ONE
Our present perilous situation is the product of the interaction of four different realms: reality, the scientific world, public opinion, and the world of business and finance. It’s useful to imagine four clocks running at different speeds, with each clock representing one of these four realms, the latter three all lagging behind the reality of climate change, but to different degrees. In the scientific realm, there is a lag built into the very structure of scientific inquiry. Science proceeds by gathering data, analyzing it, and publishing the results; from the 1980s on, we see a built-in lag of at least two years between what has actually been happening with the climate and our scientific understanding of it. The realms of public opinion and finance have lagged even further behind reality.
Let’s start all the clocks in 1979, the year President Jimmy Carter’s blue-ribbon panel presented him with their recommendations.
Clock One follows the progress of climate change itself. Hottest years in history began accumulating in the mid-1980s, and since then each decade has set new records. For instance, the 1980s counted six of its ten years as among the top ten, with 1988 breaking the all-time record for global warmth. Since 2000, every year but one has been among the top ten globally, with the warming accelerating as we approach 2023 (each of the last seven years of the 2010–2020 decade was one of the seven hottest years on record). There have been many other signals of climate change, such as a rapid acceleration of sea level rise. This clock shows that human-caused climate change has been with us since the 1980s and has been becoming ever more intense.
Clock Two marks the progress of science. Despite the warnings of the Carter blue-ribbon panel, until the mid-1990s, most scientists felt that global warming relating to greenhouse gas emissions wouldn’t arrive until the next century and would make its presence felt only incrementally. In part this was because, back then, those reconstructing past climates literally could not see the rapid, violent global changes that have characterized climate change since the ice ages began some 2.7 million years ago. Early tools for reconstructing global climate in the distant past had a resolution of hundreds of years, but scientists steadily improved various proxies that permitted them to look at ancient climates so that the picture of past climates emerged with ever more precision. What they saw was truly alarming and completely different from the conventional wisdom of earlier decades.
By the mid-1990s, signals of extremely rapid changes in the past had become blindingly clear, and by 2003, climate science had undergone a complete paradigm shift: where once climate change was seen as stately and incremental, the consensus now was that it could be dramatic and swift. As climate scientist Richard Alley put it, the old view was that climate change was a dial; the new view, a switch. Speaking to the recklessness of not controlling greenhouse gas emissions given this new view of climate, Wallace Broecker, the pioneer of the role oceans play in climate change, was even more colorful: “Climate is an angry beast,” he said, “and we are poking it with sticks.”
Clock Three marks the progress of public appreciation of the threat. At times this clock has advanced rapidly, and at other times it has run backward. There were periods in the 1980s and 1990s when public concern spiked. Regardless, awareness of how climate changes and whether climate is changing lags behind, by a large margin, both reality and the progress of our scientific understanding. If the first clock reflects what is happening currently, and the second clock lags by two years, the third clock has lagged the first two by as much as decades. Right now, opinion is changing rapidly, but as recently as a year ago, significant numbers of Americans still resisted the idea that humans were changing the climate—something that became scientific consensus more than twenty-five years ago—and an even larger percentage were unaware that the scientific consensus has shifted to the understanding that climate changes can be dramatic and extremely rapid.
Clock Four marks the understanding of climate change in the world of business and finance, including the economics community, the markets, and investors. With a couple of exceptions, this clock lags even the public in terms of appreciation of the threat. Right now, this is changing rapidly, but until a couple of years ago, the principal way climate change captured the attention of business, economists, and investors was not how climate change might affect the economy, but rather how attempts to limit fossil fuel emissions might lower profits.
This fourth clock is perhaps the least well examined and least well understood of the causes of our present dilemma, but it is also the most important. If the markets had the incentives and penalties to price in the likely future costs of climate change, the world would have acted decades ago, and we might have forestalled the changes we are seeing today. But the market did not have those incentives, and so the markets and the business community focused on the costs of changing business as usual. To justify this posture, they had to ignore increasingly clear signals from reality, as well as a scientific consensus about the dangers. That they were able to ignore these signals as long as they did turned out to be immensely consequential.
Because the markets are where the money is, politicians followed, and we are left with our present situation where the clock of climate reality ticks in real time, the scientists are mid-decade, the public is in the 1990s, and, until very recently, the financial community remained stuck in the 1980s.
OK, then; we have four clocks, each one running at a different pace. Clock One represents reality. The lag in the scientific clock, number two, is built into the very structure of scientific inquiry and that’s not going to change. The pace of the public clock, number three, varies according to events in the timelines of Clocks One, Two, and Four (business and finance), with the weightings of these various inputs also varying over time. In this sense the public clock is passive, dependent on outside influences. For most of the last three decades, events in the real world and scientific community have been less influential on the public than the messages coming from business and finance.
Today, the weightings of the influences on public awareness are shifting rapidly, as evidenced by the swiftly rising alarm in the public and a growing realization in the financial community that the reality of climate change might pose more of a risk to the economy than attempts at regulation. We will dive into the current state of play with regard to climate change in later chapters, but first we need to understand how we got here.