The Pilot Lights and Somebody’s World
169 On June 6, 1991: The eruptions began in earnest on the twelfth.
United States Geological Survey, “Remembering Mount Pinatubo 25 Years Ago: The World’s Largest Volcanic Eruption to Happen in the Past 100 Years was the June 15, 1991, Eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines,” June 13, 2016.
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/remembering-mount-pinatubo-25-years-ago-mitigating-crisis
Accessed 12-5-22.
169 there’s stuttering, throat-clearing: Stephanie Pappas, “Pinatubo: Why the Biggest Volcanic Eruption Wasn’t the Deadliest,” LiveScience, June 15, 2011.
From June 12: “Over the next three days, the volcano spit out three more vertical eruptions and 13 smaller eruptions that produced pyroclastic flows.”
The flows are “molten mixtures of ash, gas and rock that can sweep over the landscape at more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) per hour.”
169 It sent an ash cloud: United States Geological Survey, “Remembering Mount Pinatubo 25 Years Ago: The World’s Largest Volcanic Eruption to Happen in the Past 100 Years was the June 15, 1991, Eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines,” June 13, 2016.
The USGS includes the metric equivalent, which gives it even more Dolby: “40 km.”
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/remembering-mount-pinatubo-25-years-ago-mitigating-crisis
Accessed 12-5-22.
169 spikes of smoke, immense power: “The sky darkened and the ground shook. It sounded like a ‘stampede of 100,000 animals,’ said a Filipino who witnessed it.”
Thomas Fuller, “Philippine Eruption Snuffed Out Tribe’s Way of Life: Pinatubo: Ten Years Later,” International Herald Tribune, May 9, 2001.
169 “you better fill your pockets”: Nova, “In the Path of a Killer Volcano,” S20E05, PBS, February 9, 1993.
According to the volcanologist and petrologist (the study of the origin and composition of rocks) Erik Klimetti, “possibly the best documentary about volcanoes and volcano monitoring ever made.”
Erik Klimetti, “The 20th Anniversary Of The Eruption Of Pinatubo In The Philippines,” Wired, June 2011.
169 abandoned their homes: Nova, “In the Path of a Killer Volcano,” S20E05, PBS, February 9, 1993.
169 The geologist found another ride: Nova, S20E05, “In the Path of a Killer Volcano,” PBS, February 9, 1993
169 Pinatubo also injected: S. George Philander, Ed., The Encyclopedia of Global Warming & Climate Change, Second Edition, Sage Reference 2012. Christopher J. Ennis, “Sulfur Dioxide: Sulfur Dioxide and Climate Change,” 1302.
United States Geological Survey Fact Sheet, “The Cataclysmic 1991 Eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines,” United States Geological Survey Fact Sheet 113-97.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs113-97/
Accessed 12-6-22.
“It’s ash cloud contained five cubic kilometers of material,” note JoAnna Wender and M. Kumar in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. “Effects from Pinatubo didn’t end on that date 25 year ago. Gas from the ash plume jostled weather patterns and dampened the effects of global warming.”
JoAnna Wender, M. Kumar, “Pinatubo 25 Years Later: Eight Ways the Eruption Broke Ground,” Eos, June 9, 2016.
The writers continue:
Scientists tracked sulfur aerosols from Pinatubo’s eruption as they traveled around the world. For two years following the blast, surface temperatures cooled, as forecasted by climate models that included Pinatubo’s injections into the atmosphere. Pinatubo, in a sense, served as a natural climate experiment to test and calibrate models . . . confirming that humans—and the unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases they pump into the atmosphere every year—are to blame for the warming climate.
170 a Year Without Tomatoes: Associated Press, “Cool Nights, Slow Tomatoes,” August 16, 1992.
Where have all the summer’s tomatoes gone?
Nowhere. They’re still hanging on the vine, small and green.
“We should be swimming in tomatoes by now, but they are ripening three to four weeks behind normal,” John Howell, a vegetable specialist with the cooperative extension service at the University of Massachusetts, said Friday. “It’s not so much the rain, but the cool nights and lack of sun.”
The Boston Globe, “Unfried Green Tomatoes,” August 18, 1992. Gloria Negri, “Enjoying Hub Summer ‘92 Requires Playing It Cool,” The Boston Globe, August 19, 1992. Dianne Dumanoski, “Some Blame Volcano For the Chill,” The Boston Globe, August 19, 1992.
170 The winter of 1993 was powerful: Michael D. Lemonick, “The Ice Age Cometh?”, Time, Jan. 31, 1994.
170 “Whatever happened to global warming?”: Michael D. Lemonick, “The Ice Age Cometh?”, Time, Jan. 31, 1994.
170 they assumed he’d gotten the story wrong: Jonathan Weiner, “Winter Forecast: Frigid. But Don’t Be Fooled,” The New York Times, October 23, 1994. “Global Warming is a topic that my friends tend to avoid around me, out of politeness. They know I wrote a book about it a few years ago, and they assume I got the story wrong.”
170 “The greenhouse effect isn’t doing a very good job”: Patrick Michaels, “The Recent Winter Featured Big Sleaze, but Apocalypse It Wasn’t,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 23, 1994.
Skeptic Pat Michaels used the cold weather as an argument for continued climate inaction. That was his role on the game board.
“This particular human frailty—apocalypseophilia—is about to exact its price. We increasingly hear talk of a tax on the greenhouse effect of fuels, which could easily serve as the basis for the largest worldwide tax increase in history,” he writes. “Hopefully, cooler heads and ‘cynics’ will prevail, and not the climatic passion of the moment.” Michaels got his wish.
170 A good way to check the equipment: “In a way, it was a windfall for Hansen,” writes pioneer climate writer Bill McKibben. “The eruption injected huge amounts of sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere, allowing Hansen an opportunity to spot-check his computer model of climate. ‘We’d been looking for a nice, clean experiment, and nature provided one,’ he said.”
Bill McKibben, The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life, Henry Holt 2008. Chapter 30, “Getting Warmer,” 287. Reprinting Bill McKibben, “Getting Warmer,” Outside Magazine, May 1993.
170 about 2 percent of the sun’s radiation: This is just the way Wallace Broecker’s sulfur fleet would ideally function: tiny dust-size mirrors reflect the sun back at itself.
James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity,” Bloomsbury 2009. Chapter One, “The Vice President’s Climate Task Force,” 5. “Aerosols created by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines reduced solar heating of Earth by almost 2 percent, a negative forcing of about –4 watts.”
170 “meant anything to those crashing waves”: Bill McKibben, The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life, Henry Holt 2008. Chapter 30, “Getting Warmer,” 287.
Reprinting Bill McKibben, “Getting Warmer,” Outside Magazine, May 1993.
170 about 500 trillion square meters: NASA, “Earth by the Numbers,” Solar System Exploration, Planets.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/earth/by-the-numbers/
Accessed 12-10-22.
170 steady blue flames: Weiner, “Winter Forecast: Frigid. But Don’t Be Fooled,” The Times, October 23, 1994. “Climate experts agree that the carbon dioxide we have added to the air is now heating the surface of the planet by about two watts per square meter,” Weiner writes. “In effect, we have put a tiny pilot light just above each one [and] each light is shining down on its plot of earth by day and night.”
Addressing Vice President Dick Cheney’s Climate Task Force in March 2001 (all-stars: VP Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Christine Todd Whitman from EPA, and five other cabinet members), James Hansen used a different metaphor. The climate scientists had learned to use props.
I had a small 1-watt Christmas tree bulb in my pocket at the Task Force meeting, which I pulled out during my presentation, causing some eyebrows to raise in curiosity. I explained that the net effect of human-made climate forcings was equivalent to having two of those bulbs burning night and day over every square meter of Earth’s surface.
I mentioned that in some sense the force of two 1-watt bulbs is small—it cannot stop the wind or alter an ongoing weather fluctuation. Yet if it is left in place for decades and centuries, long enough to allow the ocean temperature to fully respond, it is a huge forcing.
Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren. Chapter One, “The Vice President’s Climate Task Force,” 9.
171 “It’s a big number”: Federal News Service, “Hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy And Commerce Committee; Subject: Questions Surrounding the Hockey Stick Temperature Studies: Implications For Climate Change Assessments,” July 27, 2006. Fifteen years post-Pinatubo, the effect had increased by a half-watt.
Now, humans are amplifying the natural greenhouse effect. Just to give you one measure, the extra energy trapped near the earth’s surface by a variety of greenhouses gases is about 2.5 Watts per square meter now, which is about 100 times larger than all of the energy usage by humans worldwide on the entire planet from all sources . . . There is no doubt that the earth is warming.
Preserved in more formal wear (written version, minus contractions) in Questions Surrounding The ‘Hockey Stick’ Temperature Studies: Implications For Climate Change Assessments, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy And Commerce, House of Representatives, 109 Congress, July 19 and July 27, 2006. U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006, 670.
171 So: net global cooling: Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren, 5.
171 “or there’s something wrong with the models”: Boyce Rensberger, “Volcano Reverses Global Warming; Scientists Expect Mean Temperature to Drop One Degree Over Two-Four Years,” The Washington Post, May 19, 1992.
Rensberger points out, harkening four years back to the drought hearings and his declaration, that Hansen had “kicked off much of the current popular attention to global warming.”
171 “a testable prediction”: Gregg Easterbrook, “A House of Cards,” Newsweek, June 1, 1992.
Hansen compared himself with the spunky Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton. (Dated for us, timely then.) Retton had come out of a vault—a Tsukahara, with a back somersault—to land standing up. “Remember Mary Lou Retton?” Hansen asked McKibben. “When your predictions are wrong in science, it’s not supposed to be devastating—the errors help you make refinements. But in this case I felt a little like Mary Lou Retton. I had to stick it.”
McKibben writes, “If the world’s temperature fell about one degree Fahrenheit (just over half a degree Celsius) over the course of fifteen months—Hansen would land on his feet.”
171 “When the Earth”: Larry King Live, “Is the Earth’s Atmosphere Warming?”, CNN July 19, 1991.
171 “The temperature still has to”: McKibben, The Bill McKibben Reader, 288.
171 1990 had set the record: Rudy Abramson, “1990 Hottest Year On Record, Data Shows,” The Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1991.
171 the planet cooled one degree: NASA Earth Observatory, “Global Effects of Mount Pinatubo,” NASA Langley Research Center, June 15, 2001.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects-of-mount-pinatubo
Accessed 12-10-22.
171 1994 logged in as history’s fourth-warmest year: William K. Stevens, “A Global Warming Resumed in 1994, Climate Data Show,” The New York Times, January 25, 1995.
“Global warming, interrupted as a result of the mid-1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, has resumed—just as many experts had predicted. After a two-year cooling period, the average temperature of the earth’s surface rebounded in 1994 to the high levels of the 1980’s, the warmest decade ever recorded, according to three sets of data in the United States and Britain.”
171 1995 re-broke the record: William K. Stevens, “ ’95 Is Hottest Year on Record As the Global Trend Resumes,” The New York Times, January 4, 1996.
171 “it blotted the issue off”: Susan Cohen, “The Warm Zone; Admit it: You Don’t Know What To Believe About Global Warming,” The Washington Post, July 16, 1995.
171 “the cleanest and most isolated”: Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, Constable & Co, 1922. Introduction, vii.
172 like stray frozen thoughts: William K. Stevens, The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate, Delacorte 1999. Chapter 15, “Rising Seas,” 261.
“Antarctica is a perpetual refrigerator; Browne noted the presence at an abandoned camp of early twentieth-century explorers of ‘the 89-year-old body of a husky dog that looks as if it just died.’”
Stevens is quoting fellow Times science reporter Malcolm W. Browne—the camp is the famous Cape Evans location of Scott’s Hut. “Antarctica: As Gorgeous and Deadly Today as Ever,” The New York Times, April 9, 1999.
The whole paragraph is too good not to print; first sentence especially.
The subfreezing cold that perpetually grips most of the continent takes snapshots of life that never fade. The Ross Island huts used by Scott, Shackleton and other explorers from 1902 to 1914 look much as they did when they were occupied by expeditions. They are still littered with discarded trash and the carcasses of seals and penguins slaughtered for meat, as well as the 89-year-old body of a husky dog that looks as if it just died. Ancient copies of The London Illustrated News and other early-20th-century reading matter in some of the old huts evoke the ghosts of storybook heroes.
172 A bust of Lenin: There’s a photo here—a bunch of thrillingly bright and lonely photos. Parka photos.
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, “The Pole of Inaccessibility (POI).”
https://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/igy1/poi.html
Accessed 12-6-22.
172 recalled virtually everyplace else: Jacey Fortin, “Toppling Monuments, a Visual History,” The New York Times, August 17, 2017. “Statues of Vladimir Lenin have been erected across continents. But many were removed, in countries including Romania, Uzbekistan and Ethiopia, around the time of the Soviet bloc’s collapse.”
172 A team of British-Canadian adventurers: Matthew Beard, “British Explorers Recount ‘Agony’ of Pole Trek,” The Independent (London), January 23, 2007.
172 July 21, 1983: National Weather Service, “This Day in Weather History: July Twenty-First,” U.S. Department of Commerce.
https://www.weather.gov/abr/This_Day_in_Weather_History_Jul_21
Accessed 12-10-22.
172 the coldest spot on Earth: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 67.
172 Vostok in the late seventies: Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, Chapter Nine, “A Logical, Well-Reasoned Conclusion,” 245.
172 an atmospheric record stretching back: Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, Chapter Nine, “A Logical, Well-Reasoned Conclusion,” 246.
Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 67.
172 “probably the single most”: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 67.
172 when he examined a Vostok chart: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 69.
172 By 1998, drills had chewed: Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, Bloomsbury 2006. Chapter Six, “Floating House,” 127. The distance is given by the New Yorker’s mordant and excellent Elizabeth Kolbert as 11,775 feet.
Between 1990 and 1998, an 11,775-foot-long ice core was drilled there. Since less snow falls in Antarctica than in Greenland, the layers in an Antarctic core are thinner and the climate information contained in them is less detailed. However, they go back much farther. The Vostok core, which is now stored in pieces in Denver, Grenoble, and on Antarctica, contains a continuous climate record stretching back four full glacial cycles. (As is the case with Greenland cores, temperatures can be ascertained by measuring the isotopic composition of the ice, and the makeup of the atmosphere determined by analyzing tiny bubbles of trapped air.)
What the Vostok record shows is that the planet is already nearly as warm as it has been at any point in the last 420,000 years.
Jean-Robert Petit, et al., “Climate and Atmospheric History of the Past 420,000 years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica,” Nature, Vol. 399, June 3, 1999.
172 Keeling’s ppm: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Research News, “Carbon Dioxide Peaks Near 420 Parts Per Million At Mauna Loa Observatory,” June 7, 2021.
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2764/Coronavirus-response-barely-slows-rising-carbon-dioxide
Accessed 12-12-22.
172 the old high-water mark: 298.6, to be exact. “The highest pre-industrial value recorded in 800,000 years of ice-core record was 298.6 ppm, in the Vostok core, around 330,000 years ago.” Martine Le Foch, Jean-Robert Petit, et al., “800,000-year Ice-Core Records of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2),” Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, World Data Center for Paleoclimatology/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Energy, 2012.
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Accessed 12-11-22.
Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, 128. Kolbert’s lovely and unsettling book appeared in 2006—with a then-current ppm of 378. “The Vostok record demonstrates that, at 378 parts per million, current CO2 levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million, was reached around 325,000 years ago.)”
172 “the last time”: Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, 128.
173 “crocodiles roamed Colorado”: Kolbert, 128.
173 the Antarctic record reached back 800,000 years: That low came around 665,000 years ago.
Diether Lüthi, Martine Le Floch, et al., High-Resolution Carbon Dioxide Concentration Record 650,000-800,000 Years Before Present,” Nature, Vol. 453, May 15, 2008.
Martine Le Foch, Jean-Robert Petit, et al., “800,000-year Ice-Core Records of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2),” Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, World Data Center for Paleoclimatology/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Energy, 2012.
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Accessed 12-11-22.
173 “would have meant a great deal to Arrhenius”: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter Five, “A Slow Eureka,” 67.
173 “An indescribable”: Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, Princeton University Press 2000. Chapter Five, “Ice Age Through the Ice Age,” 46.
The slightly more detailed Alley explanation: “In snow, a ray of light passes through a tiny crystal, is bent, goes through another, bounces off another, and so staggers on its way to the viewer, going much farther than the straight-line distance to the eye. On the way, the red is lost, and the result is a beautiful blue.”
For readers interested in the work-epic of it:
To really see layers in the snow, we dig two pits, each a six-foot cube, separated by a wall only a foot or so thick. Together, two such pits require moving about six tons of snow, so great care is recommended at the end to avoid kicking a hole in the thin wall, ruining the experiment and requiring yet more digging. Then, using timbers and plywood, we hammer together a roof over one pit, slide under the roof, and let a last piece of plywood fall over the entrance hole. The sun shines into the open pit and through the thin wall between the two, casting the layers in that wall into brilliant relief.
I have stood in such snow pits with dozens of people—drillers, journalists, and others—and so far, every visitor has been impressed.
And then the part about the light staggering from crystal to crystal above. Alley, Two-Mile Time Machine, 45-6.
173 the ice core field director: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Ice Memory: Does a Glacier Hold the Secret of How Civilization Began—and How It May End?”, The New Yorker,
January 7, 2002.
173 “wholesale rethinking”: Kolbert, Field Notes. Chapter Three, “Under the Glacier,” 50. “Over the last decade, three Greenland cores have been drilled to a depth of nearly two miles, and these cores have prompted a wholesale rethinking of how the climate operates. Where once the system was thought to change, as it were, only glacially, now it is known to be capable of sudden and unpredictable reversals.”
173 it taps out at 110,000 years: Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine. Chapter One, “Fast Forward,” 4.
173 a section of landscape and history: Kolbert, Field Notes, Chapter Six, “Floating House,” 127. Worth repeating—easier for you to find later on: “Since less snow falls in Antarctica than in Greenland, the layers in an Antarctic core are thinner and the climate information contained in them is less detailed.”
174 “For most of the last 100,000 years”: Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine. Chapter 12, “Crazy Climates: What the Worms Turned,” 120.
174 “an interest—partly lurid”: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Ice Memory: Does a Glacier Hold the Secret of How Civilization Began—and How It May End?”, The New Yorker,
January 7, 2002.
174 “they had just as big brains”: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Ice Memory: Does a Glacier Hold the Secret of How Civilization Began—and How It May End?”, The New Yorker, January 7, 2002.
174 The answer was temperature: This notion is how Alley’s book begins.
We live with familiar weather—ski areas are snowy, deserts are parched, rain forests drip. But what if our climate jumped to something totally unexpected? What if you went to bed in slushy Chicago, but woke up with Atlanta’s mild weather? Or worse, what if your weather jumped back and forth between that of Chicago and Atlanta: a few years cold, a few years hot? Such crazy climates would not doom humanity, but they could pose the most momentous physical challenge we have ever faced, with widespread crop failures and social disruption.
Large, rapid, and widespread climate changes were common on Earth for most of the time for which we have good records, but were absent during the few critical millennia when humans developed agriculture and industry.
Richard Alley, Two-Mile Time Machine. Chapter One, “Fast Forward,” 3.
174 “Ten thousand years of very stable climate”: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Ice Memory: Does A Glacier Hold The Secret Of How Civilization Began—And How It May End?”, The New Yorker, January 7, 2002.
175 the Times called it remarkable: Walter Sullivan, “Tubes of Ice Hold Record of Climate in Past and Future,” The New York Times, July 20, 1993.
Walter Sullivan, “Study of Greenland Ice Finds Rapid Change in Past Climate,” The New York Times, July 15, 1993.
In a commentary in the journal [Nature], Dr. J. W. C. White of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research of the University of Colorado said it was “difficult to express the importance” of the reports on the ice findings.
“Adaptation—the peaceful shifting of food-growing areas, coastal populations and so on—seemed possible, if difficult, when abrupt change meant a few degrees in a century,” he wrote. “It now seems a much more formidable task, requiring global cooperation with swift recognition and response.”
175 “implications for Federal and international climate policy”: William K. Stevens, “If Climate Changes, It May Change Quickly,” The New York Times, January 27, 1998.
175 “walking the plank blindfolded”: Stevens, “If Climate Changes,” Times.
The paleoclimatologist was Texas A&M’s Dr. Thomas J. Crowley—we’ll see him again toward the end of this story, in pitched pro-science battle.
175 “It’s certainly something”: Stevens, “If Climate Changes,” Times. This is Dr. Peter de Menocal, of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
175 Abrupt Climate Change: National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises, National Academies Press 2002.
Its (clear warning) first page:
Large, abrupt climate changes have repeatedly affected much or all of the earth, locally reaching as much as 10°C change in 10 years. Available evidence suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.
This report is an attempt to describe what is known about abrupt climate changes and their impacts, based on paleoclimate proxies, historical observations, and modeling. The report does not focus on large, abrupt causes—nuclear wars or giant meteorite impacts—but rather on the surprising new findings that abrupt climate change can occur when gradual causes push the earth system across a threshold. Just as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light, the slow effects of drifting continents or wobbling orbits or changing atmospheric composition may “switch” the climate to a new state. And, just as a moving hand is more likely than a stationary one to encounter and flip a switch, faster earth-system changes—whether natural or human-caused—are likely to increase the probability of encountering a threshold that triggers a still faster climate shift.
175 “the leadership generally viewed”: Sharon Begley, “The Truth About Denial,” Newsweek, August 13, 2007.
176 William K. Stevens, the science reporter: William K. Stevens, “On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty,” The New York Times, February 6, 2007.
176 “Good luck to you and to them”: William K. Stevens, “On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty,” The New York Times, February 6, 2007.
