This book would not have come to be without the vision, guidance, wisdom, and forbearance of Tina Bennett, to whom I now owe a lifetime of thanks. And it would not have become an actual book without the acuity, brilliance, and faith of Tim Duggan, and the enormously helpful work of Molly Stern, Dyana Messina, Julia Bradshaw, William Wolfslau, Aubrey Martinson, Julie Cepler, Rachel Aldrich, Craig Adams, Phil Leung, and Andrea Lau, as well as Helen Conford at Penguin in London.
I would not be writing this book were it not for Central Park East, and especially Pam Cushing, my second mother. I’m grateful to everyone I work with at New York magazine for all of their encouragement and support along the way. This goes especially for my bosses Jared Hohlt, Adam Moss, and Pam Wasserstein, and David Haskell, my editor and friend and co-conspirator. Other friends and co-conspirators also helped refine and reconceive what it was I was trying to do in this book, and to all of them I am so thankful, too: Isaac Chotiner, Kerry Howley, Hua Hsu, Christian Lorentzen, Noreen Malone, Chris Parris-Lamb, Willa Paskin, Max Read, and Kevin Roose. For a million unenumerable things, I’d also like to thank Jerry Saltz and Will Leitch, Lisa Miller and Vanessa Grigoriadis, Mike Marino and Andy Roth and Ryan Langer, James Darnton and Andrew Smeall and Scarlet Kim and Ann Fabian, Casey Schwartz and Marie Brenner, Nick Zimmerman and Dan Weber and Whitney Schubert and Joey Frank, Justin Pattner and Daniel Brand, Caitlin Roper, Ann Clarke and Alexis Swerdloff, Stella Bugbee, Meghan O’Rourke, Robert Asahina, Philip Gourevitch, Lorin Stein, and Michael Grunwald.
My best reader, as always, is my brother, Ben; without his footsteps to follow, who knows where I’d be. I’ve been inspired, too, in countless ways, by Harry and Roseann, Jenn and Matt and Heather, and above all by my mother and father, only one of whom is here to read this book but to both of whom I owe it, and everything else.
The last and biggest thanks belong to Risa, my love, and to Rocca, my other love—for the last year, the last twenty, and the fifty or more to come. Let’s hope they’re cool ones.
Notes
All science is speculative to some degree, subject to some future reconsideration or revision. But just how speculative varies from science to science, from specialty to specialty, indeed from study to study.
Within climate change research, both the fact of global warming (about 1.1 degrees Celsius since humans first began burning fossil fuels) and its mechanism (the greenhouse gases produced by that burning trap heat radiating upward into the planet’s atmosphere) are, at this point, established beyond any shadow of a doubt. Exactly how that warming will play out, over the next decades and then the next centuries, is less certain, both because we don’t know how quickly humans will drop their addiction to fossil fuels, and because we don’t know precisely how the climate system will recalibrate in response to human perturbation. But the notes that follow are, I hope, a road map to the state of that science, in addition to being a bibliography for this book.
I. Cascades
five mass extinctions: Those are the end-Ordovician, the Late Devonian, the end-Permian, the end-Triassic, and the end-Cretaceous. A very good recent popular account of each can be found in Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
86 percent of all species: These figures are all estimates, and different studies often come to different conclusions. Some accounts of the end-Permian extinction, for instance, suggest the extinction level is as low as 90 percent, while others are as high as 97 percent. These particular figures come from the Cosmos primer “The Five Big Mass Extinctions,” https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions.
all but the one: Brannen, Ends of the World.
began when carbon warmed: There is some considerable debate about the precise mix of environmental factors (volcanic eruptions, microbial activity, Arctic methane) that brought about the end-Permian extinction, but for a summary of the theory that volcanic activity warmed the planet and the warming released methane that accelerated that warming, see Uwe Brand et al., “Methane Hydrate: Killer Cause of Earth’s Greatest Mass Extinction,” Paleoworld 25, no. 4 (December 2016): pp. 496–507, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palwor.2016.06.002.
at least ten times faster: “Maximum rates of carbon emissions for both the PETM and the end-Permian are about one billion tons of carbon, and right now we’re at ten billion tons of carbon,” the Penn State geoscientist Lee Kump, among the world’s leading experts on mass extinctions, told me. “The duration of both of those events was much longer than fossil-fuel burning will go on, and so the total amount is lower—but not by a factor of ten. By a factor of two or three.”
The rate is one hundred times faster: Jessica Blunden, Derek S. Arndt, and Gail Hartfield, eds., “State of the Climate in 2017,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 99, no. 8 (August 2018), Si–S310, https://doi.org/10.1175/2018BAMSStateoftheClimate.1.
at any point in the last 800,000 years: Rob Moore, “Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Hits Record High Monthly Average,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, May 2, 2018. As Moore puts it: “Prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels had fluctuated over the millennia but had never exceeded 300 ppm at any point in the last 800,000 years,” https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2018/05/02/carbon-dioxide-in-the-atmosphere-hits-record-high-monthly-average/.
as long as 15 million years: See, for instance, Aradhna K. Tripati, Christopher D. Roberts, and Robert A. Eagle, “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years,” Science 326, no. 5958 (December 2009): pp. 1394–97. “The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today—and were sustained at those levels—global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today,” Tripati said in the UCLA press release for the study. “The sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.”
more than a hundred feet higher: Ibid.
more than half of the carbon: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions” (Oak Ridge, TN, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017. Accounts and estimates of historical emissions vary, but according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we have emitted 1578 gigatons of CO2 from fossil fuels since 1751; since 1989 the total is 820 gigatons.
the figure is about 85 percent: According to Oak Ridge, the total figure since 1946 is 1376 gigatons, or 87 percent of 1578.
Scientists had understood: R. Revelle and H. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades,” Tellus 9 (1957): pp. 18–27.
passing the threshold of carbon concentration: See, for instance, Nicola Jones, “How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters,” Yale Environment 360, January 26, 2017, https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the-world-passed-a-carbon-threshold-400ppm-and-why-it-matters.
a monthly average of 411: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “Another Climate Milestone Falls at Mauna Loa Observatory,” June 7, 2018, https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/another-climate-milestone-falls-mauna-loa-observatory.