(No. 48, a ±08 minute read)
Are we really facing a crisis bound up in a climacteric? Maybe.
As we gird ourselves for a debate tonight between presidential candidates; one a convicted felon fed from a silver spoon and now leading a cult of personality with decided authoritarian leanings, one a career prosecutor and bi-racial woman who rose through the ranks of mostly traditional party politics in California, it is important to remember that what is at stake beyond our borders and intra-national concerns is substantial.
And what is at stake has been understood to be at risk for a great long time.
In my recent essay in Red Canary Magazine there was much that couldn’t be shoehorned into a piece that was fit for ordinary, mortal attention spans. I can get into the weeds. But they are important weeds to grasp! For example, it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that we now reside in an a time of crisis marked by extreme weather.
If the weather forecast bears, Los Angeles heads into its first day below 100º in four days today, with temperatures “merely” in the 90ºs. I assure you Los Angeles in the 90ºs is still plenty miserable; rank with ozone, shimmering heat radiating from too much pavement, tempers flaring. And this is cooling off.
Temperatures last Friday around L.A. County: LAX–102º, Long Beach Airport–109º, Burbank Airport–114º (an all-time record since the beginning of record keeping in 1939). The heatwave has brought fire (the Line Fire and the Airport Fire in adjacent counties), heat induced power failures, and there will likely be deaths associated with this latest scorcher — heat waves are insidious killers in the world of weather extremes. Were this a one-off, a “hundred year event” we might shrug it away but it comes as year-after-year temperatures ratchet up in lockstep with the increase of atmospheric carbon thanks to our burning fossil fuels. We can’t say we didn’t see this coming.
And that brings me back to that Red Canary essay and those things left after the first gruesome edit slashed the beast of a manuscript into a more digestible portion. In the essay I use as a structuring device a poem by Edward Young (1683 – 1765) and reprinted in 1870. Young was an English free verse pioneer and influence to Goethe and Burke, best known historically for the notoriety of having his work posthumously illustrated, and perhaps eclipsed, by William Blake and his glorious drawings. “Procrastination” is from Young’s masterwork “Night Thoughts,” published in installments between 1742 and 1745 with an edition illustrated by Blake in 1797.
Using the 1870 republication date of Young’s verse in a popular magazine of the day as an historical reference point atmospheric carbon dioxide was then, according to ice core data, 288 parts per million. Forty-one years later a threshold the earth had not superseded in millennia had been crossed. Atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded — by a single part per million — 300ppm in 1911; an increase of 23ppm since 1870. This sad milestone arriving not a half century after the advent of cross-country rail service — we had done this. In 2023 we reached 421ppm.
Average atmospheric temperature increase above pre-industrial average, of course, tracks with atmospheric carbon. In 1870 there was an anomaly of +0.003ºC, in the portentous year 1911 this rose to +0.10897ºC. In 2023 we were at +1.17ºC.
Our species’ first understanding of global warming’s potential consequences dawned in 1896, twenty-six years after Young’s reprinted admonition against procrastination, in a paper by Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius. He described a mechanism where atmospheric carbon dioxide could affect worldwide temperature by way of the greenhouse effect.
Outlining a timeline of our understandings of potential global warming threat evolving into outright warning is a clarifying exercise in light of Young’s poetic admonition to, “Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer.”
That timeline:
–In 1938 Guy Callendar published a paper showing the relationship of carbon dioxide pollution and atmospheric temperature.
–In 1956 Gilbert Plass published his paper, “Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”
–In 1957 Roger Revelle and Hans E. Seuss at Scripps provided us an understanding that the oceans would not absorb the excess carbon waste our acceleration of the Industrial Revolution was delivering.
–In 1960 Charles Keeling’s well-known paper was published showing atmospheric carbon levels to be less variable than previously thought; the earth at large was being affected.
–In 1965 the first grave American public warning that something was potentially seriously wrong in our atmosphere, and apparently getting worse, arrived (as we were deepening our miring ourselves in Vietnam, and were certainly the largest greenhouse gas polluter on earth). This alarm was rung in the Johnson administration’s Science Advisory Committee report ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,’
“Ours is a nation of affluence. But the technology that permits our affluence spews out vast quantities of wastes and spent products that pollute our air, poison our waters, and even impair our ability to feed ourselves.”
So begins the report that warns of future melting ice caps, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, and temperature increases worldwide, in both our oceans and atmosphere. The accuracy of the document’s global warming consequence predictions is chilling. The Advisory Committee concludes with the oft-quoted line, “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment.”
Almost sixty years ago, with the solemn understatement of scientists hot on a theory supported only by incomplete data, this report to President Lyndon Johnson urged,
“The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased [atmospheric] CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings. The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes therefore need to be thoroughly explored.”
Unfortunately, at this point the paper goes on to envision creating in the ocean a greatly heightened reflective surface to increase its albedo, this at the unmentioned expense of oceanic photosynthesis. Truly, all of ‘em can’t be won — we live within present understandings of our planetary systems’ importance — an argument in favor of the precautionary principal.
Resuming the historical timeline of global warming understandings and warnings continues to elucidate a phenomenal failure to heed exhortations to act:
–1969 saw Daniel P. Moynihan warning Nixon’s General Consul and advisor, John Ehrlichman that carbon pollution’s ability to heat the atmosphere was a problem “that can seize the imagination of persons normally indifferent to projects of apocalyptic change.”
–The 1970s were fairly quiet until 1979 when a report published by the National Academy of Sciences showed that doubling atmospheric CO2 from preindustrial concentrations of ±280ppm would likely cause planetary warming of +1.5º–4.5ºC. The report’s authors predicted reaching this harrowing moment in 2030, today it looks more likely to be 2050. (1979; atmospheric carbon: 336.84ppm)
–1985 saw the irrefutable evidence of a hole in the ozone layer, caused by industrial chlorofluorocarbons, which would lead to their total ban with phase out starting in 1987. This is perhaps the widest reaching and most successful environmental initiative in human history demonstrating our past ability to cooperate across national borders to face environmental calamity.
–On June 23, 1988 a sobering public admonition arrived in Congressional public testimony given by Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Science Center, who testified to the link between carbon pollution and global warming having been established,
“Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.”
Hansen’s testimony solidified a bipartisan concern to address our “vast geophysical experiment” and July 28, 1988 saw introduction to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works of the ‘Global Environmental Protection Act of 1988.’ Sponsored by Senator Robert Stafford (R-VT) and co-sponsored by Senators Max Baucus (D-MT), John Chafee (R-RI), David Durenberger (R-MN), and Al Gore (D-TN) S. 2666 was a call to man the climate barricades. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) described the public response to the Hansen hearing he chaired for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee:
“As has been reported in Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and virtually every newspaper and television station in America, the evidence is mounting that the inhabitants of this planet are on a course toward dramatic changes in our world's climate — and that the cause of this change is the ‘greenhouse effect’ caused by the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other waste gases we are discharging into the atmosphere.”
The Senate bill sought the “Elimination and Regulation of Global Change Pollutants” by eliminating chlorofluorocarbons and related chemicals, reducing and stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, minimizing ground-level ozone, and controlling methane emissions. It went on to die the unremarkable death in committee near countless Senate bills have known.
“Procrastination is the thief of time.”
In 1988 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hit 351.69ppm, temperature anomaly was +0.39ºC. The period between 1870 and 1988 was one of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of roughly between 280 and 350ppm, a sweet spot that furnished an earth climatically suitable for the flora and fauna that evolved to thrive on the planet — including us. The 350ppm mark has become a benchmark rallying cry; see 350.org or any number of advocacy groups, from Our Children’s Trust to The Center for Biological Diversity.
This number comes from a 2008 paper on which James Hansen was the lead author and which warned plainly that, “if the world continues on a business-as-usual path for even another decade without initiating phase-out of unconstrained coal use, prospects for avoiding a dangerously large, extended overshoot of the 350 ppm level will be dim.” In 2008 atmospheric CO2 concentrations were 385.83ppm, we urgently needed to reel this in.
Davis Guggenheim’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth” documenting Senator Al Gore’s global warming education campaign debuted two years prior to Hansen and his collaborators’ paper. (2006; atmospheric carbon: 382.09ppm, temperature anomaly: +0.64ºC) This film’s release date must be regarded as the moment that the American fulcrum of popular opinion began to be levered once more, as it began to be in the late 1980s, towards action to face a heating climate, and environmental degradation more generally.
This documentary was also likely that incident which prompted the Republican party’s final, irrecoverable wagon circling. Oklahoma oil senator James Inhofe compared Guggenheim’s film to Mein Kampf, apparently with no concern for seemliness.
Here, by and large, we sit. The march deeper into atmospheric profligacy is a steadily increasing trend lashed to a rapidly diminishing window of opportunity to face down the consequences laid out by the Johnson administration’s Science Advisory Committee back in 1965. The overheated summer of 2023 might be considered a premonitory reality check. It was, by any account, a rotten summer worldwide. This summer will be hotter when the ledger is balanced.
And tonight, a debate, when there should be no such a thing. One side disallows the reality of global warming, one side has done something, not enough, but something, in the last four years now that the crisis is made real and no longer merely an abstract clarion call to action. Too little, too late? Yes. But to do too little now, when the monster has clambered from the depths beneath our cradle of disregard, does nothing but give the climate thanatologists data to divine and later parse when researching the substantial quietus we have allowed.
So watch the disputation if you must, but understand that the above timeline renders any purported choice moot; notwithstanding all of the additional baggage in Trump’s grip of misery, packed as it is with Project 2025 and his myriad other issues. We had been warned, we did nothing. We are reaping the consequences and will dance with the devil in November.
It’s on us to arrive home with our virtue.