Part Three
SEVEN
By the 1990s, news of new global temperature records and other weather extremes had become so frequent that, increasingly, they were treated by scientists and the media as signals that climate was already changing. The decade started off with a bang, with 1990 setting a new global record for warmth. But then in 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, throwing a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere that circled the globe. The ash cooled the planet and interrupted the drumbeat of warming years. This precipitated a spate of “Where’s your warming?” taunts from the nascent climate denial crowd.
While temperatures took a short break in the early part of the decade, a series of intense storms gave those worried about climate impacts something else to chew on. In September, Typhoon Mireille hit Japan, the first to strike the island nation in thirty years. Then, in October 1991, one of the most intense northeasters in history hit the New England coast. “The Perfect Storm,” immortalized by Sebastian Junger, hovered off the coast for days, its 100-mile-per-hour winds whipping up huge waves and storm tides. Less than a year later, Hurricane Andrew hit Florida as a category 5, making landfall in Homestead, just south of Miami. Ultimately, Andrew inflicted $50 billion in property damage (in 2020 dollars) and drove eleven property and casualty insurers into insolvency. Damaging as it was, insurance experts realized that the losses could have been far worse if the landfall had just been a few miles north. The losses had a profound impact on the insurance industry.
Along with Hurricane Iniki, which hit Hawaii a month after Andrew hit Florida, these storms seemed to support a theory that MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel had been developing since the 1980s—that greenhouse gas emissions would spur an increase in extreme weather events, specifically that global warming would lead to more intense hurricanes. A lot of things have to fall into place to create a hurricane, but a basic ingredient is an energy source, which means ocean water temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. A warming ocean that stays warm longer expands the potential for a longer hurricane season and more intense storms.
Moreover, far more complicated interactions in a warmer globe seemed to suggest increased frequency and intensity of other weather extremes such as tornadoes, windstorms, rain events, heat waves, and droughts. In subsequent years, nature obliged by providing evidence of them all. That “five-hundred-year” flood in the Midwest caused $13 billion in damage. The following year, the American Southeast was hit by a “flood of the century.” Another such flood inundated the Red River valley in the upper Midwest in 1997. That same year saw the strongest El Niño in recorded history, and estimates of worldwide damage range as high as $100 billion.
The El Niño also provided a case study of how climate change, in concert with other destabilizing factors, could bring down governments, in this case the Suharto regime in Indonesia. By the time of his fall in May 1998, Suharto had ruled Indonesia for thirty-one years. By the end, Indonesians had had it with the corruption, cronyism, and nepotism of his reign, and his government was already teetering from the repercussions of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
What brought it all to a head, however, was the El Niño and its attendant two-year drought, which caused a tripling of rice prices by March 1997, leading to starvation in some provinces. The price hikes didn’t help farmers because the price of fertilizers and pesticides rose even faster as the rupiah devalued. The El Niño also had second-order impacts, such as drought-fueled fires, which shut down airports and left seventy million people with respiratory ailments. The smoke from the fires further reduced rainfall by overloading the atmosphere with nuclei too small to allow the formation of raindrops heavy enough to fall to the ground.
By 1998, the number of Indonesians living in poverty had quad-rupled to more than one hundred million people. Civil order began to break down. Suharto tried to hold on, rigging elections, but massive riots and protests in May ultimately cost him the support of his cabinet. Purportedly, he spent much of the time after his resignation tending to his pet birds and watching nature and animal shows on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.
The El Niño had massive impacts around the world, producing floods across huge swaths of Latin America and China, as well as droughts and outbreaks of disease in Africa. While there was blanket coverage of El Niño’s impacts (everybody loves a dramatic weather story), most of the public didn’t make the connection between the destruction of this event and the potential economic impacts of climate change. Perhaps this was because this El Niño was just a stronger version of a naturally occurring cycle, or perhaps it was because climate change was still viewed as theoretical and far off in the future.
Ironically, the lasting impression left by this El Niño may have been to undercut the case for global warming in the public’s mind. That’s because the El Niño temporarily warmed global temperatures by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for warmth that would not be broken until 2005. In a masterpiece of casuistry, those opposed to taking action seized on this anomaly to start trumpeting a “pause” in global warming. They argued that if you drew a line from 1998 forward, the temperature record looked flat. To accept this, one had to disregard that every year after 1998 was one of the top ten warmest years in the temperature record to that point.
In 1998, the United States was hit by a record-setting 1,424 tornadoes. And once the effects of the Pinatubo eruption subsided early in the decade, the upward march of temperature resumed. In all, six of the ten years in the decade were either the warmest or second-warmest years for average global temperatures.
Most ominously, signs of change emerged from the most stable place on the planet: Antarctica. In the space of a week in 1995, the Larsen A Ice Shelf disintegrated. It dumped an area of ice more than twice the size of New York City into the ocean. Before it collapsed, the shelf had been stable for hundreds of years.
The decade also gave the world a preview of a host of second-order impacts of climate change. One of the basics of evolutionary biology is that when ecosystems become disrupted, opportunistic, fast-reproducing species tend to proliferate. Pathogens fit this bill perfectly. History is replete with examples of plagues and pandemics following episodes of extreme weather.
The late Paul Epstein, a Harvard epidemiologist, pioneered the study of the relationship between climate change and disease. According to Epstein, the synergies of a warming climate and disease involve much more than reproduction. For instance, as temperatures warm, mosquito metabolism increases, and the mosquitoes respond by feeding more vigorously. The same circumstances that enhance their spread also weaken the immune systems of their victims. And once ordinarily benign microbes invade humans and animals weakened by heat and pollution, they can become deadly and invade healthy populations. Epstein noted that a class of viruses that includes measles was implicated in the deaths of seals in the North Sea, lions in the Serengeti, and horses in Australia—very different animals widely scattered around the world. In each case, said Epstein, abnormal weather had caused malnutrition, weakened immune systems, and spurred the reproduction of viruses.
Warmer temperatures also allow microbes to migrate into areas formerly too cold for them to survive. This happened in 1995, when warming temperatures allowed mosquitoes carrying dengue fever to cross the mountains that had formerly confined the disease to the Pacific Ocean side of Costa Rica. Epstein’s thoughts have a chilling resonance today. The real threat, he told me at the time, may not be a single disease, but armies of emergent microbes causing havoc among a host of creatures. “The message I take home,” he said, “is that diseases afflicting plants and animals can send ripples through economies and societies no less disastrous than those affecting humans.”
Climate change got plenty of coverage starting in the 1990s, with many exploring the connections between various weather events and the likely repercussions of a changing climate. I wrote a good number of pieces on the subject, major articles for Time magazine and op-eds and essays for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications—frequently enough that I was described as a “global warming freakazoid” by a right-wing blog. Many others were writing about it as well.
And yet the real story of the 1990s was that basically nothing happened to slow the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The decade ended with greenhouse gas concentrations rising to levels they would have risen to if no action was taken to contain them. In the 1980s, the global community had a number of excuses not to take action. By the turn of the new millennium almost all of those excuses had evaporated. If the 1980s were a lost decade because there was only a hazy picture of what was happening, the 1990s were another lost decade despite a spotlight beamed on the problem from start to finish. The Kyoto Protocol, 1997’s limp attempt to reduce fossil fuel emissions, did not enter into force until 2005. Despite the promises following 1988, nothing happened in the 1990s to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.