Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

"William Antholis is managing director of the Brookings Institution, where he is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies. During Bill Clinton's presidency, he was director of international economic affairs at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. He served as deputy director of the White House climate change policy team and was a negotiator on the U.S. team at Kyoto. Strobe Talbott, president of Brookings, served seven years as U.S. deputy secretary of state. Prior to his government service, he spent twenty-one years as a reporter, columnist, and editor of Time magazine. His previous books include The Great Experiment (Simon & Schuster, 2008), Engaging India (Brookings, 2004), and The Russia Hand (Random House, 2002)."

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Fast Forward

Brookings Institution Press

Chapter One

FOR TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS, we and our ancestors have treated the earth as a laboratory in which we have tinkered with the forces of nature. From taming fire and harnessing wind to developing antibiotics, the results have often advanced civilization. Yet for the past two centuries, we have been conducting what could be the most momentous and dangerous of all experiments: warming the globe.

We started the experiment without meaning to, and, until recently, we did not even know it was under way. Now it may be out of control, threatening to ruin our planet as a home for us and countless other creatures.

Avoiding that fate is a test of our humanity. We flatter ourselves with the anthropological designation Homo sapiens. The phrase is often translated simply as "man who knows." We have now, belatedly, met that definition: those of us alive today are the first generation to know that we live in the Age of Global Warming. We may also be the last generation to have any chance of doing something about it. Our forebears had the excuse of ignorance. Our descendants will have the excuse of helplessness. We have no excuse.

But the Latin participle sapiens means more than just possessing knowledge; it connotes wisdom, common sense, and competence. By that standard, we have a long way to go-and not much time. It is as though we were watching a video on fast forward. There is still some mystery about what is happening and plenty of suspense about how it will turn out. But we cannot just wait and see. We must respond, and our response, too, must be on fast forward.

Climate change is a test of our scientific and entrepreneurial ingenuity. The necessary restructuring of our industries and economy will be possible only if our leaders demonstrate determination, skill, and courage in their policies for their own nations and in cooperation with one another. So climate change is a test of politics as the art of the possible in the face of what we must hope is only a nearly impossible problem.

Climate change is also a test of our ethics, the values that underlie our politics. The potential catastrophe the planet faces obliges us to rethink our rights and duties as citizens. More fundamentally, we need to rethink our obligations as members of a sometimes shortsighted, sometimes sapient, potentially endangered species-and to act accordingly.

A PLANETARY FEVER

During the Industrial Revolution, starting in the late eighteenth century, manual labor and draft-animal farming gave way to the manufacture of goods by machines that ran on energy generated from burning coal. About a hundred years later, in 1897 Mark Twain thought it a witty truism to observe that "everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Yet factories in Europe and North America, including in Twain's adopted home state of Connecticut, were emitting carbon dioxide and other gases in quantities that would shift the balance between the absorption and reflection of solar energy in a way that would risk overheating the planet.

Shortly after Twain died in 1910, temperatures started to creep upward. At first, the warming effects of carbon dioxide were too small to be identified as a trend. Then, around 1970, scientists began to close ranks around the suspicion that something new and worrisome was happening. In 1988 the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Based on input from more than a thousand of the world's leading meteorologists, geologists, oceanographers, and physicists, the panel concluded that in the course of the twentieth century, the average temperature of the earth's surface had increased 1.3 Fahrenheit from the average in the nineteenth century.

That may not sound like a lot, given the day-to-day fluctuations in weather, not to mention season to season or even year to year. In the winter of 2009-10, for example, three snowstorms, one in December and two in February, dumped a total of four and a half feet of snow on Washington, D.C. The U.S. government shut down for four days; Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware declared a state of emergency; and Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma mocked the idea of global warming by building an igloo near the U.S. Capitol. In fact, the blizzards neither proved nor disproved the reality of climate change. Neither did Katrina, the Category 3 hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005.

The reason for alarm is in the pattern that scientists have discerned over time. A century ago, the numbers of record hot days and record cold days were about the same, whereas in the past decade, there have been about twice as many record highs, and the frequency and severity of storms have increased. And while there have been spikes at both the hot and cold ends of the spectrum, the net effect has been a rise in the average surface temperature of the planet.

Warming since the nineteenth century has initiated the melting of the polar ice caps and the rapid retreat of major glaciers, such as those in the Rockies and the Andes. That phenomenon has begun to deprive the earth of the dual cooling function that ice performs by chilling its surroundings and forming a reflective shield that bounces heat rays back into space.

A few degrees' increase in global average temperature can have a significant impact. Twenty thousand years ago-when it was about 9F colder than it is today-the ice covering present-day Canada and much of the northern United States was more than a mile thick. As the earth gradually warmed over the following millennia, the combination of temperate climate and stable sea levels was conducive to the enrichment of soil and the growth of fish populations along the coasts. These conditions-a result of natural global warming-opened a new chapter in human history: the Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 years ago, when nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and formed stationary communities.

The IPCC has concluded that what is happening now-a sudden and rapid change in weather patterns-is not natural; rather, it is largely anthropogenic, a consequence of human activity. The panel also believes that the effects of rising temperatures to date are a likely prelude to more menacing developments in the decades to come.

So far the IPCC has issued four multivolume reports. The last came out in 2007. Each assessment represents an updated consensus, and each update has been more alarming than its predecessor about how fast the planet seems to be warming and more certain about human activity being the cause.

As temperatures rise, the danger is analogous to a fever in the human body. We feel healthy at 98.6F, not so good at 99.5, and lousy at 101; if we get up to 105 or so we are likely to be taken to the hospital. So where, on a thermometer that registers the earth's temperature, should there be a marker indicating that a fever is not just uncomfortable and unhealthy but life-threatening? As they contemplate this question, scientists have settled on 3.6F above average temperatures about a century ago, before they began to rise as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Since the global average...