ArticlesLiterary Journalism Worksheet.pdf• Literary journ.docx

Articles/Literary Journalism Worksheet.pdf
• Literary journalism “is a form of nonfiction writing that
adheres to all of the reportorial and truth-telling covenants of
conventional journalism, while employing rhetorical and
storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction.
In
short, it is journalism as literature.”1
• “Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are
immersion reporting, complicated structures, character
development, symbolism, voice, a focus on ordinary
people…and accuracy. Literary journalists recognize the need
for a
consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are
filtered.”2
i. Immersion reporting
ii. Complicated structures
iii. Symbolism

iv. Character development
v. Voice
vi. Accuracy
1 Joshua Roiland, “By Any Other Name: The Case for Literary
Journalism,” Literary Journalism Studies Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall
2015 (http://ialjs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/LJS-v7i2-60-
89-Roiland_HYPERLINKED-1.pdf?6b8609)
2 Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary
Journalism. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Articles/Kunkel, Inventing Climate-Change Literature _ The
New Yorker.pdf
11/19/2018 Inventing Climate-Change Literature | The New
Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/problem-
climate-change-novel 1/6
How to write about what we’re doing to the planet? In what
genre, what form? I grew
up outside of a small town in northwestern Colorado, and in
recent years spruce and
pine beetles have devastated forests throughout the Rockies,
turning evergreen slopes a
dead maroon. Beetles have always attacked and killed the trees
there, just as the
Atlantic Ocean has always bred hurricanes and have scoured
California. The
difference—which we give the bland name climate change—lies
in the new frequency
and intensity of these events. A 2013 study from the University
of Colorado found that
drought and warmer sea-surface temperatures best explain the
trees’ increased
Cultural Comment
Inventing Climate-Change Literature
By Benjamin Kunkel October 24, 2014
Photograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty

droughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughtsdro
ughtsdroughtsdroughtsdroughts
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susceptibility to the beetles, and warmer and drier conditions
are almost certainly what
the coming decades have in store for the American West.
Meanwhile, on a drive
through the mountains, great bristling stands of living green-
and blue-needled trees
alternate with brittle dead zones, and the mind slips among
memory, evidence, and
anticipation: landscape I saw as a kid, landscape I now see,
landscape that I foresee. The
experience itself is a bit like hesitating between literary genres.
There’s the novel of
memory (and couldn’t “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” be
translated, if you didn’t
know better, as “In Search of Lost Weather?”); there’s the satire
of contemporary life,
complete with hand-wringing ruminations on the environment
from the driver’s seat of
a non-electric car; and there’s the work of science—or climate-
science— ction, set in
the not-too-distant future, in which the coniferous forests of the
West are no more.
Climate change has occasioned a lot of good journalism, but it

poses as tremendous
problems for imaginative literature as it does for electoral
politics, and for many of the
same reasons. The worst effects aren’t yet here, and even when
global warming is the
suspected culprit behind a hurricane or a drought, its ngerprints
are never to be found
on the scene of any particular disaster. Fictional characters, like
esh-and-blood
citizens, have more urgent concerns than the state of the climate
twenty years hence.
Nor is it easy for people, real or imaginary, to feel any special
moral relationship to the
problem. Oil-company executives may be especially guilty, and
environmental activists
especially virtuous. The rest of us, in the rich countries, are
culpable to such a similar
degree that we might as well be equally innocent. So it is that a
crisis at the center of
our collective life exists for us at the margins of individual
consciousness, as a whisper
of dread or a rustle of personal implication. The main event of
contemporary
civilization is never, on any given day, the main event. It cannot
be imagined as a
punctual occurrence, like the “airborne toxic event” that hangs
over DeLillo’s “White
Noise” or the nuclear war, remembered as “a sudden shear of
light and then a series of
low concussions,” in the background to Cormac
McCarthy’s “The Road.”
Perhaps this is why climate change hasn’t yet left a literary
footprint commensurate
with its historical weight. Ecological anxiety, to be sure,
belongs to the atmosphere of

plenty of realist ction, and warmer, crazier weather darkly
adorns many futuristic
novels whose primary catastrophe has been unleashed by
genetic engineering, peak oil,
viral plague, or class warfare. Novelists not generally regarded
as sci- authors have
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even set a in the drowned world of tomorrow. But few
imaginative
writers have dealt with the present-day experience of global
warming in a direct and
concentrated way.
The strongest work of climate-change lit, to call it that, that
I’ve read is Ben Lerner’s
recent novel “10:04,” in which the signi cance of daily life—the
books people write, the
personal relationships they try to sustain—threatens to dissolve
in the face of what is,
for the narrator, “a future I increasingly imagined as
underwater.” By the end of the
novel, the underwater future has materialized, for a time
anyway, in the shape of
Hurricane Sandy, which in the fall of 2012 battered New York
City and submerged its
lower-lying districts. Even so, Lerner’s narrator, whose
neighborhood and apartment
are spared, feels that this future doesn’t quite include him.

“Another historic storm had
failed to arrive,” he says, then adds:
Except it had arrived, just not for
us. Subway and traffic tunnels in
lower Manhattan had lled with
water, drowning who knows how
many rats; I couldn’t help
imagining their screams. Power
and water were knocked out below
Thirty-Ninth Street and in Red
Hook, Coney Island, the
Rockaways, much of Staten Island.
Hospitals were being evacuated
after backup generators failed;
newborn babies and patients
recovering from heart surgery were
carried gingerly down ights of
stairs and placed in ambulances
that rushed them uptown, where

the storm had never happened.
The passage is the exception proving the rule that the
contemporary experience of
climate change has so far eluded the grasp of literature. Lerner
can write a novel, set in
the present, that deals with the subject head-on, but only by
becoming essayistic,
handful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of
workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful
of workshandful of workshandful of workshandful of works
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journalistic (the narrator is aggregating news stories in his
head; he is neither
evacuating a hospital nor being evacuated himself ), and, even
then, only amid the
heaviest weather yet visited on New York City this century. If
climate change has, to
date, proved hard to write about, that’s because it exists for
most of us, to date, as
something that afflicts different neighborhoods, distant cities,
or future times.
A number of Octobers ago, I spent a few weeks in a cabin in
Colorado that was also
hosting an abundance of black ies. (The cabin was built, it so

happens, from beetle-kill
spruce, a form of lumber that is more available these days than
before the beetles
knocked off so many trees.) The buzzing of the ies persisted
throughout my stay, in
spite of energetic y-swatting campaigns, and some time after
leaving the cabin I had
the thought that the noise of the ies, in my ears all day without
often becoming the
main thing on my mind, wasn’t altogether unlike my daily
awareness of climate change.
A sense of what we’re doing to the planet accompanies me all
the time, but mostly as a
distraction, a morbid static in the air. You try not to listen;
sometimes, you can’t help it.
Or so I found myself thinking, coming up with the idea for a
play. It may say
something about the difficulties involved in writing about
climate change that I could
gure out no way to face them other than by deploying the
disreputable technique of
allegory and the outmoded medium of the theatre.
An urban couple lives in an apartment thronging with ies. As
the play opens, they’ve
hired exterminators to rid their home of these bugs, these
irritants. That was the
explicit premise; the implicit part, gradually to become clear to
the audience, was that
ies have infested not only this particular dwelling but the world
at large, and that their
presence is a symptom of climate change. The couple’s effort at
pest control fails, and
the ies return. The couple resume their old routine, sometimes

swatting at and
sometimes trying to ignore the minor presence in their lives of
what is arguably the
world’s major problem. I liked the idea that, because this was a
play, there would be no
ies onstage. The reality that they intimated would thus be, in
another sense,_ unreal._
Because we are aware of climate change and, also, we are not.
It’s somewhat embarrassing, in the twenty- rst century, to
produce an allegory on any
subject; the technique strikes us as both antique and naïve. I
was able to keep writing
and, above all, revising, because it seemed to me that climate
change was such a vast
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development, with so many of its consequences available only
to the imagination, that I
had to deal with it allegorically or not at all. And I told myself
that it had to be a play
for the stage, instead of a novel or a screenplay, because the
theatre, being con ned to
the use of a few actors and a handful of props, is a natural
medium for allegory: the
inherent poverty of its technical means allows for symbols and
ideas to remain the
abstractions that they are, even as the theatre grants them a

certain invisible
concreteness. The lmmaker or novelist, on the other hand, will
be tempted to visually
portray or physically describe just those things whose very
nature is to exceed our
capacity to depict them.
But was my play, which I ended up calling “Buzz,” really a
climate-change allegory? In
writing it, I often forgot about my troupe of invisible ies, much
as the characters do.
At other times, I felt like they were more suggestive of
perennial human problems like
aging, disappointment, or decay. There was something
intermittent about the meaning
of my rather heavy-duty symbolism, and about whether the ies
signi ed anything at
all. But this, too, I thought, could work in the play’s favor.
Objectively, almost
everything we do is connected to climate change; subjectively,
almost nothing. Except
that from time to time the objective situation becomes a
subjective truth.
In the end, I found that what I was writing had to be a comedy
even more than an
allegory. The scale of our planetary crisis dwarfs us as
individuals and has so far
defeated us as citizens, which meant that the efforts of any
single household to confront
the problem could only be joked about. “Nothing is funnier than
unhappiness,” Nell
says to Nagg in Beckett’s “Endgame.” Helplessness is a species
of unhappiness, and my
unhappy play about our deteriorating climate has at least had
the merit of making me

laugh more than anything else I’ve written. It’s sometimes
suggested that peoples with
especially calamitous histories—the Jews, the Irish—have
especially comic sensibilities.
If so, climate change may afford writers of all nations the
chance to become comedians,
even as they do not lack for tragic material.
Benjamin Kunkel ’s play “Buzz” is being in Brooklyn until
November 22nd. It was
published in earlier this year.
performedperformedperformedperformedperformedperformedper
formedperformedperformedperformedperformed
book formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook
formbook formbook formbook formbook formbook form
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Benjamin Kunkel, a founding editor of n+1, is the author of the
novel “Indecision” and the
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Articles/Kolbert, _A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-
Rules on Climate Change_.pdf
10/14/2018 A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on
Climate Change | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/10/a-summer-of-
megafires-and-trumps-non-rules-on-climate-change 1/4
T he Ranch Fire broke out sometime on the morning of Friday,
July 27th, east ofUkiah, California, in Mendocino County.
Extreme heat and windy weather made
the blaze difficult to ght; by early Sunday, it had spread to
thirteen thousand acres, and
by the end of the following week it had burned a hundred and
fteen thousand acres.
That weekend, it jumped four streams, a major road, and a re
line that had been cut by
a bulldozer, and in the process it spread to another hundred
thousand acres. By August
12th, it had become the largest wild re in California’s history,
and by the time it was
mostly contained, last week, it had charred more than six
hundred square miles, an area

twice the size of New York City.
A blaze that consumes more than a hundred thousand acres is
known as a mega re. It
used to be rare for res to reach this threshold. Now it’s routine.
“We seem to have
multiple mega res each year,” the Web site Wild re Today noted
recently. While the
Ranch Fire raged, three other hundred-thousand-acre-plus res
were “active” in the
United States: the Carr Fire, also in Northern California; the
South Sugarloaf Fire, in
northern Nevada; and the Spring Creek Fire, in southern
Colorado. Meanwhile, in
Canada, the province of British Columbia declared a state of
emergency in response to
more than ve hundred active blazes. As smoke from these and
other con agrations
drifted across the Paci c Northwest, the air quality in Seattle
declined to a level
considered “unhealthy for all,” and the city’s mayor urged
residents to stay indoors.
It was against this infernal backdrop that the Trump
Administration recently unveiled
its plan to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions
from power plants. The
res, according to Donald Trump, had nothing to do with global
warming, and instead
were the result of “bad environmental laws,” which, he claimed,
were preventing “readily
Comment September 10, 2018 Issue
A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s

Non-Rules on Climate Change
Against an infernal backdrop of widespread wild res, the
Administration announced its plan
to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power
plants.
By Elizabeth Kolbert
available water” from being used to ght the blazes. Under the
headline “
,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board dismissed
the President’s theory as “wingnut drivel.” Somewhat less
colorfully, Newsweek observed
that it had “little basis in fact.”
The power-plant rules that Trump wants to scrap have a long
and delay- lled history.
All the way back in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
carbon dioxide quali es as
a pollutant that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
Instead of complying
with that ruling, George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection
Agency ran out the
clock. When Barack Obama took office, he, too, dawdled; it
wasn’t until his second

term that the E.P.A. nally proposed the so-called Clean Power
Plan. The plan, which
was supposed to reduce CO emissions from generating stations
by roughly a third, was
nalized in 2015, but it never went into effect. In early 2016, the
Supreme Court, in a
5–4 decision, took the extraordinary step of blocking its
implementation, pending the
outcome of a lawsuit brought by two dozen states—almost all of
them led by
Republicans—along with a host of coal and utility companies.
(The states accused the
E.P.A. of exceeding its authority.) Two and a half years later,
there is still no decision in
that suit, because, under President Trump, the E.P.A. has been
asking for, and receiving,
postponements.
Finally, in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit
indicated that it was tired of the Administration’s stalling.
Then, late last month, the
E.P.A. published what it calls the Affordable Clean Energy
rules, or . The new
rules, which would replace the Clean Power Plan, are rules in
name only. They’d allow
states to set their own standards; these, in many cases, would
amount to a carte blanche
for utility companies. Compared with the Clean Power Plan,
could, over the next
few decades, allow hundreds of millions of tons of additional
carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, by the E.P.A.’s own admission, the new “rules”
could result in as many as
fourteen hundred premature deaths annually, owing to the

increased pollution from
coal plants. The non-rule rules still have to be nalized, and then
they, too, doubtless
will be challenged in court. By the time that challenge is heard,
there may be a new
Administration in the White House—at least, so it is devoutly to
be wished.
As it happens, a few days after the E.P.A.’s announcement of
the rules a group of state
agencies in Sacramento released a report detailing how climate
change will affect
2
California. If emissions are not reined in, by the end of the
century maximum daily
temperatures could rise by a horri c 8.8 degrees. Two-thirds of
Southern California’s
beaches could be lost to sea-level rise, and the area burned by
wild res could nearly
triple.
The California report points up the essential hazard of delay.
Many pollutants dissipate
or break down over time. Carbon dioxide hangs around and
accumulates. What our
power plants put into the air today will still be contributing to

warming and melting,
res and oods, more than a hundred years from now. And what’s
added tomorrow
(and tomorrow and tomorrow) will make the situation that much
worse.
This ery summer has given us a glimpse of what climate change
will look like. In
addition to the blazes in the West, forest res raged in Sweden
above the Arctic Circle.
More than ninety people were killed by wild res that broke out
during an extreme heat
wave in Greece. In Japan, a heat wave resulted in at least eighty
deaths, and in South
Korea record-breaking temperatures were blamed for twenty-
nine deaths. (Last month,
during South Korea’s heat wave, the Prime Minister ordered all
work on public
construction sites halted during daytime hours.)
But perhaps what’s most scary about this scorching summer is
how little concerned
Americans seem to be. So far, climate change has barely
registered as an issue in the
midterm elections, and, where it has, the optics couldn’t be
worse: “Trump Digs Coal”
was a slogan that appeared on placards at a West Virginia rally
with the President,
staged on the day that the new power-plant rules were
published. As a country, we
remain committed to denial and delay, even as the world, in an
ever more literal sense,
goes up in ames. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the September 10,

2018, issue, with the headline
“Fire Alarm.”
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker
since 1999. She won the 2015
Pulitzer Prize for general non ction for “
.” Read more »
The Sixth Extinction: An UnnaturalThe Sixth Extinction: An
UnnaturalThe Sixth Extinction: An UnnaturalThe Sixth

Extinction: An UnnaturalThe Sixth Extinction: An
Extinction: An UnnaturalThe Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural
HistoryHistoryHistoryHistoryHistoryHistoryHistoryHistoryHist
oryHistoryHistory
Articles/Kolbert, _What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the
...Dire Climate Report_ .pdf
10/14/2018 What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the U.N.’s
Dire Climate Report? | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/what-is-
donald-trumps-response-to-the-uns-dire-climate-report 1/4
T hree years ago, when world leaders met in Paris to negotiate a
treaty on climatechange, one of the sticking points was where to
set what might be called the
Doomsday Thermometer. For reasons that had to do mostly with
politics, rather than
with geophysics, industrialized nations wanted to de ne
“dangerous” warming as an
average global-temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit).
But island states, such as the Maldives and Mauritius, along
with developing countries
like Ethiopia and Cambodia, were resistant. Well before the
world warmed by two
degrees, their countries would be devastated—some of them
underwater. Why should
they endorse what amounted to a death sentence?

“We will not sign off on any agreement that represents a certain
extinction of our
people,” a delegate to the talks from Barbados told Politico.
Together with a group of
nearly fty “climate vulnerable” countries, the island nations
pressed for a limit of 1.5
degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The compromise
reached—more Monty Hall
than Solomon—was to endorse both gures. The Paris agreement
calls for “holding”
warming below two degrees, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it
to 1.5 degrees.
Last week, the United Nations’ scienti c advisory board
delivered its assessment of
those numbers. The ndings of the group, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate
Change, were almost universally—and justi ably—described as
“dire.” Even 1.5 degrees’
worth of warming, the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be
disastrous, with consequences
that include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the
world’s coral reefs, the
displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a
decline in global crop yields.
Meanwhile, at the current rate of emissions, the world will have
run through the so-
called carbon budget for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or
so. “It’s like a deafening,
Comment October 22, 2018 Issue
What Is Donald Trump’s Response to
the U.N.’s Dire Climate Report?

The U.N.’s scienti c advisory board sounds a piercing alarm on
climate change, but the
President doesn’t seem to hear it.
By Elizabeth Kolbert
piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim,
the executive director of
the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington Post.
But, if a smoke alarm rings in the kitchen and everyone’s
watching “Fox & Friends” in
the den, does it make a sound? Asked about the report last
week, Donald Trump said,
“I want to look at who drew it—you know, which group drew
it.” The answer seemed
to indicate that the President had never heard of the I.P.C.C., a
level of cluelessness
that, while hardly a surprise, was nevertheless dismaying. The
next day, as a devastating
hurricane hit Florida—one made that much more destructive by
the warming that’s
already occurred—the President ew to Pennsylvania to
campaign for Lou Barletta, a
climate-change-denying Republican congressman running for
the Senate.
Though the Administration often seems incapable of systematic

action, it has spent the
past eighteen months systematically targeting rules aimed at
curbing greenhouse-gas
emissions. One of these rules, which required greater fuel
efficiency for cars and trucks,
would have reduced CO emissions by an estimated six billion
tons over the lifetime of
the affected vehicles. In a recent ling intended to justify the
rollback, the
Administration predicted that, by the end of this century, global
temperatures will have
risen by almost four degrees Celsius (nearly seven degrees
Fahrenheit). In this context,
the Administration argued, why would anyone care about a mere
six billion tons? Come
the apocalypse, it seems, we’ll all want to be driving S.U.V.s.
The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge
the Administration’s
baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a
lower-court ruling on
hydro uorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent
greenhouse gases
known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule
phasing out HFCs, which
are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court
decision was, by the
dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.
Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would
be calamitous, it also
indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has
become unavoidable.
“There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes
needed to prevent it, the

group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity
is generated and
distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be
needed in transportation,
agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would
have to be
accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To
have a reasonable chance
2
of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO
emissions, now
running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved
by 2030 and reduced
more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be
enough. All the scenarios that
the I.P.C.C. could come up with to limit warming to 1.5 degrees
rely on some kind of
“carbon-dioxide removal”: essentially, technologies to suck CO
out of the air. Such
technologies exist, but so far only in the sense that ying cars
exist—as expensive-to-
produce prototypes. A leaked draft of the report noted that there
was a “very high risk”
of exceeding 1.5 degrees; although that phrase was removed

from the nal report, the
message is clear.
Thus, it is tempting, following the Trump Administration’s lead,
to simply give up. But,
as Edgar puts it in “King Lear,” the “worst is not, so long as we
can say, ‘This is the
worst.’ ” Perhaps the most important takeaway from the report
is that every extra half a
degree is world-altering. According to the I.P.C.C., between 1.5
degrees and two
degrees of warming, the rate of crop loss doubles. So does the
decline in marine
sheries, while exposure to extreme heat waves almost triples. As
always, it’s the poor
who are apt to suffer most. Friederike Otto, the acting director
of Oxford’s
Environmental Change Institute, recently told the Web site
Carbon Brief that “half a
degree of additional warming makes a huge difference. For
people who are already
marginalised, this can be an existential difference.”
Meanwhile, two and a half degrees, three degrees, or even, per
the Trump
Administration, four degrees of warming are all realistic
possibilities. Indeed, based on
recent trends, the last gure seems the most likely. Globally,
emissions rose last year,
and they’re expected to rise still further this year. This disaster
is going to be as bad—as
very, very bad—as we make it. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the October 22, 2018,
issue, with the headline

“Global Warning.”
2
2
.” Read more »

oryHistoryHistory
Articles/Schulz, _The Really Big One (Print)_.pdf
Articles/Richardson, _Ballard of the Sad Climatologist_
(Print).pdf

Articles/Kolbert, _The Fate of Earth_.pdf
10/14/2018 The Fate of Earth | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-fate-
of-earth 1/10
W
Yesterday evening, at Manhattan’s New School, the New Yorker
staff writer Elizabeth
Kolbert delivered the second annual Jonathan Schell Memorial
Lecture on the Fate of the
Earth, an event established by the Nation Institute in honor of
the late Jonathan Schell, a
longtime New Yorker staff writer, and named for “The Fate of
the Earth,” a series of articles
that Schell wrote for the magazine in 1982 and later published
as a book. Kolbert’s remarks
have been edited for length.

hen I was asked to deliver this lecture, the prompt I was given
was to address
the fate of Earth. At rst, I thought of focussing on the threat of
nuclear
annihilation, which Jonathan Schell for The New Yorker in the
nineteen-eighties, and which now, , seems
nearer than ever before. Another possible topic was, of course,
climate change, which
my colleague Bill McKibben . Bill’s work, like Schell’s,
possesses a erce moral energy and a remarkable prescience.
Whether it is or
droughts or ooding or wild res, like the sort raging right now in
Northern California,
we’re already seeing the destabilizing effects of global warming
that he foretold in “
,” published in The New Yorker in 1989. Just this week, the
administrator
of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, signed an
order to
, which was central to the United States’ commitment to
the Paris climate accord, which the White House .
All of which is to say that October of 2017 is a scarily
opportune moment to talk about
nuclear war or to talk about climate change—or to talk about
climate change and
nuclear war. But I am going to try to do something different.
Instead of looking at the
fate of Earth from our anxious perspective, from a human
perspective, I’d like to try to
Annals of Technology

The Fate of Earth
Humanity’s survival on this planet seems more uncertain than
ever. But what happens when
we look at ourselves through other creatures’ eyes?
By Elizabeth Kolbert October 12, 2017
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of-earth 2/10
look at it from the viewpoint of the millions and millions of
non-human species with
which we share the planet. This represents a different kind of
imaginative exercise. It
requires us not to imagine events that might happen but to look
at events that have
happened through different eyes—or even without eyes, since so
many of our fellow-
creatures lack them. We will always fall short in these
exercises, but I think it’s
important to try, so I hope you will indulge me.
I want to start off with an individual animal, who went by the
name of Toughie.

Toughie, as I understand it—and I never had the pleasure of
meeting him, though I did
meet one of his siblings, or perhaps cousins—was a very
charming fellow. He was born
in the cloud forest above the town of El Valle, in central
Panama, a beautiful, rugged
area that’s unusually rich in biodiversity. Speci cally, Toughie
was born in a tree hole. It
was lled with water, the way most things in the cloud forest are
lled with water. His
mother deposited her eggs there, and then, when Toughie and
his siblings were
tadpoles, their father took over, and he cared for them. Up in
the tree hole, there wasn’t
much for the tadpoles to eat, so Toughie and his sisters and
brothers sustained
themselves by literally eating the skin off their father’s back.
Toughie was living in the
cloud forest in 2005, when he was found by a group of
herpetologists. Eventually, he
came to live in the botanical garden in Atlanta.
Toughie was, presumably, a pretty typical representative of his
species, the Rabbs’
fringe-limbed tree frog. This species was discovered only in
2005, and named only in
2008. The reason it was discovered, which is the same reason
that Toughie came to live
in the botanical garden in Atlanta, is that biologists were
desperately trying to
catalogue the amphibian life in central Panama before it
disappeared. They had
watched in horror as a plague had swept through the western
part of the country,
wiping out frogs and toads, and they could see that this wave of
death was moving east,

toward the central part of the country, which is home to some
really spectacular
amphibian species, including the Panamanian golden frog.
So these biologists—some were American, some were
Panamanian—were, as I said,
trying to catalogue what was out there before it was lost. And
they were also collecting
live animals, with the idea that, if they could save breeding
pairs, they could create a
A Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog. Photograph by Brian
Gratwicke / Flickr
of-earth 3/10
sort of ark. In the case of the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog,
only a handful of animals
were caught before the scourge hit. Researchers had managed to
collect a few females
and a few males, including Toughie, but, although they were
brought together in
various con gurations, they never produced viable offspring.
Meanwhile, efforts to
collect more members of the species were unsuccessful; the frog
has a distinctive call
that sounds like a dog’s bark, and though many man-hours were
spent listening for it, it
has not been heard in the forest since 2007. The last female
Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree
frog died in 2009, the second-to-last male in 2012. This left just

Toughie. And when he
died, in September of 2016, it is likely that the species went
extinct. A notice of
Toughie’s death ran in the Times, under the headline, “
.”
The cause of this extinction, the cause of the , was a chytrid
fungus
called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd. No one knows
exactly where the disease
originated, or how it moved around the world, but it showed up
on different continents
almost simultaneously, which means that, almost certainly, it
was transported by people.
One theory is that it was carried across the globe on African
clawed frogs, which were
exported from Africa in the nineteen-forties and fties for use as
pregnancy tests; the
frogs would be injected with a woman’s urine, and if by the
next day they’d produced
eggs, then this showed that the woman was pregnant. African
clawed frogs, it turns out,
can carry Bd but are not affected by it. They may account for
the spread, but this is still
an active subject of research.
Seen through the eyes of Toughie and his ilk—and frogs have
very interesting eyes;
they can see colors in the dark, something humans certainly
can’t do, and it’s possible
no other animals can do—Bd looks a lot like germ warfare, like
a biological weapon
designed to spread and in ict maximum damage. One of the most
disturbing sections
of Schell’s book about nuclear war, “The Fate of the Earth,” is

the chapter titled
“ .” In that chapter, Schell writes, “We have always been able to
send
people to their death, but only now has it become possible to
prevent all birth and so
doom all future human beings to uncreation.” This is what the
spread of Bd has done to
the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog: all future generations have
been doomed to
uncreation. And it’s not just this one species. Many other frogs
and toads have been
doomed by this same pathogen. Gastric brooding frogs were
remarkable animals that
gestated their young in their stomachs and gave birth through
their mouths. There were
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of-earth 4/10
T
two species that lived in Australia, until Bd swept through. Both
are now extinct. The
same goes for the sharp-snouted day frog, also native to
Australia, and the golden toad
(no relation to the golden frog), which was native to Costa Rica.
Many, many
populations of frogs in North America have crashed owing to
Bd. All in all, the fungus
has been implicated in the extinction or catastrophic decline of
at least two hundred
species.
Bd is just one of several pathogens that we can be pretty con
dent have been moved
around the world by people and that are now having
devastating, biological-weapons-
scale impacts. Another is what’s become known as . You’ve
probably heard about this disease. It was rst detected in upstate
New York in 2007,
near Albany, and it has since killed millions and millions and
millions of bats. White
nose is also a fungal infection. It comes from Europe—genetic
analysis is pretty clear
about that—and it was probably brought to New York on the
shoes or backpack of
some unsuspecting tourist. Over the past decade, it has spread

to thirty-one U.S. states
and ve Canadian provinces. And the problem with white-nose
syndrome, as with Bd,
is that, once it gets into the environment, it can spread on its
own, by putting out
spores, or it can be spread by other animals or by people.
his is a photo of me and an official of the Vermont Fish and
Wildlife
Department, Scott Darling, in a cave. Something like three
hundred thousand
bats used to spend the winter hibernating here, but because of
white-nose syndrome
that number has dropped by about ninety per cent in the past
decade. Darling and I are
standing on a carpet several inches thick, made up entirely of
dead bats.
Of course, it’s not just microorganisms that people are moving
around the globe. We
move plants; . Sometimes we do this purposefully, but much
more
often we do it by accident. It’s estimated that, on any given day,
ten thousand species
are being moved around the world just in the ballast water of
our supertankers. Mostly,
the results go unnoticed; the species that’s being moved to a
new place can’t survive
there, or doesn’t reproduce. But sometimes the results are so
world-altering that we
can’t help but attend to them. And the more species we move
around the planet,
In the southern gastric-brooding frog, now extinct, tadpoles
developed in the female’s stomach and emerged as

fully formed froglets.
Photograph by Michael J. Tyler / Science Source
white-nose syndromewhite-nose syndromewhite-nose
syndromewhite-nose syndromewhite-nose syndromewhite-nose
syndromewhite-nose syndromewhite-nose syndromewhite-nose
syndromewhite-nose syndromewhite-nose syndrome
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move animalswe move animalswe move animalswe move
animals
of-earth 5/10
through global trade and global travel, the more of these
impossible-to-overlook events
we’re going to get.
There are thousands of examples—in fact, whole databases full
of them. Hawaii used to
have about a hundred species of native tree snails, which were
found nowhere else on
Earth. Now, because of competition from non-native snails
introduced by people, there
are only about twenty- ve species left, most of them highly
endangered. The Guam
ycatcher (a bird) and the Guam ying fox (a bat) were both

driven to extinction by the
introduction of the brown tree snake, which was probably a
stowaway in military cargo
brought to the island during the Second World War. In New
Zealand, the huia and the
Stephens Island wren are two of a whole slate of bird species
that were with
the introduction of European predators such as rats and weasels.
MORE FROM
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The list could go on and on. We humans think of moving
organisms around the globe
as very ordinary; many of the plants in our back yards come
from other continents, as
do many of the crops and the domesticated animals that we
consume. But when we
look at this from the perspective of other creatures, from the
perspective of a Hawaiian
snail, say, or a Guam ycatcher, or a huia, the process looks very
different, very out of
the ordinary. Over most of evolutionary history, plants and
animals didn’t just show up
killed offkilled offkilled offkilled offkilled offkilled offkilled
offkilled offkilled offkilled offkilled off
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A pair of huias—male on the left, female on the right—from the
Canterbury Museum, in New Zealand.
Photograph by Frans Lanting Studio / Alamy
of-earth 6/10
on new continents or in new ocean basins, or, if they did, they
did so only very rarely,
perhaps as a result of a tsunami or some other violent event.
Without a lot of help, a
land animal can’t cross an ocean, and a marine creature can’t

cross a continent.
Two hundred and fty million years ago, toward the end of the
Paleozoic era, all the
world’s landmasses were squished together into one giant
supercontinent, Pangaea.
Today, biologists point out, we are, in effect, creating a new
Pangaea by bringing all the
world’s ora and fauna together. And this reshuffling of the
biosphere, this creation of a
new supercontinent, is a development that’s unprecedented in
Earth’s history. It took
many millions of years to form the original Pangaea, and here
we are putting the new
one together in a matter of centuries. We are running geologic
history backward, and at
warp speed.
This rearrangement of the biosphere is one reason that scientists
argue we no longer
live in the Holocene epoch but have , the age of man.
Whether this new nomenclature should be formally adopted is
still a matter of debate,
but the term has already been adopted informally, and it appears
all the time now in
popular and scienti c publications. And this represents a really
basic and disorienting
shift in how we think about ourselves.
Thinking scienti cally about man’s place in the world used to
mean acknowledging our
insigni cance. Charles Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell, taught
us that the time in which
we live is not in any way special. Earth has been around for
eons, and the same
processes of change—erosion, for instance, or volcanism—that

shape the planet today
were shaping it in the days of the dinosaurs. Darwin taught us
that our species was just
another species. Like every other living creature, it had evolved
slowly, from more
ancient forebears. Even the qualities that seem to set humans
apart—love, say, or a
sense of right and wrong—must have arisen just as other
adaptive traits did, through
the process of natural selection.
The Anthropocene forces us to see ourselves differently, as
remarkable, even unique. No
other creature in the history of life on Earth—and at least 3.8
billion years, maybe longer—ever dominated the planet as we
do now. No creature has
ever changed it at the rate that we are changing it right now.
This is true whatever we
do, whether we start a nuclear war or don’t start one, whether
we replace our coal plants
with wind turbines, or our gas-powered cars with electric ones.
entered the Anthropoceneentered the Anthropoceneentered the
Anthropoceneentered the Anthropoceneentered the
Anthropocene
this history goes backthis history goes backthis history goes
backthis history goes backthis history goes backthis history
goes backthis history goes backthis history goes backthis
history goes backthis history goes backthis history goes back

of-earth 7/10
T his, as I’m sure you recognize, is a coral. Speci cally, it’s a
colony of Acroporamillepora, which is a very common coral on
the Great Barrier Reef. Corals are
animals, colonial animals, that resemble humans in one respect:
they’re great engineers.
Corals construct reefs by excreting calcium carbonate. Hundreds
of billions of
individual corals working at this project, generation after
generation, create these
enormous structures. And these structures are crucial to marine
life. In the tropics, the
oceans tend to be very low in nutrients, because the water
doesn’t turn over very much.
And water that’s low in nutrients should be, and generally is,
low in life. But coral reefs
are full of life; the density and diversity of life on a healthy reef
may be greater even
than in a rain forest. And the reason for that, it seems, is that
reefs are like bazaars,
where all sorts of creatures congregate and swap with each
other what they need to
survive. Corals themselves are models of coöperation; they
house single-celled plants—
tiny algae—that use the nutrients the corals excrete. And, in
return, these algae provide
a lot of the corals’ food.
Even though corals are relatively simple creatures, or perhaps
because they are simple
creatures, they are very sensitive to changes in their
surroundings. And there are all

sorts of ways that, in the Anthropocene, they are suffering.
Corals thrive in clear water.
If the water becomes turbid or gets silted up—as a result, say,
of deforestation—they
can’t cope. Over shing is also a problem. Grazing sh eat algae
that compete with
corals for space, so if the grazers are gone the algae take over.
Agricultural runoff, too, is
a danger. It contains a lot of nutrients, and corals, as I
mentioned, thrive in nutrient-
poor waters. Runoff favors algae growth, and corals lose out.
These are some of the local threats that affect individual coral
reefs. Then there are the
global threats. One of the hallmarks of the Anthropocene is that
we are changing the
conditions of life everywhere at once, and in many different
ways. Corals like warm
water, but they don’t like very warm water. When water
temperatures rise beyond a
certain range, their plant symbionts go into a sort of frenzy and
produce dangerous
quantities of oxygen radicals. So the corals expel them and, as a
result, turn white. This
is the phenomenon that’s become known as . Without their plant
symbionts, the corals don’t get enough food and essentially start
to starve. Sometimes
they bounce back, and sometimes they don’t. Ocean
temperatures are rising very
quickly, so bleaching events are becoming more frequent and
more severe. Here is a
Photograph by Robert Pickett / Papilio / Alamy
coral bleachingcoral bleachingcoral bleachingcoral
bleachingcoral bleachingcoral bleachingcoral bleachingcoral

bleachingcoral bleachingcoral bleachingcoral bleaching
of-earth 8/10
E
video of an Australian scientist, Terry Hughes, ying over
bleached sections of the
Great Barrier Reef. It gives you a sense of how extensive the
damage can be.
When we burn coal and oil and gas, we are taking carbon that
was sequestered in the
course of hundreds of millions of years and throwing it back
into the atmosphere in a
matter of centuries, or even decades, as carbon dioxide. This is
not just warming the
planet; it’s also changing the chemistry of the oceans. A lot of
the CO gets absorbed in
seawater, where it dissolves and forms carbonic acid. Acidi ed
water makes it more
difficult for corals to complete their construction projects. At a
certain point, it makes it
impossible. If Bd looks to frogs like a kind of biological
warfare, ocean acidi cation
looks to corals like chemical warfare. Scientists who have
examined this issue very
carefully, both in lab experiments and eld experiments, predict
that the whole reef-
building project, which has been going on for millions and

millions of years, may be
coming to an end. Instead of reefs, we’re going to have what
one scienti c team
described as “rapidly eroding rubble banks.”
It’s estimated that a quarter of all marine species spend at least
part of their lives on a
reef. Something like fty thousand reef-dwelling species have
been described, but
probably there are another million—and perhaps several
million—waiting to be
catalogued. All these species are put at risk by the destruction
of the world’s reefs,
which is starting to look all but inevitable; already close to
eighty per cent of the coral
cover in the Caribbean has disappeared. The casualties will
range from very tiny
creatures, like the newly discovered Leucothoe eltoni, an
Indonesian shrimp named for
Elton John, up to larger, more charismatic species, like the
Australian butter y sh.
veryone here, I’m sure, has seen this photo before. It’s the
famous “ ”
shot, the rst complete image of Earth, taken in 1972 by the crew
of Apollo 17,
and it’s often said to have marked a turning point in our
relationship to our home
planet. As Neil de Grasse Tyson has said, “The space program’s
unprecedented images
of Earth compelled us all to think deeply about our dependence
on nature and the fate
of our civilization.” Seeing our world as small and lonely is one
of those shifts in
perspective that rattles us out of our complacency.

2
NASA
blue marbleblue marbleblue marbleblue marbleblue marbleblue
marbleblue marbleblue marbleblue marbleblue marbleblue
marble
of-earth 9/10
But the blue-marble perspective, looking down at Earth from an
altitude of more than
twenty thousand miles, is, of course, not a coral’s or a shrimp’s
or a frog’s. It seems safe
to say that, shown this image, not even our very closest
relatives, chimpanzees, would
have any idea what they were looking at. To appreciate
something so abstracted from
lived experience is a singularly human talent. So is posing a
question like “What is the
fate of Earth?” But if Toughie, say, or a huia or a Stephens
Island wren or a butter y
sh or a kiwi or an elephant or a wolf or a Leucothoe eltoni could
ask that question, I
think I know what their answer would be. It’s not nuclear war,
exactly. Nor is it climate
change, exactly. It’s us. We are the fate of Earth.
Today, the biomass of Earth’s human population is estimated to

be ten times greater
than the combined biomass of all the planet’s wild mammals. (I
use the term “wild”
here advisedly.) Meanwhile, if we look at the weight of our
domesticated animals—
cows and goats and pigs—the situation is even more extreme.
Their biomass is roughly
twenty- ve times greater than that of wild mammals. And if you
add us and our beasts
together the ratio is thirty- ve to one. In numerical terms, we are
a hugely successful
species—an astonishingly successful species—and our success
has come at the expense
of other living things.
In October of 2017, it’s easy to worry that the human project is
in danger. From the
perspective of other species, though, what’s scary is not the
fragility of human life but
its remorseless vigor. We should attend to the fate of Earth for
our own reasons. The
greatest threats that we face—nuclear war, climate change—are
almost easier to
accomplish these days than they are to envision. But as
important as we are to
ourselves, we’re not all there is on this blue marble. And if we
are just thinking about
ourselves, then we are failing as ethical agents, which is to say
as human beings.
of-earth 10/10

.” Read more »
oryHistoryHistory

Video
The Wild res Ravaging Northern California
The res have burned 191,000 acres and claimed at least thirty-
one lives, and more destruction may be yet to
come.
Articles/Davenport, _Major Climate Report Describes a
Strong... as Early as 2040_.pdf
10/11/2018 Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of
Crisis as Early as 2040 - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-
report-
2040.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fclimate&act
ion=click&contentCollection=clim… 1/7
By Coral Davenport
Oct. 7, 2018
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Fwd:, our email newsletter.
INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United
Nations’ scientific panel on climate
change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate
consequences of climate change than
previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires
transforming the world economy
at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic

precedent.”
The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, a group of
scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world
leaders, describes a world of worsening
food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs
as soon as 2040 — a period well
within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill
Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C.
reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit
organization. “We were not aware of
this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be
commissioned by world leaders under the
Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global
warming.
The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at
the current rate, the atmosphere
will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees
Celsius) above preindustrial
levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts
and poverty. Previous work had
focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were
to rise by a larger number, 3.6
degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the
threshold scientists previously
considered for the most severe effects of climate change.
The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will
come much sooner, at the 2.7-
degree mark.
Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the

world economy within just a few
years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would
come at a cost of $54 trillion. But
while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the
rapid changes required to avoid
2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically
unlikely.
[How much hotter is your hometown today than when you were
born? Find out here.]
Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk
of Crisis as Early as 2040
report-
For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on
carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps
as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But
such a move would be almost
politically impossible in the United States, the world’s largest
economy and second-largest
greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the
world, including in China, the
European Union and California, have enacted carbon pricing
programs.
People on a smog-clouded street in Hebei Province, China, in

2016. China is the largest emitter of greenhouse
gases, followed by the United States. Damir Sagolj/Reuters
President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused
climate change, has vowed to
increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw
from the Paris agreement. And on
Sunday in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of
greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track
to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also
plans to withdraw from the accord.
The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40
countries who analyzed more than
6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to prevent
warming of more than 3.6 degrees
above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the
most severe social and economic
damage from climate change. But the heads of small island
nations, fearful of rising sea levels,
had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees
of warming.
report-
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about climate change.]

Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only
several decades in the future will
arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows.
“It’s telling us we need to reverse
emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said
Myles Allen, an Oxford University
climate scientist and an author of the report.
To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse
pollution must be reduced by 45
percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It
also found that, by 2050, use of coal
as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40
percent today to between 1 and 7
percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make
up about 20 percent of the
electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67
percent.
“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate
change without getting rid of
coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke
University and an author of the report.
President Trump has vowed to increase the burning of coal and
said he intends to withdraw from the Paris
agreement. Doug Mills/The New York Times
report-

The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that
stopping global warming calls for an end
of coal use. In a statement, Katie Warrick, its interim chief
executive, noted that forecasts from
the International Energy Agency, a global analysis organization,
“continue to see a role for coal
for the foreseeable future.”
Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for
governments to invest in carbon
capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too
expensive for commercial use, could
allow coal to continue to be widely used.
Despite the controversial policy implications, the United States
delegation joined more than 180
countries on Saturday in accepting the report’s summary for
policymakers, while walking a
delicate diplomatic line. A State Department statement said that
“acceptance of this report by the
panel does not imply endorsement by the United States of the
specific findings or underlying
contents of the report.”
The State Department delegation faced a conundrum. Refusing
to approve the document would
place the United States at odds with many nations and show it
rejecting established academic
science on the world stage. However, the delegation also
represents a president who has rejected
climate science and climate policy.
“We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from
the Paris agreement at the earliest

opportunity absent the identification of terms that are better for
the American people,” the
statement said.
The report attempts to put a price tag on the effects of climate
change. The estimated $54 trillion
in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow to $69
trillion if the world continues to warm
by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does
not specify the length of time
represented by those costs.
The report concludes that the world is already more than
halfway to the 2.7-degree mark. Human
activities have caused warming of about 1.8 degrees since about
the 1850s, the beginning of large-
scale industrial coal burning, the report found.
The United States is not alone in failing to reduce emissions
enough to prevent the worst effects of
climate change. The report concluded that the greenhouse gas
reduction pledges put forth under
the Paris agreement will not be enough to avoid 3.6 degrees of
warming.
The report emphasizes the potential role of a tax on carbon
dioxide emissions. “A price on carbon
is central to prompt mitigation,” the report concludes. It
estimates that to be effective, such a
price would have to range from $135 to $5,500 per ton of
carbon dioxide pollution in 2030, and
from $690 to $27,000 per ton by 2100.
By comparison, under the Obama administration, government
economists estimated that an
appropriate price on carbon would be in the range of $50 per

ton. Under the Trump
administration, that figure was lowered to about $7 per ton.
report-
The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that
stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded
by the libertarian billionaires
Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning
against politicians who support a
carbon tax.
“Carbon taxes are political poison because they increase gas
prices and electric rates,” said
Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, an industry-
funded Washington research organization, and who led the
Trump administration’s transition at
the Environmental Protection Agency.
The report details the economic damage expected should
governments fail to enact policies to
reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly
1.2 percent of gross domestic
product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.

report-
A wildfire in Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California last
month. The new I.P.C.C. research found that
wildfires are likely to worsen if steps are not taken to tame
climate change. Noah Berger/Associated Press
In addition, it said, the United States along with Bangladesh,
China, Egypt, India, Indonesia,
Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million
people who will be exposed to the
effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of
warming occur.
At 3.6 degrees of warming, the report predicts a
“disproportionately rapid evacuation” of people
from the tropics. “In some parts of the world, national borders
will become irrelevant,” said
Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human
Settlements and an author of the report.
“You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and
one million people, but not 10
million.”
The report also finds that, in the likelihood that governments
fail to avert 2.7 degrees of warming,
another scenario is possible: The world could overshoot that

target, heat up by more than 3.6
degrees, and then through a combination of lowering emissions
and deploying carbon capture
technology, bring the temperature back down below the 2.7-
degree threshold.
In that scenario, some damage would be irreversible, the report
found. All coral reefs would die.
However, the sea ice that would disappear in the hotter scenario
would return once temperatures
had cooled off.
report-
“For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then
coming back to it is attractive
because then they don’t have to make such rapid changes,” Dr.
Shindell said. “But it has a lot of
disadvantages.”
For more news on climate and the environment, follow
@NYTClimate on Twitter.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with
a focus on climate change, from the Washington
bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at
Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National

Journal. @CoralMDavenport • Facebook
Articles/McKibben, How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the
Planet _ The New Yorker.pdf
11/19/2018 How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet | The
New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-
extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet 1/19
T hirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,”
a long article aboutwhat we then called the greenhouse effect. I
was in my twenties when I wrote it,
and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young.
But the data were
persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so
much carbon into the
atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our in
uence—and humanity,
with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to
affect every cubic metre of
the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its
water. Scientists underlined
this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era
as the Anthropocene,
the world made by man.
I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed
likely that we’d try as a
society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988,
George H. W. Bush, running for
President, promised that he would ght “the greenhouse effect

with the White House
effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in
seats of power around
the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a
theoretical threat has become a
erce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is
ablaze. A big re near Los
Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger re,
in the Sierra Nevada
foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s
history. After a summer of
unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with
less than half the usual
precipitation, the northern restorm turned a city called Paradise
into an inferno within
an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at
least sixty-three people;
more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities
brought in cadaver dogs, a
lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead,
and anthropologists from
Reflections November 26, 2018 Issue
How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the
Planet
By Bill McKibben
New Yorker

California State University at Chico to advise on how to
identify bodies from charred
bone fragments.
For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held
that conditions for human
beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer,
poverty and hunger are
less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale
literacy and education. But
there are newer signs that human progress has begun to ag. In
the face of our
environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether
the human game has
begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a
United Nations agency
announced that the number of chronically malnourished people
in the world, after a
decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight
million, to a total of eight
hundred and fteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of
violent con icts and
climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the
U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing,
“driven in part by an
increase in con icts and climate-induced disasters.”
In 2015, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, the
world’s governments,
noting that the earth has so far warmed a little more than one
degree Celsius above
pre-industrial levels, set a goal of holding the increase this

century to 1.5 degrees
Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), with a fallback target of two
degrees (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit). This past October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate
Change published a special report stating that global warming
“is likely to reach 1.5 C
between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current
rate.” We will have
drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it.
The report did not
mention that, in Paris, countries’ initial pledges would cut
emissions only enough to
limit warming to 3.5 degrees Celsius (about 6.3 degrees
Fahrenheit) by the end of the
century, a scale and pace of change so profound as to call into
question whether our
current societies could survive it.
Scientists have warned for decades that climate change would
lead to extreme weather.
Shortly before the I.P.C.C. report was published, Hurricane
Michael, the strongest
hurricane ever to hit the Florida Panhandle, in icted thirty
billion dollars’ worth of
material damage and killed forty- ve people. President Trump,
who has argued that
global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” visited
Florida to survey the
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“C
wreckage, but told reporters that the storm had not caused him
to rethink his decision
to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. He
expressed no interest in the I.P.
C.C. report beyond asking “who drew it.” (The answer is
ninety-one researchers from
forty countries.) He later claimed that his “natural instinct” for
science made him
con dent that the climate would soon “change back.” A month
later, Trump blamed the
res in California on “gross mismanagement of forests.”
Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes
and recoveries, famines
and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse
ideologies. Climate change
is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the
journal
, the physical shifts we’re in icting on the planet will “extend
longer than the
entire history of human civilization thus far.”
The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But
already, even in the
most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy
meadow because of the
proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come
with the hot weather; we
have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jelly
sh, which thrive as

warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the
water. The planet’s diameter
will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover
two hundred million
square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink,
under our feet and in our
minds.
limate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun violence,” has
become such a
familiar term that we tend to read past it. But exactly what
we’ve been up to
should ll us with awe. During the past two hundred years, we
have burned immense
quantities of coal and gas and oil—in car motors, basement
furnaces, power plants, steel
mills—and, as we have done so, carbon atoms have combined
with oxygen atoms in the
air to produce carbon dioxide. This, along with other gases like
methane, has trapped
heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space.
There are at least four other episodes in the earth’s half-billion-
year history of animal
life when CO has poured into the atmosphere in greater
volumes, but perhaps never at
greater speeds. Even at the end of the Permian Age, when huge
injections of CO from
volcanoes burning through coal deposits culminated in “The
Great Dying,” the CO
2

2
2
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content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps a tenth of the current
pace. Two centuries
ago, the concentration of CO in the atmosphere was two
hundred and seventy- ve
parts per million; it has now topped four hundred parts per
million and is rising more
than two parts per million each year. The extra heat that we trap
near the planet every
day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs
the size of the one
that was dropped on Hiroshima.
As a result, in the past thirty years we’ve seen all twenty of the
hottest years ever
recorded. The melting of ice caps and glaciers and the rising
levels of our oceans and
seas, initially predicted for the end of the century, have
occurred decades early. “I’ve
never been at . . . a climate conference where people say ‘that
happened slower than I
thought it would,’ ” Christina Hulbe, a New Zealand
climatologist, told a reporter for

last year. This past May, a team of scientists from the
University of Illinois
reported that there was a thirty- ve-per-cent chance that,
because of unexpectedly high
economic growth rates, the U.N.’s “worst-case scenario” for
global warming was too
optimistic. “We are now truly in uncharted territory,” David
Carlson, the former
director of the World Meteorological Organization’s climate-
research division, said in
the spring of 2017, after data showed that the previous year had
broken global heat
records.
We are off the literal charts as well. In August, I visited
Greenland, where, one day, with
a small group of scientists and activists, I took a boat from the
village of Narsaq to a
glacier on a nearby ord. As we made our way across a broad
bay, I glanced up at the
electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking
icon showed that we were a
mile inland. The captain explained that the chart was from ve
years ago, when the
water around us was still ice. The American glaciologist Jason
Box, who organized the
trip, chose our landing site. “We called this place the Eagle
Glacier because of its
shape,” he said. The name, too, was ve years old. “The head and
the wings of the bird
have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but
the eagle is dead.”
There were two poets among the crew, Aka Niviana, who is
Greenlandic, and Kathy
Jetnil-Kijiner, from the low-lying Marshall Islands, in the Paci

c, where “king tides”
recently washed through living rooms and unearthed graveyards.
A small lens of fresh
water has supported life on the Marshall Islands’ atolls for
millennia, but, as salt water
2
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W
intrudes, breadfruit trees and banana palms wilt and die. As the
Greenlandic ice we
were gazing at continues to melt, the water will drown Jetnil-
Kijiner’s homeland. About
a third of the carbon responsible for these changes has come
from the United States.
A few days after the boat trip, the two poets and I accompanied
the scientists to
another ord, where they needed to change the memory card on a
camera that tracks
the retreat of the ice sheet. As we took off for the ight home
over the snout of a giant
glacier, an eight-story chunk calved off the face and crashed
into the ocean. I’d never
seen anything quite like it for sheer power—the waves rose
twenty feet as it plunged
into the dark water. You could imagine the same waves washing

through the Marshalls.
You could almost sense the ice elevating the ocean by a sliver—
along the seafront in
Mumbai, which already oods on a stormy day, and at the Battery
in Manhattan, where
the seawall rises just a few feet above the water.
hen I say the world has begun to shrink, this is what I mean.
Until now, human
beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out
across the globe
—slowly at rst, and then much faster. But a period of
contraction is setting in as we
lose parts of the habitable earth. Sometimes our retreat will be
hasty and violent; the
effort to evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow
roads was so chaotic that
many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be
slower, starting along
the world’s coastlines. Each year, another twenty-four thousand
people abandon
Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop elds are
polluted with salt. As sea
ice melts along the Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect
towns, cities, and native
villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was
all but eradicated by
Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Washington , “The older
people can’t
rebuild; it’s too late in their lives. Who is going to be left? Who
is going to care?”
In one week at the end of last year, I read accounts from
Louisiana, where government
officials were nalizing a plan to relocate thousands of people

threatened by the rising
Gulf (“Not everybody is going to live where they are now and
continue their way of life,
and that is a terrible, and emotional, reality to face,” one state
official said); from
Hawaii, where, according to a new study, thirty-eight miles of
coastal roads will become
impassable in the next few decades; and from Jakarta, a city
with a population of ten
million, where a rising Java Sea had ooded the streets. In the rst
days of 2018, a
New Yorker
nor’easter ooded downtown Boston; dumpsters and cars oated
through the nancial
district. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see
where the ood zones
are,” Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, told reporters. “Some
of those zones did not
ood thirty years ago.”
According to a study from the United Kingdom’s National
Oceanography Centre last
summer, the damage caused by rising sea levels will cost the
world as much as fourteen
trillion dollars a year by 2100, if the U.N. targets aren’t met.
“Like it or not, we will
retreat from most of the world’s non-urban shorelines in the not

very distant future,”
Orrin Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote
in his book “Retreat
from a Rising Sea.” “We can plan now and retreat in a strategic
and calculated fashion,
or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in
response to devastating
storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we
can ee in panic.”
But it’s not clear where to go. As with the rising seas, rising
temperatures have begun to
narrow the margins of our inhabitation, this time in the hot
continental interiors. Nine
of the ten deadliest heat waves in human history have occurred
since 2000. In India, the
rise in temperature since 1960 (about one degree Fahrenheit)
has increased the chance
of mass heat-related deaths by a hundred and fty per cent. The
summer of 2018 was
the hottest ever measured in certain areas. For a couple of days
in June, temperatures in
cities in Pakistan and Iran peaked at slightly above a hundred
and twenty-nine degrees
Fahrenheit, the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever
measured. The same heat
wave, nearer the shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of
Oman, combined triple-
digit temperatures with soaring humidity levels to produce a
heat index of more than a
hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. June 26th was the
warmest night in history, with
the mercury in one Omani city remaining above a hundred and
nine degrees
Fahrenheit until morning. In July, a heat wave in Montreal
killed more than seventy

people, and Death Valley, which often sets American records,
registered the hottest
month ever seen on our planet. Africa recorded its highest
temperature in June, the
Korean Peninsula in July, and Europe in August. The reported
that, in Algeria,
employees at a petroleum plant walked off the job as the
temperature neared a hundred
and twenty-four degrees. “We couldn’t keep up,” one worker
told the reporter. “It was
impossible to do the work.”
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A
This was no illusion; some of the world is becoming too hot for
humans. According to
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
increased heat and humidity
have reduced the amount of work people can do outdoors by ten
per cent, a gure that
is predicted to double by 2050. About a decade ago, Australian
and American
researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-
called “wet-bulb”
temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed thirty- ve
degrees Celsius
(ninety- ve degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was higher
than ninety per cent,

even in “well-ventilated shaded conditions,” sweating slows
down, and humans can
survive only “for a few hours, the exact length of time being
determined by individual
physiology.”
As the planet warms, a crescent-shaped area encompassing parts
of India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and the North China Plain, where about 1.5 billion
people (a fth of
humanity) live, is at high risk of such temperatures in the next
half century. Across this
belt, extreme heat waves that currently happen once every
generation could, by the end
of the century, become “annual events with temperatures close
to the threshold for
several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass
migration.” By 2070,
tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive humid
heat a year can expect
between a hundred and two hundred and fty days, if the current
levels of greenhouse-
gas emissions continue. According to Radley Horton, a climate
scientist at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, most people would “run
into terrible problems”
before then. The effects, he added, will be “transformative for
all areas of human
endeavor—economy, agriculture, military, recreation.”
Humans share the planet with many other creatures, of course.
We have already
managed to kill off sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife since
1970 by destroying their
habitats, and now higher temperatures are starting to take their
toll. A new study found

that peak-dwelling birds were going extinct; as temperatures
climb, the birds can no
longer nd relief on higher terrain. Coral reefs, rich in
biodiversity, may soon be a tenth
of their current size.
s some people ee humidity and rising sea levels, others will be
forced to relocate
in order to nd enough water to survive. In late 2017, a study led
by Manoj Joshi,
of the University of East Anglia, found that, by 2050, if
temperatures rise by two
New Yorker
degrees a quarter of the earth will experience serious drought
and deserti cation. The
early signs are clear: São Paulo came within days of running out
of water last year, as
did Cape Town this spring. In the fall, a record drought in
Germany lowered the level
of the Elbe to below twenty inches and reduced the corn harvest
by forty per cent. The
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded in a
recent study that, as the
number of days that reach eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit or
higher increases, corn and
soybean yields across the U.S. grain belt could fall by between
twenty-two and forty-

nine per cent. We’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie
beneath most of the
world’s breadbaskets; without the means to irrigate, we may
encounter a repeat of the
nineteen-thirties, when droughts and deep plowing led to the
Dust Bowl—this time
with no way of xing the problem. Back then, the Okies ed to
California, but
California is no longer a green oasis. A hundred million trees
died in the record
drought that gripped the Golden State for much of this decade.
The dead limbs helped
spread the waves of re, as scientists earlier this year warned that
they could.
Thirty years ago, some believed that warmer temperatures
would expand the eld of
play, turning the Arctic into the new Midwest. As Rex
Tillerson, then the C.E.O. of
Exxon, cheerfully put it in 2012, “Changes to weather patterns
that move crop
production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.” But there is no
rich topsoil in the far
North; instead, the ground is underlaid with permafrost, which
can be found beneath a
fth of the Northern Hemisphere. As the permafrost melts, it
releases more carbon into
the atmosphere. The thawing layer cracks roads, tilts houses,
and uproots trees to create
what scientists call “drunken forests.” Ninety scientists who
released a joint report in
2017 concluded that economic losses from a warming Arctic
could approach ninety
trillion dollars in the course of the century, considerably
outweighing whatever savings

may have resulted from shorter shipping routes as the Northwest
Passage unfreezes.
Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of the Hudson Bay, in Canada,
is connected to the
rest of the country by a single rail line. In the spring of 2017,
record oods washed away
much of the track. OmniTrax, which owns the line, tried to
cancel its contract with the
government, declaring what lawyers call a “force majeure,” an
unforeseen event beyond
its responsibility. “To x things in this era of climate change—
well, it’s xed, but you
don’t count on it being the x forever,” an engineer for the
company explained at a
media brie ng in July. This summer, the Canadian government
reopened the rail at a
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A
cost of a hundred and seventeen million dollars—about a
hundred and ninety thousand
dollars per Churchill resident. There is no reason to think the x
will last, and every
reason to believe that our world will keep contracting.
ll this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit
faster. What has

de ed expectations is the slowness of the response. The
climatologist James
Hansen testi ed before Congress about the dangers of human-
caused climate change
thirty years ago. Since then, carbon emissions have increased
with each year except
2009 (the height of the global recession) and the newest data
show that 2018 will set
another record. Simple inertia and the human tendency to
prioritize short-term gains
have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s contribution
has been by far the most
damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the
term “predatory delay” to
describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to
make money off
unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of
the oil companies,
which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception
in mankind’s history, is
a prime example.
As journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles have
revealed since
2015, Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, understood that
its product was
contributing to climate change a decade before Hansen testi ed.
In July, 1977, James F.
Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the
company’s top leaders in
New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse
effect. “There is general
scienti c agreement that the most likely manner in which
mankind is in uencing the
global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the

burning of fossil fuels,” he
said, according to a written version of the speech which was
later recorded, and which
was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the
company’s executives,
Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide
concentration in the atmosphere
would increase average global temperatures by between two and
three degrees Celsius
(5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius
(eighteen degrees
Fahrenheit) at the poles.
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
November 26, 2018
New Yorker
Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It out
tted an oil tanker, the
Esso Atlantic, with CO detectors to measure how fast the
oceans could absorb excess
carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate
models. By 1982, they
had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were
probably too low. In a
private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global
warming and “potentially

catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil
fuel combustion.”
An investigation by the L.A. revealed that Exxon executives
took these
warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the
company’s Canadian
subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and
negative effects of warming on
Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse
gases were rising due to
the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said.
The following year, he
wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and
development costs” in
the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly
predicted, would increase
from two months to as many as ve months. At the same time, he
said, the rise in the
sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger
waves that would
damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could
make the earth buckle
and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these
ndings, Exxon and other
major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic,
and started to build
their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate
for the anticipated rises
in sea level.
The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did
Exxon and other
companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they
used his climate
models to gure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic

would eventually fall.
Had Exxon and its peers passed on what they knew to the
public, geological history
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would look very different today. The problem of climate change
would not be solved,
but the crisis would, most likely, now be receding. In 1989, an
international ban on
chlorine-containing man-made chemicals that had been eroding
the earth’s ozone layer
went into effect. Last month, researchers reported that the ozone
layer was on track to
fully heal by 2060. But that was a relatively easy ght, because
the chemicals in
question were not central to the world’s economy, and the
manufacturers had readily
available substitutes to sell. In the case of global warming, the
culprit is fossil fuel, the
most lucrative commodity on earth, and so the companies
responsible took a different
tack.
A document uncovered by the L.A. showed that, a month after
Hansen’s
testimony, in 1988, an unnamed Exxon “public affairs manager”
issued an internal
memo recommending that the company “emphasize the
uncertainty” in the scienti c
data about climate change. Within a few years, Exxon, Chevron,
Shell, Amoco, and
others had joined the Global Climate Coalition, “to coordinate

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