1. The Coming of the Penumbral Age
2. Ronald Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,”
Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 535–666; Naomi Oreskes,
Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
3. Paul Ehrlich
The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). See also “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be Avoided?,” Paul R. Ehrich and Anne H. Ehrlich,
Proc. Royal Society B, 2013.
4. On the various forms of Chinese population control, see Susan Greenhalgh,
Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
2. The Frenzy of Fossil Fuels
1. Michael Mann,
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
3. Seth Cline, “Sea Level Bill Would Allow North Carolina to Stick Its Head in the Sand,”
U.S. News & World Report, June 1, 2012,
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/01/sea-level-bill-would-allow-north-carolina-to-stick-its-head-in-the-sand. Stephen Colbert made a satire of the law (see Stephen Colbert, “The Word—Sink or Swim,”
The Colbert Report, June 4, 2012,
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/414796/june-04-2012/the-word-sink-or-swim).
5. Kim Stanley Robinson,
Forty Signs of Rain,
Fifty Degrees Below,
and Sixty Days and Counting (New York: Spectra Publishers, 2005–2007).
6. Naomi Oreskes, “Seeing Climate Change,” in
Dario Robleto: Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens, ed. Gilbert Vicario (Des Moines, Iowa: Des Moines Art Center, 2011).
7. See Clive Hamilton,
Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010),
http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/; and Paul Gilding,
The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
8. For an electronic archive of predictions and data as of 2012, see
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/. An interesting paper from the University of California, San Diego, addresses the issue of under-prediction; see Keynyn Brysse et al., “Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?”
Global Environmental Change 23 (2013): 327–337.
9. David F. Noble,
A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992); and Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison,
Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2007).
10. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), chap. 5, esp. 157 n. 91–92. See also Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement’s Counter-claims,”
Social Problems 47 (2000): 499–522; Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change among Conservative White Males in the United States,”
Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 1163–1172.
13. Sarah Collins and Tom Kenworthy, “Energy Industry Fights Chemical Disclosure,” Center for American Progress, April 6, 2010,
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/fracking.html; Jad Mouawad, “Estimate Places Natural Gas Reserves 35% Higher,”
The New York Times, June 17, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/business/energy-environment/18gas.html?_r=1.
15. Emil D. Attanasi and Richard F. Meyer, “Natural Bitumen and Extra-Heavy Oil,” in
Survey of Energy Resources, 22nd ed. (London: World Energy Council, 2010), 123–140.
19. Arctic Sea Ice Extent, IARC-JAXA Information System (IJIS), accessed October 10, 2013:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm; Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis, National Snow & Ice Data Center, accessed October 10, 2013:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/; Christine Dell’Amore, “Ten Thousand Walruses Gather on Island As Sea Ice Shrinks,”
National Geographic, October 2, 2013; William M. Connolley, “Sea ice extent in million square kilometers,” accessed October 10, 2013:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seaice-1870-part-2009.png.
20. Gerald A. Meehl and Thomas F. Stocker, “Global Climate Projections,” in
Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2007—The Physical Science Basis.” February 2, 2007.
21. Clifford Krauss, “Exxon and Russia’s Oil Company in Deal for Joint Projects,”
The New York Times, April 16, 2012.
22. For statistics on continued coal and oil use in the mid-twentieth century, see U.S. Energy Information Administration,
International Energy Outlook 2011 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy, 2011), 139, Figures 110–111,
http://205.254.135.7/forecasts/ieo/.
24. “Canada, Out of Kyoto, Must Still Cut Emissions: U.N.,” Reuters, December 13, 2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/13/us-climate-canada-idUSTRE7BC2BW20111213; Adam Vaughan, “What Does Canada’s Withdrawal from Kyoto Protocol Mean?”
The Guardian, December 13, 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/13/canada-withdrawal-kyoto-protocol; James Astill and Paul Brown, “Carbon Dioxide Levels Will Double by 2050, Experts Forecast,”
The Guardian, April 5, 2001,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2001/apr/06/usnews.globalwarming.
28. Ian Allison, et al.,
The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science (Sydney: University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, 2009), esp. 21; Jonathan Adams, “Estimates of Total Carbon Storage in Various Important Reservoirs,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon2.html.
30. Philip Ziegler,
The Black Death (London: The Folio Society, 1997).
31. A. Hallam and P. B. Wignall,
Mass Extinctions and their Aftermath (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), gives the Big 5 as occurring at the end of the Devonian, Ordovician, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods, on the classical Western geological timescale.
3. Market Failure
1. Amory Lovins,
Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2011).
2. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).
3. For an example of this characteristic, see Justin Gillis, “Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.,”
The New York Times, March 13, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/science/earth/study-rising-sea-levels-a-risk-to-coastal-states.html. Note how Gillis frames the evidence, first stating that “the handful of climate researchers who question the scientific consensus about global warming do not deny that the ocean is rising. But they often assert that the rise is a result of natural climate variability.” He then quotes Myron Ebell, who was not a climate researcher, but an
economist and paid employee of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was heavily funded by the carbon-combustion complex and committed to market fundamentalism. See
http://cei.org/.
4. Richard Somerville,
The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change (Washington, DC: American Meteorological Society, 2008); Stephen H. Schneider,
Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth’
s Climate (Washington DC: National Geographic Press, 2009); Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe,
Climate Change: Picturing the Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); James Hansen,
Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); Burton Richter,
Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Michael Mann,
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). For an analysis of scientists’ difficulties in dealing efficaciously with public communication media, see Maxwell T. Boykoff,
Who Speaks for the Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5. Richard White,
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
6. Scholars note that even nineteenth-century markets were not free. See Ha-Joon Chang,
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); and Ha-Joon Chang,
23 Things They Don’
t Tell You about Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).
7. Dennis Tao Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961: A Survey and Comparison to Soviet Famines,”
Comparative Economic Studies 50 (2008): 1–29.
8. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards,” November 18, 1991.
9. Naomi Oreskes, “Science, Technology, and Free Enterprise,”
Centaurus 52 (2011): 297–310; and John Krige,
American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
10. See, for example, David Joravsky,
The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Nils Roll-Hansen,
The Lysenko Effect (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004).
12. Friedrich August von Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom, Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87.
Epilogue
Interview with the Authors
About the Maps Inspiration for the 20-meter sea level rise in our scenario came from the Ohio State glaciologist John H. Mercer, who perceived the possibility of a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in 1968 and published a detailed examination in 1978.
* Recent satellite observations suggest Mercer was more right than he knew, and rapid ice loss is occurring in both West Antarctica and Greenland.
† The maps drew on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
‡
