes of coal-burning power plants, and factory furnaces;
to create more expedient heating and cooling systems in new houses;
to increase the use of solar, wind, and geothermal energy;
to stop/slow down the process of deforestation and degradation of natural territories;
to remove storage tanks for hazardous substances from the coastal areas;
to expand the areas of existing nature reserves and parks;
to apply regulations preventing global warming;

You can choose the measures, which are the most effective in your opinion and list them in a global warming conclusion paragraph. According to the standards of academic writing, the final words of the essay should serve as a call for action.

Ideas of scientists

Proposals for solving the problem of climate change from leading scientists sometimes may seem unrealistic. But experts seriously consider all the factors when developing them, because sooner or later these strategies may come in handy. You may describe some of the theories in your environmental pollution and global warming essay.

Today, the Earth absorbs 70% of all radiation received from the Sun and there is a need to reduce this amount. Astronomer Roger Ancel suggested placing millions of lenses with a diameter of 60 cm around the Earth to reflect the sun rays. It should be noted that the reduction of solar illumination by 1.6% compensates for the temperature increase by 1.75 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) as there is a direct correlation between light scattering and temperature. For example, the temperature drops during the eruption of volcanoes when a huge mass of particles enters the atmosphere and as a result a smaller percentage of sunlight can reach the Earth.

According to another strategy (taken from the journal ActaAstronautica), it was proposed to create a ring of small particles or spaceships around the Earth to darken some parts of tropics and thereby to balance the climate.

The cost of these projects can be very high: $500 billion for special spacecraft design and from $6 to $200 trillion for the particles-ring construction.

Climatologist Wallace Broker proposed to scatter sulfur in the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 15 km with the help of hot-air balloons and airplanes. The bigger part of sulfur particles will stay at this level for about a year or two. This project is estimated at $50 billion.

Another theory suggests producing salted steam with the help of mechanisms that will turn the seawater into real clouds saturated with sodium chloride.

There is an idea to create artificial floating islands with a mirroring surface in the sea zones or to cover some desert regions with light colored plastic materials to reflect solar radiation.

The plan to disperse substances that catalyze the growth of water plants in order to increase the amount of carbon dioxide these plants absorb has already been implemented in some areas of Antarctica.

A famous British astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, believed that the survival of the human race depends on our chances to find a new home elsewhere in the universe, because the destruction that global warming causes is skyrocketing. He claimed that people could have a permanent base on the Moon in the next 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next four decades.

Useful tips for writing the research paper on global warming

If we look closely at a climate change research paper example, it will be noticeable that the academic text is written according to specific rules. There is a clear structure, which makes the presentation of different opinion points clear. An essay is a short prose paper, the purpose of which is to express thoughts and ideas of the author on a particular subject. It is worth pointing out that the usage of templates in essay writing is rare and often discouraged. It is obvious that you have to strain your brain to write a good essay.

Tip 1: read the essays of other authors

Find the papers with similar global warming essay titles and read them carefully. This will help you develop your own writing style. After all, essay writing requires a sense of style. According to the opinion of specialists, a good presentation of your opinion should be emotional, expressive, and artistic.

Tip 2: study the literature on the given topic

As it has been already mentioned, an essay is a creative work, which involves the description of our own thoughts on a particular topic. But one should keep in mind that such academic papers target not only beginners but also readers who have a certain level of awareness of the topic. Therefore, in order to present the main points and ideas in the best possible way, one should have knowledge in the area.

Tip 3: think out the structure and the climate change essay outline

Such work can have an arbitrary structure, and the only formal rule is the presence of a heading. Nevertheless, the most popular structure of an essay is as follows:

1. Title. It’s not hard to come up with good global warming essay titles since many authors have already considered this problem and lots of options can be found online. However, it is much better if the heading is unique. Many students compile the text relying on the title, although experts recommend doing vice versa. You can come up with the title after the paper is finished as it will be possible to highlight the main idea accurately.

2. Global warming essay introduction. It depends on the introduction whether the reader will continue studying the rest of the text. This part should be bright, catchy, and closely related to the actual problems and phenomena.

3. The main body. You’ll have to formulate the thesis and arguments supporting each point of your global warming research paper outline. A thesis should be the author’s idea and the arguments should be its rationale.

4. Conclusion of a global warming essay. It’s necessary to sum up the answers to all the questions presented in the text and prove the statement that you have put forward at the beginning.

5. References. If you have used the writings of other authors, conference proceedings, or scientific sources, the examiner should be aware of this. Compile a list of references at the end of the paper.

If you are looking for some directions on how to write an essay, here they are. However, you can write all the parts in random order. For example, it’s normal to compose an introduction paragraph for a global warming essay after the main block with thesis and arguments. First, you need to create a rough draft of the paper, and then it should be edited and checked for possible mistakes. Once that is done, you will be able to polish it to become the final text that completely satisfies the requirements.

Tip 4: Do not "overload" the essay

It is evident that everyone has their own writing style and wants to provide a detailed answer to each question, but too long of a construction can negatively affect the mark. The hook for global warming essay must consist of a few sentences maximum. The presentation of the arguments also should not be burdened with superfluous text.

Tip 5: be honest with readers

It is highly unethical and counterproductive to attribute someone else’s ideas to oneself. You should remember that excellence can be achieved with practice only. Working on essays develops creative thinking as well as the ability to express one’s opinion. This will help you to learn how to choose words that fit the context, highlight cause-effect relationships, and support your thesis with appropriate arguments and examples from real life.

Your email address will not be published / Required fields are marked *

Try it now!

Calculate your price

Number of pages:

Order an essay!

Fill out the order form

Make a secure payment

Receive your order by email

What is a cultural essay and how to write it?

Academic essay on culture is a work, which develops a student’s creative skills and their capacity to solve non-standard problems. The extent of student’s freedom in writing about culture…

26th Oct 2022

How To Write A Synthesis Essay?

Studying in high school or college presupposes writing various types of academic papers. Some of them are easy to approach, while others seem to be more complicated.  A synthesis essay is among…

28th Nov 2019

Writing a Deforestation Essay

The topic of diminishing forest areas has become one of the most discussed issues nowadays; but in some places in the world, it has become a national problem. Therefore, it is evident that this…

13th Jul 2020

Get your project done perfectly

Professional writing service

Reset password

We’ve sent you an email containing a link that will allow you to reset your password for the next 24 hours.

Please check your spam folder if the email doesn’t appear within a few minutes.

IMAGES

Persuasive Essay Sample: Global Warming
Global Warming Speech
Issue of Global Warming Argumentative Essay on Samploon.com
⇉Global Warming Speech Example Argumentative Essay Essay Example
Essay on Global Warming with Samples (150 & 200 words)
Speaker to address climate change and its effect on human health

VIDEO

Essay on Global Warming., 100-150 Words
GLOBAL WARMING, ESSAY ON GLOBAL WARMING
Global warming
10 lines on Global warming l essay on global warming l global warming essay #globalwarming #shorts
Essay on Global warming||
Essay on Global warming 🌍

COMMENTS

Essay on Global Warming with Samples (150, 250, 500 Words
Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 - 150 words. Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth's atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can't be ignored and steps have to be taken to ...
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
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 ...
The new climate narrative
The new climate narrative. This op-ed was originally published by Project Syndicate. As the Nobel laureate economists Robert Shiller, Abhijit Banerjee, and Esther Duflo have argued eloquently in ...
Climate Change Assay: A Spark Of Change
Bahçeşehir College is committed to increasing students' awareness of the changing world we live in. This climate change essay competition saw many students submitting well thought out pieces of writing. These essays were marked on their format, creativity, organisation, clarity, unity/development of thought, and grammar/mechanics.
Global warming
Modern global warming is the result of an increase in magnitude of the so-called greenhouse effect, a warming of Earth's surface and lower atmosphere caused by the presence of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and other greenhouse gases. In 2014 the IPCC first reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and ...
The Race to Tell—and Sell—the Story About Climate Change
The race is on to tell—or sell—the right story about global warming. November 9, 2021, 6:52 AM ... Such a unique call for papers promised an event at once wholly academic and wholly ...
Changing the narrative of climate change
The Lowy Institute Poll nicely illustrates archetypical climate narratives. If your climate narrative is "Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs", chances are high you read the drought, fires, smoke and hail during the horror summer of 2019-20 as the ...
PDF Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics
Climate Explained is a collection of short primers that answer diverse climate change questions, including why it's cold outside if global warming is real, how we know that humans are responsible for global warming, and the relationship between climate change and national security. Image 1. Example Climate Explained essays on the Yale Climate ...
Global Warming
Global warming is the long-term warming of the planet's overall temperature. Though this warming trend has been going on for a long time, its pace has significantly increased in the last hundred years due to the burning of fossil fuels.As the human population has increased, so has the volume of . fossil fuels burned.. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and natural gas, and burning them causes ...
Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics
Climate Explained, a part of Yale Climate Connections, is an essay collection that addresses an array of climate change questions and topics, including why it's cold outside if global warming is real, how we know that humans are responsible for global warming, and the relationship between climate change and national security.
Want people to notice your climate research? Learn how to write
A new study found that climate change papers written in a more narrative style — those that tell a story — were the most highly cited by other scientists, an important measure of their ...
Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed
Writers Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams offer new perspectives on how to remake the world. By Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette Stories can drive action, but perhaps the most damaging climate change story we can tell is the tall tale that we can simply opt for the stability and safety of the status quo, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit said Wednesday evening at Harvard's Memorial ...
Global Warming Essay for Students in English
Global Warming refers to the increase in the average temperature of the earth's surface during the last century. One of the reasons why Global Warming is dangerous is because it disturbs the overall ecology of the planet. This results in floods, famine, cyclones and other issues. There are many causes and results of this warming and is a danger ...
Global Warming Essay: Everything You Need to Know to Write One
But, this is not all that is there. Due to a changing climate and more extreme weather conditions, some side effects of global warming can include: Rising sea levels; Land degradation; Loss of biodiversity; Loss of wildlife. These are the primary effects on our environment that can be caused by global warming.
Changing the Narrative around a Changing Climate
This emphasis on storytelling is encouraging because narrative forms of communication can generate complex emotional responses and immersive experiences, which can make a story more interesting, engaging, and persuasive than ... Leiserowitz, Anthony, et al., Americans' Actions to Limit Global Warming, November 2013.
Climate Change narrative essay.
Climate change can be described simply as a change in weather over a period of time but the truth is it has destroyed many lives, killed thousands, wild life included and it is at your door at the moment. Humans have created a monster that is bigger than any we ever faced; yes you heard right we are destroying ourselves.
Essay On Global Warming
Essay On Global Warming in 300 Words. Global warming is a phenomenon where the earth's average temperature rises due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone trap the incoming radiation from the sun. This effect creates a natural "blanket", which prevents the heat from escaping ...
Global Warming as Literary Narrative
Global Warming as Literary Narrative. Frederick Buell. Published 22 June 2014. Environmental Science. Philological Quarterly. Climate change is everything, a story and a calamity bigger than any other. It's the whole planet for the whole foreseeable future, the entire atmosphere, all the oceans, the poles; it's weather and crop failure and ...
5 Big Lies About Climate Change, And How Researchers Trained A ...
They ultimately came up with five major themes of climate misinformation, namely: 1) Global warming is not happening; 2) Human-produced greenhouse gases are not causing global warming; 3) Climate ...
Reading Environmental Literature Can Persuade on Climate
In this study, participants in the Concerned and Cautious audience segments of Global Warming's Six Americas were randomly assigned to read one of three short stories: ... Consistent with prior research on narrative persuasion, we found that many of these effects are mediated by feelings of transportation by the story and identification with ...
National Climate Assessment: How to deal with despair over ...
The continent's ice is melting at an accelerating rate. The National Climate Assessment released a report last week with a startling warning: climate change could cause more damage to the ...
Argumentative Essay on Global Warming
In fact, a study published in the journal Science found that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and primarily caused by human activities. Another common argument against taking action on global warming is the belief that the costs of addressing the issue are too high. However, the costs of inaction are far greater.
Essays On Global Warming: Qualitative Writing Tips
It is obvious that you have to strain your brain to write a good essay. Tip 1: read the essays of other authors. Find the papers with similar global warming essay titles and read them carefully. This will help you develop your own writing style. After all, essay writing requires a sense of style.

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Essay on Global Warming

Short Essay on Global Warming and Climate Change?

What is Global Warming?

What are the Causes of Global Warming?

Solutions for Global Warming

Effects of Global Warming

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 – 150 words

Essay on Global Warming in 250 Words

Essay on Global Warming in 500 Words

Essay on Global Warming UPSC

Climate Change and Global Warming Essay

Tips to Write an Essay

Digvijay Singh

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Connect With Us

Need help with?

Country Preference

Which English test are you planning to take?

When are you planning to take the exam?

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

What is your budget to study abroad?

The New York Times

Losing Earth

Editor’s Note

Part One 1979–1982

2. The Whimsies of The Invisible World Spring 1979

3. Between Catastrophe and Chaos July 1979

4. ‘A Very Aggressive Defensive Program’ Summer 1979-Summer 1980

5. ‘We Are Flying Blind’ October 1980

6. ‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981

7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982

8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982

Part Two 1983–1989

2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985

3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986

4. ‘Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.’ Fall 1987-Spring 1988

5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988

6. ‘The Signal Has Emerged’ June 1988

7. ‘Woodstock For Climate Change’ June 1988-April 1989

8. ‘You Never Beat The White House’ April 1989

9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ May 1989

10. The White House Effect Fall 1989

11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ November 1989

Correction August 2, 2018

Correction August 7, 2018

Correction August 16, 2018

More on NYTimes.com

The new climate narrative

Fareed Zakaria on an Age of Revolutions

Spring 2024 Issue

FP Analytics

From Resistance to Resilience

The Tragedy of Stopping Climate Change

There’s No Wake-Up Moment on Climate in America

Join the Conversation

Change your username:

Confirm your username to get started.

More from Foreign Policy

Forget About Chips—China Is Coming for Ships

‘The Regime’ Misunderstands Autocracy

Washington’s Failed Africa Policy Needs a Reset

What Columbia’s Protests Reveal About America

FP’s flagship evening newsletter guiding you through the most important world stories of the day, written by Alexandra Sharp . Delivered weekdays.

Changing the narrative of climate change

Related Content

Chart of the week: Trump and the US-Australia alliance

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Tennessee Power Plant

Media Credits

Production Managers

User Permissions

Interactives

Related Resources

Want people to notice your climate research? Learn how to write.

Turning Climate Crisis Stories Into Narrative of the Future, Changed but Still Beautiful

Filter by Type

Research Areas

Essay on Global Warming