The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.

Almost nothing stood in our way - nothing except ourselves. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions - far closer than we’ve come since. Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?īecause in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert Polynesia swallowed by the sea the Colorado River thinned to a trickle the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. The Paris climate agreement - the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 - hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution.

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