Preface
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One day, at the beginning of the geologic epoch called the Pleistocene, Earth's skies turned an ominous gray. The north wind rose and began churning the frigid air into keening gusts. Sonn the first snowflakes descended, signaling the onset of what the nature writer Loren Eiseley termed "the angry winter." It barely stopped snowing for the next 2 million years, during which the planet was held in thrall by massive ice sheets that covered all of Antarctica, most of Europe, large expanses of North and South America, and lesser parts of Asia. The only sounds were the thunder of great avalanches and the gnashing of the advancing glaciers. The most recent of the great ice ages had arrived, triggered perhaps by the completion of the Milky Way's latest rotation, which occurs only once every 300 million years.

Scientists tell us that we remain citizens of the Ice Age. And many of them believe that it is only a matter of time before Earth's surface disappears once more beneath the blinding snows and mile-thick glaciers. When this will come to pass, no one can say for certain.

At present, climatologists are preoccupied by a more immediate concern that the next revolution of the galactic wheel. For much of the last century, Earth and its atmosphere have been heating up, a proces that most, though not all, scientists believe is due to the massive consumption of fossil fuels - coal, oil, natural gas - triggered by the industrial revolution. What is more, global warming is accelerating. The 1970s were warmer than the 1960s; the 1980s were warmer than the 1970s; and the 1990s have been warmer still.

Global warming is not a newly discovered phenomenon. The early debates over its cause were mostly conducted in scientific journals in technical language inaccessible to the public at large. This is no longer the case. In the span of little more than a week during the summer of 1998, the following headlines appeared in newspapers delivered at my doorstep. All but one make the front page: "July Breaks Worldwide Termperature Record," "Warmer, Wetter, Sicker: Linking Climate to Health," "Drought in Texas and Oklahoma Stunting Crops and Economies: Severity Is Reminiscent of the Dust Bowl Years," "Frogs Falling Silent Across USA," and "Religious Groups Mount a Campaign to Support Pact on Global Warming." Their collective message is disquieting to say the least.

Greenhouse is the biography of a scientific idea, the story of what global warming - or the so-called greenhouse effect - is and of how it came to be. The story begins nearly two centuries ago, with the natural philosopher Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, who came within a hair's breadth of being executed during the French Revolution. Fourier was the first to envision Earth as a giant greenhouse whose atmosphere traps the radiant heat from the Sun, warming the planet and giving life to every plant and animal inhabiting its surface, a sign to the Frenchman of nature's great benevolence.

Fourier and the other great scientific figures in part one were "The Time Travelers." Before them, Earth's origins and age were based on the chronology set forth in the Old Testament, and it was impossible to grasp the sweep of time or the great changes, both climatic and geologic, to which the planet has been subjected during the 4 billion years of its existence. Among Fourier's fellow voyagers were James Hutton, a lonely, contemplative Scotsman, and Sir Charles Lyell, an inveterate collector of butterflies. Together they championed the theory of uniformitarianism, which argues the that atmospheric and geologic forces currently at work are the same as those that operated in the past, paving the way for the modern science of geology. And for Charles Darwin as well. Lyell's friend and colleague, Darwin added time to the evolutionary scale the way Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton added distance to the stars. Yet Darwin would have rested much easier has he only known about a simple moth whose coloration was changing in response to the polluted skies of an industrializing England.

In a series of benumbing changes that bordered on the inexorable, the warp and woof of nature were being rewoven on the loom of industry. In part two, "The World Eaters," we encounter the inventors and the capitalists who wrested fossil fuels from the earth and used them to transform the planet: Richard Arkwright, the textile manufacturer who invented the factory system; ironmaster Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale; Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, who perfected the steam engine; locomotive builders Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson; steel magnates Henry Bessemer and Andrew Carnegie; Jhon D. Rockefeller, the baron of Standard Oil; Sir Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the nineteenth century's most colorful and renowned engineer; Model T builder Henry Ford. Towering hundreds of feet above it all an dspewing their burden into the atmosphere twenty-four hours a day were stone that became the preeminent symbol of the industrial age. So seeming complete was the victory of man over nature that the historian Henry Adams, while visiting the Hall of Dynamos at the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900, suddenly felt that the planet had been greatly diminished.

In 1896, three-quarters of a century after Fourier published his all but forgotten article, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius returned to the subject. The future Nobel laureate conjectured that industrial pollutants, most particularly carbon dioxide, were accumulating in Earth's atmosphere. If this gaseous buildup continues, temperatures would gradually rise, although Arrhenious believed it likely that the world's supply of coal and other carbon fuels would be exhausted long before global warming could have any appreciable effect.

As we have recently learned, only a few degrees separate a warm planet from one shrouded in ice, a tale told in the once mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi from the American Southwest, the parallel demise of the Vikings of Greenland, and the scattering of the "Okies" during the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression. Not until the late 1970s would scientists, armed with data indicating that the planet was warming more rapidly than Arrhenious theorized, sound the alarm. In part three, "The Dwellers in the Crystal Palace," we trace the major discoveries and follow the debates, both scientific and public, from the early twentieth century through the 1997 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Kyoto and beyond.

Among the individuals who figure prominently in these developments is George Callendar, an obscure English coal engineer who, standing alone for three decades, clung doggedly to Arrhenius's hypotheses that humans are indeed capable of altering the wind and weather. A citizen of London, Callendar watched in disbelief as killer fogs gave way to killer smogs, the deadliest of which claimed more than 4,000 lives in 1952. On Callendar's heels came Charles Keeling, a gifted and rebellious chemist whose obsession with trapping air in glass flasks accidentally led to the discovery that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising more rapidly than anyone had previously theorized, and that they seem to be directly related to the greenhouse effect. Another brilliant chemist, Thomas Midgley Jr., invented chlorofluorocarbons for use in refrigerators and air-conditioning units, little suspecting that his chemicals would rend the ozone layer above Antarctica, exposing the world's plants and animals to the dangers of ultraviolet radiation. It would take Joseph Farman, a member of the British Antarctic Survey, twenty-seven years on the bone-numbing continent to alert the world to Midgley's potentially catastrophic blunder.

In the rain forests of the world dwell most of Earth's plant, animal, and insect species, the majority of which are not yet classified by scientists. Locked within the massive canopy are countless billions of tons of carbon dioxide. It is being returned to the atmosphere at a record rate as the result of intentional burning and rampant logging, which, when opposed by environmentalists, has often resulted in murder in the Amazon. Based on an analysis of growth rings, the same trees are providing scientists with a crucial record of climate change, one bolstered by teh decline of coral reefs, the migrations of a diminutive species of butterfly, the shrinkage of glaciers, and ice cores laboriously collected at both poles.Moreover, scientists are using the most advanced computers to create models of climate change in the future, a story told in the closing stages of this work. In the chapters "Signs and Portents" and "Scenarios," we glimpse what the future may be like should global warming continue unchecked. Is the most recent incarnation of El Nino a preview of things to come - drought, fire, disease, torrential rains, mudslides, and oppressive heat? Or is global warming, as an outspoken minority of scientists steadfastly maintain, a good thing - a harbinger of more greenery, less privation, and freedom from cold? Finally, we visit Kyoto and examine the fierce debate surrounding the global warming treaty hammered out at the midnight hour, a treaty that the U.S. Senate may not ratify even though the United States leads the world in the production of greenhouse gases.

No one knows when the debate on global warming will be resolved by scientists, but it is one with which every citizen should be familiar. How we got from Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier two centuries ago to our current predicament makes for a fascinationg albeit deeply sobering tale - and, one hopes, for interesting reading as well.

 

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