• 63

chapter two

Climate and Biological Diversity

The Earth’s climate is enormously complex, involving subtle and im-

All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

perfectly understood relationships between the Sun, atmosphere,

oceans, lithosphere (Earth’s crust), pedosphere (soils), and terrestrial
biosphere (forests, mostly). But over the course of the twentieth century,
in particular from the late 1950s onward, knowledge of the Earth’s cli-
mate advanced very quickly. By the late twentieth century, scientific
research had reached near-consensus on the accuracy of a long-advanced
and troubling forecast for the Earth’s climate. This, of course, was the
idea that human activities since the beginning of the Industrial Revo-
lution had altered climate and begun heating the Earth. Variously
labeled the “enhanced greenhouse effect,” “global warming,” or “an-
thropogenic climate change,” the problem centered mostly on human
interference in the planet’s carbon cycle. By burning fossil fuels and
emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases, humans were in-
creasing the concentrations of powerful heat-trapping gases in the at-
mosphere. Scientists feared potentially catastrophic consequences for
the world’s climate if these trends were left unchecked. Spurred by the
increasing volume and quality of research on the subject, as well as by
new technologies that enabled improved monitoring of the Earth’s cli-
mate, these predictions became increasingly dire. Yet there was an
enormous gap between what scientists thought needed to happen to
avoid catastrophe and the reality of global climate-change politics. By
2015 there was increasingly strong evidence that the Earth’s climate
and the operation of its many ecosystems had already begun to change
in response to higher CO2 levels.
Copyright 2014. Belknap Press.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES
AN: 1199725 ; J. R. McNeill, Peter Engelke.; The Great Acceleration : An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945
Account: [Link]
 64 • The Great Acceleration

Climate and the Industrial Revolution

The Earth’s atmosphere is the reason the planet is neither freezing cold
nor burning hot. In highly simplified terms, almost one-third of solar
radiation is instantly reflected back into space. A bit more than two-
thirds of the incoming solar radiation that strikes the Earth is absorbed
and converted into infrared energy (heat) by the Earth’s surface, oceans,
or atmosphere, and re-radiated in all directions. Greenhouse gases
(GHGs), of which there are several types, absorb most of this infrared
(or long-wave) energy. Naturally occurring greenhouse gases include
water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. There are
also several that do not occur in nature but that have been created by
humans. The most important of these are CFCs, first invented in
the laboratory in the 1920s. Each gas captures energy at different wave-
lengths, and each has different characteristics, such as absorptive power
and duration in the atmosphere. Each, moreover, exists in the atmo-
sphere at different concentrations, and the concentration of each gas
has varied substantially over geological time. Very recently, at the onset
of the Industrial Revolution, the naturally occurring concentrations
were about 0.7 parts per million (ppm) for methane, 280 ppm for CO2,
and 288 parts per billion (ppb) for nitrous oxide. The concentration of
every one of these has risen since.1
Atmospheric gas concentrations are not the only determinants of
climate. Other factors influence the amount of solar radiation that
reaches the Earth’s surface and the amount absorbed or reflected. De-
velopments that occur in and on the Earth itself also have an influence
on climate. These, in turn, can interact in complicated fashion with
GHG concentrations. The output of the Sun itself can vary, which in-
fluences the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth. Slight oscil-
lations of the Earth’s axial rotation and orbit about the Sun are other
factors affecting climate. These oscillations, known as Milanković cy-
cles, occur over many thousands of years and help shape the timing of

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 65

the Earth’s ice ages. The amount of solar radiation that reaches the
Earth’s surface is also influenced by aerosols, which are airborne par-
ticles that block incoming radiation. Volcanic eruptions can influence
global temperatures. The ash and soot emitted by volcanoes can reach
the stratosphere and encircle the globe, increasing the amount of aero-
sols. If large enough, a single volcano’s eruption can be sufficient to re-
duce global temperatures, albeit temporarily (a few years), until rain
washes the particles out of the atmosphere. The largest recorded erup-
tions in world history have had significant short-term temperature ef-
fects in just this manner, as occurred after the Laki eruption of 1783
(in Iceland) and the Tambora eruption of 1815 and the Krakatau erup-
tion of 1883 (both in Indonesia).
Although more stable than what occurred before, the Holocene cli-
mate (which began roughly twelve thousand years ago) has had marked
fluctuations. Temperatures in the early Holocene were as much as 5
degrees Celsius warmer than during the trough of the previous ice age.
During the Holocene, the peak occurred between eight thousand and
five thousand years ago, when temperatures ranged up to 3 degrees
Celsius warmer at the highest (most northerly) latitudes than the av-
erage for the Holocene. Natural temperature variation has occurred in
more recent history as well. Between 1100 and 1300 CE, Europe expe-
rienced a warm spell called the medieval climate anomaly, followed by
the Little Ice Age, which lasted from roughly 1350 to 1850 and had tem-
peratures almost a degree Celsius colder on average than currently.
The concern about anthropogenic climate change centers primarily
on human interference in the natural cycling of carbon during the
industrial era. The world’s store of carbon is cycled between the lith-
osphere, pedosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans. However,
human activities since the Industrial Revolution have altered the
distribution of carbon across these spheres. In essence, the climate
change problem arises from the fact that humans have removed carbon
from the Earth and placed it in the atmosphere at rates much faster

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 66 • The Great Acceleration

than occurs naturally. Humans have also increased the concentration of

other carbon-containing greenhouse gases. Methane (CH4), also known
as natural gas, when burned is transformed into CO2 and water. The
main problem with methane, however, stems from direct release into
the atmosphere. On a per-molecule basis, methane is far more powerful
than carbon dioxide at trapping heat.2
There are two basic ways humans have added carbon to the atmo-
sphere. First, carbon is released through deforestation, via burnt or de-
caying wood and from newly exposed, carbon-rich soils. Deforestation
is an ancient phenomenon, but the greatest acceleration of deforesta-
tion on a global level has occurred since 1945. Conversely, growing for-
ests absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Hence, the amount of carbon
added to the atmosphere through deforestation is always a net figure,
in effect deforestation minus afforestation. Net deforestation and
other land-use changes currently add about 15 percent of total anthro-
pogenic carbon into the atmosphere (as of 2015).3
Second, and more importantly, carbon is released through the
burning of fossil fuels. Humans have shifted carbon stored in the lith-
osphere (in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas) to the atmosphere and
thereby to the oceans. Consider the amount of carbon released into the
atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. In 1750, before the Industrial
Revolution began, humankind released perhaps 3 million metric tons of
carbon into the atmosphere in this manner annually. A century later,
in 1850, the figure was around 50 million tons. Another century later,
at the end of World War II, it had increased more than twenty-fold, to
about 1,200 million tons. Then after 1945 humankind embarked upon
a fiesta of fossil fuel combustion. Within fifteen years after the war
ended, humans were putting around 2,500 million tons of carbon into
the atmosphere each year. In 1970 this figure increased to over 4,000
million tons, in 1990 to over 6,000, and in 2015 to some 9,500 million
tons—about 3,200 times more than in the year 1750 and eight times
the total in 1945. By the turn of the twenty-first century, fossil fuels

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 67

had become responsible for around 85 percent of anthropogenic carbon

added to the atmosphere.4
Increased anthropogenic carbon emissions translated into increased
atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Carbon dioxide concentrations are
now around 400 ppm, compared with the 280 ppm preindustrial base-
line. This concentration is the highest CO2 level reached in the last
several hundred thousand years and possibly the last twenty million
years. In 1958, when the first reliable, direct, and continuous measure-
ment of atmospheric CO2 began, concentration levels stood at 315 ppm.
Since then the measured concentration has increased every year. It is
unlikely that at any other time in the long history of the atmosphere
CO2 concentrations have jumped by one-fourth within fi ft y years.
Recent emission trends have been especially noteworthy. The rate
of increase in carbon dioxide emissions during the 2000s was more
than twice that of the 1990s (3.3 percent versus 1.3 percent global an-
nual growth). The continuing if uneven growth of the global economy
provided only part of the explanation. More troublesome was the
carbon intensity of the global economy (CO2 emissions per unit of
economic activity). The global economy had been decarbonizing since
about 1970, yet after 2000 the process went into reverse. Economic
growth became more, rather than less, dependent on carbon-heavy
fuels, in particular coal burned in China.5
By the last decades of the twentieth century, it appeared as if the
world’s climate was indeed shifting as a result of increased atmospheric
carbon dioxide, methane, and other GHGs. Temperature data showed
a mean surface atmospheric warming of about 0.8 degrees Celsius over
the average of the twentieth century. The rate of change was greatest at
the end of the century. Roughly three-quarters of the increase oc-
curred after the mid-1970s, the remainder before 1940. Since the 1970s,
each successive decade has been warmer than all previous recorded
ones; in 2010 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) in the United States announced that the decade of the 2000s

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 68 • The Great Acceleration

was the warmest on record. Temperature increases were greatest at the

highest latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, consistent with climate
models that forecast the greatest warming at the poles and the least in
the tropics.6
Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also had important
consequences for the world’s oceans. As with the atmosphere, mea-
surements showed that the oceans had warmed during the second half
of the twentieth century. The upper 300 meters of the oceans warmed
a bit less than 0.2 degrees Celsius after 1950, while the upper 3,000
meters warmed just shy of 0.04 degrees. This may not sound like much,
but given the density of water and the immense volume of the oceans,
these small increases represented an enormous amount of thermal
energy. Since 1950 the upper 3,000 meters of ocean had absorbed more
than fourteen times the amount of energy absorbed by the continents.
Increasing oceanic temperatures began to have real effects, espe-
cially on sea levels and sea ice. Sea levels rose slightly over the twentieth
century—about 15 centimeters, roughly half of which was from the
thermal expansion of water and the other half from melting ice sheets
in places such as Greenland. Arctic sea ice also began melting. Spring
and summer sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean retreated perhaps 10 to
15 percent over the second half of the twentieth century. As with at-
mospheric temperatures, the rate of change was greatest toward the
end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.
Trends for the sea ice surrounding the Antarctic were less clear. A dis-
concerting event occurred in 2009, when a part of the enormous Wilkins
Ice Shelf collapsed; but while some areas around the continent were
losing ice, others appeared to be gaining. The total amount of Antarctic
sea ice may even have increased since 1970.7
Increasing temperature was not the only consequence for the
world’s oceans. Part of the atmosphere’s CO2 is absorbed by the world’s
“sinks,” meaning soils, forests, oceans, and rocks. The precise func-
tioning of sinks is still debated, but roughly half the CO2 emitted

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 69

through burning fossil fuels winds up in various sinks. Oceans are re-
sponsible for about half of this figure. Without this ser vice provided
by the oceans, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would be far higher.
Unfortunately, this ser vice is not without consequences. By the turn
of the twenty-first century, there was good evidence that the cumula-
tive, additional CO2 taken up by the oceans had begun to alter their
chemistry. Increasing carbon dioxide levels acidify the oceans, which
makes it more difficult for some organisms to manufacture their skel-
etons and shells. A few of these imperiled creatures are critical food for
whales and fish. Even more ominously, there is some evidence that
oceans and other sinks such as forests may be having an increasingly
difficult time absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. It is possible that
some sinks could switch to net producers rather than absorbers of CO2,
as might occur if tropical forests dry out due to higher temperatures.8
The potential risks of climate change are numerous, few more
threatening than the alteration to the world’s water supply. Increased
atmospheric temperatures likely will alter a great many of the world’s
ecosystems, change regional precipitation patterns, cause more fre-
quent and extreme weather events, raise sea levels and erode coastlines,
harm the world’s biological diversity, enhance the spread of infectious
diseases, and cause more heat-related human fatalities, among many
other effects. By the onset of the twenty-first century, most scientists
believed that increasing atmospheric temperatures had already begun
to have such impacts. Glacial melt was one example. During the twen-
tieth century there was increasing evidence that the world’s glaciers
were retreating, with the rate of decline much quicker at the end of the
century than at the beginning. Glaciers in the European Alps, for
instance, melted at the rate of 1 percent per year between 1975 and 2000,
and at a rate of 2 to 3 percent after 2000. This was a global trend. Scien-
tific tracking of thirty “reference” glaciers scattered around the globe
revealed that melting after 1996 was four times as great as between
1976 and 1985.9

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 70 • The Great Acceleration

Concerns about glacial retreat might seem esoteric. Glaciers are far
away in both mind and geography. The great majority of the world’s ice
is locked up at the poles, within the glaciers covering Greenland and
Antarctica. Nearly everyone has heard of the risks of sea-level rise from
the melting of these polar glaciers, but this particular problem seems
to be a concern for the distant future. As for the world’s glaciers that
are not at the poles, what does it matter if they melt? How important
is it to most Americans, for instance, that the glaciers in their soon-to-
be-inaccurately-named Glacier National Park (in Montana) are almost
gone? Not much, perhaps, outside of some aesthetic lament. Yet in
many parts of the world, the spring and summer melt from glaciers is a
matter of life and death. A critical illustration of this is provided by
the Himalayas and nearby Central Asian mountain ranges, which
hold the largest amount of ice outside the polar regions. These ranges
are the source of Asia’s most important rivers, including the Indus,
Yangzi, Mekong, Ganges, Yellow, Brahmaputra, and Irrawaddy, which
collectively sustain more than two billion people. Higher tempera-
tures in the Himalayas, in particu lar at high elevations, has meant
increased glacial melt over the past several decades. The fear is that
decreased glacier sizes and snowpack will alter both the amount and
the seasonal timing of river water, with dramatic and negative effects
for downstream communities that depend on these rivers for irriga-
tion agriculture, for drinking water, and for much else. Indeed, the
ecosystems that support these two billion people are likely to undergo
major changes.10
While the melting of glaciers that people have come to depend on
has fi lled some observers with foreboding for the future, millions of
people unconcerned with climate change likely have felt its indirect ef-
fects. One indirect effect of a warmer atmosphere is the increased ca-
pacity of air to hold water vapor. This, paradoxically, has improved the
odds of both droughts and downpours. In dry parts of the world, warmer
air can hold more moisture and so less falls as rain. In places already

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 71

An empty chasm left behind by the retreat of the South Annapurna glacier in the
Nepalese Himalayas, 2012. Since the end of the nineteenth century, many glaciers
around the world have retreated due to rising average temperatures. Rapid glacier re-
treat in the Himalayas since 1980 threatens to create water shortages in South,
Southeast, and East Asia. (© Ashley Cooper/Corbis)

given to heavy rain, warmer air allows still greater rainfalls, because
there is more moisture to be squeezed out of the clouds. Thus, areas
such as the American Southwest have become more subject to drought,
while drenching monsoon rains have brought more drastic floods to
the Himalayan foothills.11 Meanwhile, warmer sea surface tempera-
tures have probably spawned more tropical cyclones. Even though one
cannot attribute any specific weather event, whether Hurricane
Katrina in 2005 or the Pakistan megaflood of 2010, to climate change,
over time such events became more likely as a result of warmer tempera-
tures. Trotsky is credited (probably wrongly) with saying, “You may
not be interested in war, but war will be interested in you.” So it has
been with climate change and the world’s vulnerable populations,

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 72 • The Great Acceleration

whether in the low-lying wards of New Orleans or along the Indus

River: they may not be interested in climate change, but climate change
will be interested in them.

History of Climate Science

Given the complexity of the Earth’s climate, it should come as no sur-
prise that advanced scientific understanding of climate is very recent.
Scientific understanding has required a high degree of interdisciplinary
cooperation involving geophysicists, oceanographers, meteorologists,
biologists, physicists, geologists, mathematicians, and specialists from
a host of other disciplines. As a global phenomenon, climate change
has provoked scientific collaboration across international boundaries.
The history of climate science thus has been marked by both of these
forms of cooperation. Although there is much yet to learn about how
the climate changes, the past half century has seen enormous scientific
progress. Concern about rising CO2 levels has motivated a good part
of the increased scientific attention to the problem. Technological in-
struments, such as satellites that became available only after the onset
of the Cold War, helped translate that attention into information and
understanding. These instruments have been fundamental to gath-
ering and assessing the data needed to map the history of the Earth’s
climate, to model its workings, and—within sharp limits—to predict
its future.
The first attempts to explain why the Earth has a habitable atmo-
sphere occurred during the nineteenth century. The French natural
philosopher Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, writing in the 1820s, argued
that the atmosphere traps a portion of incoming solar radiation, thereby
raising its temperature far above what would other wise be the case. He
likened the atmosphere’s influence on temperature to the glass cov-
ering a greenhouse, an imperfect analogy that nonetheless stuck. Over
the course of the nineteenth century, scientists in other parts of

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 73

Eu rope wrestled with basic questions about how the Earth’s climate
functioned. They were provoked in large part by the Swiss polymath
Louis Agassiz, who wrote in 1840 that the Earth had experienced past
ice ages. Hence, much of the subsequent scientific work centered on
understanding how the climate could change so dramatically over time.
Among these curious scientists was John Tyndall, a British physicist
who in the 1850s discovered the infrared absorptive capacity of CO2.
Even more important was the work of the Swedish scientist Svante
Arrhenius, who published a groundbreaking paper in 1896 that out-
lined the basic relationship between CO2 and climate. Arrhenius
calculated the global temperature changes that might result if levels
of the gas were to increase or decrease. He estimated a temperature
increase of 5.7 degrees Celsius if CO2 levels were to double, but dis-
missed the possibility that humans could emit so much carbon into the
atmosphere.12
Arrhenius’s paper sparked considerable debate, but its impact was
limited by a lack of basic scientific understanding of various Earth
systems, poor data, and a conceptual lens that refused to consider that
humans had the power to alter the Earth’s climate. For instance, Ar-
rhenius could only estimate the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as
no one had yet been able to measure it reliably. But the early decades of
the twentieth century nonetheless were marked by scientific progress
in other areas relevant to the study of climate. In interwar Europe, the
Serbian mathematician Milutin Milanković refined the theory that
the Earth’s oscillations and solar orbit were responsible for the ice
ages. His painstaking calculations resulted in an understanding of the
cycles that bear his name. At about the same time in the Soviet Union,
the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky was working on the natural carbon
cycle. He argued that living organisms in the biosphere were respon-
sible for the chemical content of the atmosphere, adding much of its
nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2. Hence, plants and other living organisms
were foundational to the Earth’s climatic history.13

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 74 • The Great Acceleration

The basic understanding of Earth systems developed in the nine-

teenth and early twentieth centuries, but one big breakthrough in cli-
mate science occurred after 1945. As the Cold War spurred increases in
public funding of the hard sciences, it was not surprising that Amer-
ican scientists became important figures. In the 1950s a group of scien-
tists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, near San Diego, funneled
small amounts of defense-related funding toward their studies of CO2
in the atmosphere and oceans. Two of them, Charles Keeling and
Roger Revelle, created the first reliable atmospheric carbon dioxide
monitoring station. They placed newly developed, sophisticated equip-
ment atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, chosen because the air circu-
lating about the remote location was not contaminated by emissions
from local power plants or factories. The Mauna Loa station gave sci-
entists their first true and reliable measurements of atmospheric CO2
concentrations. Within a couple of years, the station established that
concentrations were indeed rising. The Mauna Loa time series has pro-
duced data continuously since 1958; in the process, its sawtooth up-
ward curve has become one of the most widely known visuals of
anthropogenic climate change.14 The sawtooth pattern represents the
seasonal changes in CO2 in the Northern Hemisphere: in the summer
months when the leaves are out, more carbon is in trees and bushes
and less in the atmosphere. In the winter the atmosphere has a little
more CO2.
The Mauna Loa initiative occurred within the context of the Inter-
national Geophysical Year (IGY), a collaborative global research effort
that highlighted both US and Soviet technical and scientific capabili-
ties. But the IGY also spoke to scientists’ desire to develop geophysical
monitoring and assessment systems using the powerful new tools that
had recently become available to them. Between the 1950s and 1970s,
scientists could take advantage of the first satellites to study the Earth
and the first mainframe computers to develop and run crude models
of the Earth’s climate. Cold War–driven exploration of the polar regions

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 75
400

380
Parts per million

360

340

320

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Year
Atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.

generated the first ice core drilling programs. These enabled scientists
to analyze air bubbles buried in the polar ice caps that were hundreds
of thousands of years old, thereby discovering information about past
climates. The Americans drilled the first ice core in the late 1950s, for
purely military reasons, at Camp Century in Greenland; it gave scien-
tists useful data anyway. The Soviets had their own program at Vostok
Station in the Antarctic. Starting in the 1970s, their drilling eventu-
ally produced cores extending back more than four hundred thou-
sand years, giving scientists access to air pockets over several glacial
periods.15
Cold War–related research overlapped with increasing scientific ef-
fort in other international contexts. The scale of the research problem,
the resources needed to tackle it, and a desire to share expertise meant

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 76 • The Great Acceleration

not only increasing scientific cooperation but also greater support from
international institutions such as the World Meteorological Organ-
ization (WMO) and, later, the United Nations Environment Pro-
gramme (UNEP). By the 1960s a number of prominent scientists had
begun to address the possibility that anthropogenic climate change
was possible. Research was sufficiently advanced to place the issue on
the agenda of the UN-sponsored 1972 Stockholm environmental con-
ference. Scientific advances continued through the 1970s, prodded by
continuing technical and methodological improvements, better data,
and more sophisticated research networks. American scientists con-
tinued to be leaders in the field, owing in part to support provided by
organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences. The 1970s
closed with the first international conference dedicated exclusively to
climate change, held in Geneva in 1979 and organized by the WMO
and UNEP.16 Climatology, hitherto a domain of specialists trained in
the precise sciences, would soon enter the messy arena of politics.

Climate Science Meets Climate Politics

Until the 1980s, discussion of anthropogenic climate change had been
confined largely to the scientific community. There had been some po-
litical awareness and media coverage during the 1970s, but the issue
was too new and abstract to receive much of a hearing. Moreover, the
scientific consensus about warming was relatively weak. But the 1980s
were a watershed decade, as scientific agreement about anthropogenic
warming strengthened and the issue became political for the first time.
Partly this change stemmed from heightened awareness of atmo-
spheric environmental problems. Acid rain became an important po-
litical issue regionally, in Europe and eastern North America, from the
late 1970s. Political concern about the thinning of the ozone layer sud-
denly emerged during the 1980s, but, in contrast to acid rain, on a
global level. The 1986 discovery of an ozone “hole” over the Antarctic

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 77

stimulated public interest and gave a major boost to negotiation of the

Montreal Protocol in 1987. This agreement, which committed signato-
ries to reduce their emissions of CFCs, brought scientists into global
atmospheric politics. Public awareness of the ozone hole was still fresh
in 1988, when record-breaking heat and drought in North America
helped stimulate public and governmental interest in institutional-
izing climate change politics at the global level. That year the WMO
and UNEP helped to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), a scientific body charged with arriving at a consensus
position on anthropogenic warming. Since then the IPCC has produced
four large assessment reports, in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and most re-
cently in 2014. All were based on comprehensive reviews of the scien-
tific evidence surrounding climate change. These became increasingly
assertive in linking climate change to human activities and in warning
of the urgent need for a global political response. The 2014 report was
blunt: “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent an-
thropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.
Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human
and natural systems.” The IPCC leadership had to defend each report,
in particular from a small but vocal and well-placed group of climate
skeptics who attacked the IPCC’s approach, evidence, motives, or
legitimacy.17
The IPCC’s work occurred in parallel to global political negotia-
tions aimed at lowering anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The process
began in earnest in 1988, when the UN General Assembly labeled cli-
mate change a “common concern of mankind.” In a startlingly short pe-
riod, diplomats hammered out a Framework Convention on Climate
Change, signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Although its provi-
sions were nonbinding, the treaty put into motion regular diplomatic
negotiations aimed at creating a more substantive agreement. Follow-
up meetings over the next few years set the stage for negotiation of the
Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a binding agreement that mandated small

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 78 • The Great Acceleration

emissions cuts (compared with the baseline year established in the

Protocol, 1990) by the world’s rich countries.
But trouble appeared immediately as rifts among the world’s big-
gest greenhouse gas emitters threatened to undermine the Kyoto agree-
ment. These divisions cast a pall over subsequent diplomacy, which for
twenty years achieved nothing of substance. (In those twenty years,
1995–2015, the total tonnage of global carbon emissions from the energy
sector nearly equaled that of all human history prior to 1995.)18 The two
largest polluters, the United States and China, resisted binding agree-
ments on emissions. In general, both China and the United States took
self-serving positions in climate diplomacy, content to let the perfect
become the enemy of the good.
In the American case, domestic political resistance made it excep-
tionally difficult for even the most willing presidential administration
to commit the United States to deep emissions cuts. A sizable chunk
of the American public did not accept the consensus of climate change
science, and interested industries both encouraged that skepticism and
lobbied Congress to prevent emissions agreements. US per capita
emissions remained among the highest in the world even after the US
total was eclipsed by China’s in 2006. Nonetheless, the US diplomatic
position emphasized the need for the largest developing countries, in
particular China, India, and Brazil—all of which had much lower per
capita emissions—to be party to any mandatory greenhouse gas emis-
sion cuts framework.
China, on the other hand, argued that the industrialized countries
should make commitments first, on the grounds that their cumulative
emissions over the centuries were highest and that they had already ben-
efited economically from heavy use of fossil fuels in ways that China
had not. China also pointed to the per capita emissions rates as a key
measure of responsibility and a reason the United States should move
first to restrain its emissions. Chinese diplomats championed the Kyoto

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 79

Protocol, which exempted China from any constraints on its carbon

emissions.
Other large developing countries took positions similar to China’s.
India, for instance, which in 2009 overtook Russia to become the
third-largest CO2 emitter, argued that the world’s richest countries
had a moral duty to make emissions cuts. New Delhi’s diplomats, like
Beijing’s, maintained that poorer countries had the right to continued
high emissions in the interest of their own economic development. To-
gether with several other developing countries, India lobbied hard for
the transfer of mitigation technologies and expertise from the rich to
the poor world, and for a sliver (0.7 percent) of rich-world GDP to help
poorer countries limit their emissions.
Domestic pressures, unsurprisingly, shaped diplomatic positions on
climate politics in Russia as well. In 2004 the Russian parliament
cheerfully ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Russia’s economic collapse of
the 1990s had resulted in emissions levels well beneath those required
by Kyoto, and Russia stood to benefit from any emissions trading
scheme. Subsequently, however, as Russia’s economy recovered and as
its oil and gas industry boomed, Russia’s leaders lost their enthusiasm
for international climate agreements. Many Russians, most notably
Vladimir Putin, maintained that a warmer future would bring them
more benefit than harm, a record heat wave in 2010 notwithstanding.
In any case, few Russian politicians saw merit in policies that might
restrict their oil and gas revenues.
Other countries also altered their positions as domestic political
and economic conditions shifted. A 2007 election in Australia, for in-
stance, brought to power a government eager to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. The new prime minister often named climate change the
great moral challenge of his generation, and for several years climate
policy was an urgent political issue in Australia. Subsequent prime
ministers, however, did not share the same ardor. Australia enacted a

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 80 • The Great Acceleration

carbon tax on some emitters in 2012 but scrapped it in 2014. Canada,

on the other hand, ratified Kyoto in 2002 but failed to meet its targets.
In 2006 Canadians elected a prime minister hostile to restriction on
emissions, and withdrew from the Protocol in 2012. Most Candians felt
uneasy about that stance, and in 2015 another election brought a new
climate policy, one committed to carbon pricing and emissions targets.
The countries keenest on Kyoto and subsequent proposals to limit
emissions were those of the European Union together with some small
island nations. Kiribati, the Maldives, and several other countries that are
low-lying atolls expected to be swamped by rising sea levels, giving them
an urgent stake in emissions reductions. Most EU countries favored
emissions agreements too. Their per capita emissions stood well below
those of the United States, Canada, or Australia, and fuel shifts late in
the twentieth century, toward nuclear power (1960s–1986) and toward
Russian natural gas (post-1970s), put them in a favorable position with
respect to most proposed emissions reduction schemes. But their flexi-
bility could not overcome the reluctance of the United States, China,
India, and others to embrace meaningful control of greenhouse gases.
The prospects for diplomatic breakthroughs on a scale corresponding
to the urgency of the issue seemed very remote through 2013. Climate
politics kept running into the same roadblocks. First, for politicians
focused on staying in office, addressing climate change seriously held
little charm: the costs of inaction would be felt only after they had re-
tired from the political stage, whereas any emissions reductions that en-
tailed economic sacrifice would cost them popular support instantly—
as Australian politicians discovered. Thus climate change was one of
those political problems that seemed to elected officials to reward pro-
crastination. Second, climate stabilization was (and is) a public good,
meaning that all parties can benefit from it regardless of who sacrifices
to achieve it—so negotiators were tempted to “ free ride,” hoping to
induce others to make sacrifices from which all would benefit.

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 81

Then in 2014 the United States and China surprised the world with
a joint promise to reduce carbon emissions, or in China’s case to cap
their growth, over the next ten to fi fteen years. The following year,
prodded by German chancellor Angela Merkel, the G-7 countries
vowed to phase out fossil fuels altogether by the end of the century.
Whether the promises can be kept and whether they will inspire imi-
tation from other countries around the world is unclear. These hopeful
outcomes would require an end to the twenty-year-old pattern in which
expedience in domestic politics trumps other considerations in cli-
mate politics. Pope Francis sought to raise the odds of political break-
through in an encyclical in 2015 framing climate change as a great and
urgent moral challenge, putting the moral weight of the Vatican firmly
on the side of climate stabilization.
Optimists found reason to hope that renewable energy would make
emissions targets attainable. By 2015 solar power had become competi-
tive in price with fossil fuels as a way to generate electricity. Other
renewables, as noted in Chapter 1, showed promise as well. The Inter-
national Monetary Fund estimated that government subsidies to fossil
fuels around the world amounted to $5.3 trillion annually, between 6
and 7 percent of the size of the world economy, and had accounted for
more than a third of all global carbon emissions since 1980. Phasing
out these subsidies, optimists believed, would go a long way toward
reducing reliance on fossil fuels and therefore toward carbon emis-
sions reductions.19 Even if politics might not permit slashing subsidies
for fossil fuels, the long-term trend of falling prices for kilowatts pro-
duced via solar power augured poorly for the future of fossil fuels, at
least coal and oil if not natural gas, in electricity generation. In that
sector, at least, a large part of the future appeared (in 2015) to belong to
renewable energy.
Others, less optimistic about emissions reductions, figured that the
best hope for avoiding unwelcome climate change lay in geo-engineering

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 82 • The Great Acceleration

schemes. These ranged from the prosaic, such as sequestering carbon

underground in abandoned salt mines, to the heroic, such as installing
arrays of mirrors in space to reflect incoming sunshine away from
Earth. The most popular suggestions, among scientists and engineers,
were seeding the oceans with iron fi lings to stimulate the growth of
carbon-absorbing plankton and spattering the stratosphere with sul-
fate aerosols to reflect sunlight into space. Whether or not interna-
tional climate politics, new energy technologies, or geo-engineering
will offer a way out of the climate quandary is perhaps the greatest ques-
tion of the twenty-first century.
The environmental history and politics of the recent past will exert
influence over the distant future. Carbon emissions of the industrial
era will affect climate long after no one can remember Kyoto, Chan-
cellor Merkel, or for that matter China and the United States. Some
proportion, perhaps as much as a quarter, of the roughly 300 billion
tons of carbon released to the atmosphere between 1945 and 2015 will
remain aloft for a few hundred thousand years.

Biological Diversity
Scientific, philosophical, and occasional public concern about certain
vanishing species can be traced back centuries, but until recently few
people worried that humankind was capable of systematically de-
creasing the Earth’s living heritage. This began to change only in the
postwar era, when a small number of scientists started to ponder cu-
mulative human impacts on the world’s biomes. These concerns, first
articulated sporadically by a few in the 1950s and 1960s, took roughly
two additional decades of observation and argumentation to ripen into
a critical mass. The terms biological diversity and the shorthand biodiver-
sity were largely unknown within the scientific community until the
1970s and 1980s. But the scientific and popular use of both exploded
during the 1980s, especially after a 1986 conference on the topic orga-

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 P A C I F I C O C E A N
Median minimum extent of sea-ice,
1979–2000
B e r i n g
Sea-ice extent, September 2012 S e a

Sea of

G u l f o f Okhotsk

A l a s k a

it
Stra
Bering
Chukchi
Sea East
Siberian
Sea

Beaufort
Sea

Laptev
ai t

r
St Sea
re A R C T I C
Clu
Mc

O C E A N

Hudson
Bay

Lincoln Sea
Foxe Basin

Baffin
Kara
Bay
Sea

it
ra
St
is
Dav Greenland Barents
Sea
Sea

Denmark Strait

Norwegian Sea

A T L A N T I C O C E A N

0 1000 miles

0 1000 km

Sea-ice cover at the Arctic Circle, 1979–2012.

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 84 • The Great Acceleration

nized in Washington, DC, by the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson. The

conference proceedings, published as a book under the apt title Biodi-
versity, sounded an alarm. The volume, Wilson wrote, “carries the
urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the envi-
ronments that have fostered the diversity of life forms for more than a
billion years.” This message, picked up and broadcast by the world’s
press, fed on increasing popular and scientific fears about global envi-
ronmental conditions, from tropical deforestation to ozone depletion.
Within a remarkably short time, concern about global extinctions had
become a key feature of environmental politics and the word biodiver-
sity had become a part of the world’s popular lexicon.20
Biodiversity had great appeal, but in scientific practice it proved a
difficult and blunt instrument. What, exactly, did it mean? What would
be measured and how? Did biodiversity mean, for instance, genetic di-
versity, species diversity, or “population” diversity (meaning geograph-
ically distinct populations of animals or plants within a species)? Even
if a measure was agreed upon, how did it matter? It would be far better,
many scientists claimed, to focus on measuring and maintaining eco-
system functioning and healthy biotic landscapes rather than to obsess
over the number of species or quantity of genetic matter. These issues
are still hotly debated, but scientists acknowledge that species diversity
is a simple, readily understandable measure that has powerful popular
resonance. Even if flawed, so the argument goes, species extinction is
still the most tangible way to measure global biotic decline.21
Attempts to identify and catalog the world’s species go back several
decades, but despite intense and sustained attempts to do so, biologists
can only guess at the total number of extant species. Estimates vary
widely, ranging from a few million to one hundred million species or
more. Biologists have tended to settle toward the lower end of this
spectrum, but they freely admit that their figures are rough estimates.
Part of the variation is due to what is included in the count—for in-
stance, whether to include microorganisms such as bacteria—but the

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 85

problem arises from the simple fact that most species remain unknown
to science. Fewer than two million species have been identified and “de-
scribed” by scientists, and only a small percentage of these have been
thoroughly assessed. Of the described species, invertebrates dominate
(about 75 percent of all species), followed by plants (18 percent) and
vertebrates (less than 4 percent).22
There is more agreement about where most life forms are located.
Tropical forests in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia con-
tain the bulk of the world’s species. Just 10 percent of the Earth’s terres-
trial surface is thought to hold between one-half and two-thirds of its
species. The broadleaf rainforests have the most. By far the greatest
number of described species of mammals, birds, and amphibians are
found there. Rainforests are also richest in plant species, although there
is wide plant biodiversity in other regions and biomes, such as the Medi-
terranean basin and South Africa’s Cape Province. Stadium-size plots
of Ecuador’s lowland rainforest, for example, contain more than one
thousand species of plants, shrubs, and trees. Ecuador alone (a small
country roughly the size of Great Britain) is thought to have 40 percent
more plant species than all of Europe. At the low end of the plant bio-
diversity scale are the world’s deserts (although, counterintuitively, a
very few deserts are relatively rich in plant biodiversity) and landscapes
at very high (northern) latitudes.23
Terrestrial species form only a portion of the world’s biodiversity.
The rest exists in the world’s oceans and seas and, to a lesser extent, in
its freshwater. Some scientists have estimated that perhaps 15 percent
of the world’s species live in the oceans, but this is admittedly guess-
work. Although freshwater systems represent only a fraction of the
world’s total surface area and water, they too contain a relatively high
number of species, by some estimates as much as 7 percent of all de-
scribed species. The problems with estimating species numbers and
abundance are compounded by the nature of underwater environ-
ments: the oceans and seas are vast, and marine environments can be

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 86 • The Great Acceleration

exceptionally difficult to reach and study. As a result, knowledge of

marine species diversity and abundance lagged far behind that of ter-
restrial species through the twentieth century. Only recently has this
begun to change.24
Oceans and lakes seem to show some similarities with terrestrial
ecosystems. For instance, aquatic life is not uniformly distributed
across the globe’s waters. As with tropical rainforests, some aquatic
ecosystems are incredibly rich in species. The continental shelves, coral
reef systems, and those parts of the oceans exposed to nutrient-rich
currents (such as Newfoundland’s Grand Banks) possess enormous
species abundance and/or diversity. (One attempt to count all the
mollusk species at a single site in tropical waters off New Caledonia,
for instance, uncovered 2,738 different species.) Other wise, much of
the ocean is relatively barren, akin to the world’s land deserts. Further,
as is the case with terrestrial species, a great many aquatic species are
not highly mobile. Certain species, in particular the largest pelagics
(some species of whales, dolphins, sharks, and fish that are found in
deep water), do migrate over very long distances. This is not the case,
however, for a great number of others. Many species can exist only in
specific habitats and are therefore found in only a few places. Thus, as
in terrestrial systems, endemism is an important feature of both fresh-
water and saltwater ecosystems. Grouper, for example, is a fish that
survives in tropical and subtropical waters, with individual species of
grouper found only in certain locations.25
Concern about species decline has been the primary motive behind
attempts to estimate the number of species globally. Over the last
three decades in particular, scientific concern increasingly has focused
on whether humankind has begun the “sixth extinction,” meaning a
mass extinction of species that would rival in scale the five known such
events in planetary history, the last of which occurred sixty-five mil-
lion years ago. Scientific worry about mass extinctions emerged coinci-
dentally with heightened concern about tropical deforestation and its

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 87

effects during the 1970s and 1980s. Biologists began to speculate that
human activities were forcing large numbers of species into extinction,
far faster than the normal or “background” rate. Again E. O. Wilson
was one biologist at the forefront in mainstreaming the idea, calculating
in 1986 that extinctions in the world’s rainforests were one thousand
to ten thousand times greater than normal due to human activities. Many
other biologists since have arrived at different estimates of the true ex-
tinction rate, with discrepancies once more explained by a combina-
tion of unknown species numbers and inexact assessments of human
impact. All, however, concede that current rates are many times higher
than background. Moreover, they generally agree that increased human
interference in the planet’s ecosystems was the reason for rapidly in-
creasing extinction rates during the last half of the twentieth century.
By 2000, some scientists estimated that perhaps as many as a quarter
of a million species had gone extinct during the twentieth century, and
feared that ten to twenty times as many might vanish in the twenty-
first. Because most species disappeared before they could be described
by scientists, the great majority of extinctions in the twentieth century
were of creatures unknown to biology.26
Though the idea of listing the world’s threatened species had been
floated as early as the 1920s, it was not until 1949 that European
conservationists produced the first tentative list, which contained
fourteen mammals and thirteen birds. That same year these conserva-
tionists, including the first UNESCO director, Julian Huxley (brother
of the writer Aldous Huxley), created the International Union for the
Protection of Nature (IUPN). Headquartered in Switzerland, the
organization charged itself with preserving “the entire world biotic
community.” During the 1950s the IUCN (in 1956 “Conservation” re-
placed “Protection” in the organization’s title) began producing lists of
threatened species, and in the 1960s it began publishing them. Now
known as the Red List of Threatened Species, these are the most highly
respected global assessments, compiled by thousands of scientists.

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 88 • The Great Acceleration

Nonetheless even the prodigious efforts made to produce the Red List
could yield insights into the status of only a small fraction of all spe-
cies. The list issued in 2012 contained nearly sixty-four thousand
species, of which about twenty thousand (32 percent) were categorized
as threatened. The list contained a heavy bias toward terrestrial species,
with much more known about birds, mammals, amphibians, and some
categories of plants than about aquatic species.27

Changes in Terrestrial Biodiversity

As with so many areas of environmental change during the last de-
cades of the twentieth century, population growth, economic develop-
ment, and technological capabilities combined to drive the decline of
biodiversity. On land, the leading cause was habitat destruction. During
the twentieth century the area devoted to cropland and pastures on
Earth more than doubled, with roughly half of that occurring after
1950. This increase occurred at the direct expense of the world’s forests
and grasslands. This was the greatest threat to terrestrial species, because
heterogeneous landscapes containing great plant and animal diversity
were replaced by highly simplified ones managed by human beings for
their own purposes. Such landscapes could and did continue to sup-
port some indigenous species, but a great many other species could not
prosper in these modified landscapes. Replacing native habitat with
other land uses systematically reduced the spaces for wildlife. Cropland
and pastures, for instance, host only a fraction of the birds counted in
the world’s remaining intact grasslands and forests. Landscapes already
long ago biologically simplified by conversion to farm or pasture grew
still more simplified after 1945. Farmland almost everywhere was in-
creasingly subjected to mechanization, intensive monocropping, and
chemical pest control. After land-use changes, the next biggest threat
to biodiversity came from exploitation due to hunting, harvesting, and
poaching for subsistence or trade. In addition, invasive species were a

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 89

major problem for biodiversity. Invasives preyed upon or crowded out

indigenous species, created “novel” niche habitats for themselves and
other exotic intruders, and altered or disrupted ecosystem dynamics in
general. Finally, by the end of the century some scientists reported in-
stances of species beginning to suffer from the adverse consequences of
climate change.28
Global deforestation was the most important type of land-use change
after 1945, especially in the tropics where the bulk of the world’s species
lived. The clearing of tropical rainforests spurred scientists to put bio-
diversity on the international agenda during the 1980s. Yet the exact
amount of tropical forest lost in the postwar decades remained un-
known. Analysts arrived at different figures for tropical deforesta-
tion, as they did with species estimates, because they used diverse
methodologies and data sets. While deforestation remains a subject of
intense debate and disagreement, the consensus is that it has pro-
ceeded rapidly. One estimate, for instance, put the total loss of tropical
forest at 555 million hectares, an area a bit more than half the size of
China, in the half century after 1950.
In contrast, over the same period temperate forests (largely in the
Northern Hemisphere) were roughly in balance, losing only a bit more
from clearing than they gained in regrowth. This difference repre-
sented an abrupt shift in relative fortune. In the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, deforestation had been much faster in the Northern
Hemisphere than in the tropics. This imbalance remained even into
the early twentieth century, as North American forests became the
world’s largest suppliers of wood and forest products. By then, however,
a shift from temperate to tropical forests was under way. The specter of
wood shortages had induced reforms in the United States and elsewhere,
which meant that large tracts of forest acquired protected status and ag-
gressive afforestation measures began. The European empires also had
taken advantage of rapidly decreasing transportation costs to increase
logging for export in their colonial possessions in tropical Africa

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 90 • The Great Acceleration

and Southeast Asia, for example, and to relieve pressure on their own
forests.29
By World War II the global deforestation shift from temperate to
tropical forests was largely complete. After the war, economic expan-
sion further increased pressure on forests, especially those in tropical
regions. Newly independent governments in equatorial regions were
happy to supply timber to North America, Europe, and Japan; con-
verting forests into lumber for export was a quick and simple means of
gaining much-needed foreign currency. Rapidly growing human pop-
ulation in the tropics was also an important driver of deforestation,
leading to greater migration into tropical forests. Governments often
encouraged such migration, preferring that landless workers claim
new cropland and pastures rather than enacting politically conten-
tious land reforms. Finally, technological changes after the war made
it much easier to deforest the tropics. The spread of trucks, roads, and
chain saws allowed even the smallest operators to work with greater
efficiency. All of these factors worked in combination. By the late 1970s
and early 1980s, much scientific concern about the tropics centered on
the clearing of the Amazon rainforest. Although Southeast Asian for-
ests also had been cleared at a prodigious rate, the deforestation of
the Amazon became the focus of global attention, due to its enormous
size, perceived pristine state, and symbolic importance.30
Island ecosystems were as severely affected as tropical forests, if in dif-
ferent ways. Islands are home to isolated ecosystems containing many
endemic species of plants, mammals, birds, and amphibians. Island spe-
cies have no place to escape to when humans hunt them, alter their hab-
itat, or introduce invasive species. Island nations therefore routinely
appear at the top of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species for
having the highest percentage (but not the highest absolute numbers)
of threatened species. Madagascar, for instance, contains thousands of
endemic species of plants and animals. After 1896, when the French
annexed the island, its forests were systematically logged. Deforestation

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 91

and habitat alteration continued through independence in 1960, much

of which owed to the country’s high rate of population growth and
consequent pressure to clear more land for farming. The result was
that by century’s end, more than 80 percent of the island’s native veg-
etation had been removed, placing its endemic species under relentless
pressure. Isolation also makes islands highly susceptible to invasive
species. Islands have been home to the majority of the world’s
known bird extinctions, from the great auk to the dodo. On Guam,
the brown tree snake, introduced by accident around 1950, found the
Micronesian island to its liking and reproduced prolifically. In the fol-
lowing decades, snakes consumed a good portion of the island’s en-
demic bird species and a few of its mammal species to boot. Efforts to
eradicate the snake on Guam have failed, and biologists remain con-
cerned that it will be inadvertently exported to other vulnerable Pacific
islands. Small and remote islands, of which the Pacific has its full share,
were the most vulnerable to biodiversity loss in general and through
invasive species in particular.31

Changes in Aquatic Biodiversity

The decades after 1945 witnessed dramatic alterations to freshwater and
marine ecosystems. After World War II humans accelerated their cam-
paign of taming the world’s rivers, to the point where few big ones any-
where were left in their original states. Engineers built tens of thousands
of dams, reservoirs, levees, and dikes. The Nile’s Aswan High Dam,
installed during the 1960s, symbolized the world’s infatuation with
colossal dams. Engineers dredged streambeds and river bottoms and
rerouted entire rivers, changing water flow patterns and temperature
levels. Pollutants from cities and industry added chemicals of many
different types and toxicities. Agricultural runoff increased the load of
organic nutrients in streams and rivers. This led to the eutrophication
of downstream water bodies and the creation of oxygen-deprived “dead

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 92 • The Great Acceleration

zones,” as in parts of the Gulf of Mexico, the Baltic, and the Yellow
Sea. Increased siltation from mining, agriculture, and deforestation
also reshaped stream, river, bay, and estuarine habitats. Finally, the
world’s marshes and wetlands, home to rich collections of unique
fish, birds, amphibians, mammals, plants, and insects, shrank dramati-
cally. This occurred nearly everywhere, although rates varied substan-
tially. Marshes and wetlands were converted into other types of uses,
filled in to make land for agriculture or cities. River diversions, especially
in arid regions where freshwater for irrigation was precious, starved
marshes and wetlands of water. Water diversions in some rivers, like
South Africa’s Orange or America’s Colorado, reduced flow to the point
of seasonal dryness, endangering species-rich wetlands at the river
mouths.32
As on islands, invasive species in freshwater ecosystems proved in-
creasingly disruptive after 1945. While invasives were nothing new, the
accidental or deliberate introduction of such species became a com-
monplace thereafter. The Nile Perch, introduced from other parts of
Africa into Lake Victoria sometime during the 1950s, was a dramatic
example of what could occur when exotics encountered endemic spe-
cies. By the 1970s this large predator reproduced exuberantly in Lake
Victoria. It fed on the lake’s endemic fish species, including many of its
tiny and beautiful species of cichlid, and put the entirety of the lake’s
ecosystem in jeopardy. Biologists debate the perch’s exact role in changing
Lake Victoria, but they are in agreement that the fish was a major con-
tributor to biodiversity decline in Africa’s largest lake.33
Invasive species may have had their greatest effects on the world’s
estuaries, which are transition zones between freshwater and saltwater
ecosystems. Estuaries are also natural harbors and provide the global
economy with many of its ports. During the twentieth century estu-
aries felt the destructive effects of several combined forces. Changes
made to upstream river systems altered sedimentation and tempera-
ture levels, among other things. Agricultural runoff changed nutrient

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 93

balances. Urban and industrial centers added pollutants. Wetland con-

version reduced animal habitat in estuaries. With estuaries so disturbed,
exotic species, often introduced via ships’ bilge tanks, easily colonized
these habitats. San Francisco Bay provides a good illustration. By the
end of the twentieth century, the bay had been subject to more than a
hundred years’ worth of urban growth, agricultural runoff, and re-
plumbing of its rivers and wetlands. The ports of Oakland and San
Francisco, moreover, were among the most important on the Amer-
ican West Coast, which meant that thousands of oceangoing vessels
traversed the bay every year, each one a potential carrier of invasive
species. As a result, San Francisco Bay is now home to over two hun-
dred exotic species, including some that have become dominant in
their new ecological niches.34
After 1945 the human impact on oceanic biodiversity intensified,
just as it did in the world’s freshwater and estuarine environments.
Humans began interfering in the ecology of the deep ocean, which
until then had felt little or no human presence of any kind. Commer-
cial fishing was by far the most important activity. Humans had fished
the oceans and seas for millennia, but the postwar era saw unprece-
dented increases in the scale, location, and impact of oceanic fishing.
Global demand for fish increased rapidly along with rising wealth and
growing world population. Supply increased in large part because
postwar technologies allowed fishers to catch ever-larger quantities of
fish in ever-deeper waters. Much of this technology had been devel-
oped initially for military purposes. Sonar, for instance, had been
refi ned during World War II to track and hunt submarines, but after
the war it was also used to locate schools of fish. Over the subsequent
decades, improved Cold War–era sonar systems eventually enabled
fishers to map the seafloor, giving them the ability to place trawls and
nets in the most lucrative locations. When married to other postwar
technologies such as shipboard computers, global positioning systems,
and monofilament nets, fishing vessels became highly lethal machines.

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 94 • The Great Acceleration

Moreover, states subsidized the construction of oceangoing vessels

that were capable of not only catching greater amounts of deepwater
fish but also processing and freezing the fish on board. These “factory”
ships could stay at sea for long stretches, giving their prey no rest. By
the 1980s and 1990s, fleets of massive vessels equipped with these tech-
nologies were plying the seven seas, fishing the deep waters of the In-
dian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans and venturing into polar waters as
well.35
At the outset of the postwar era, almost everyone believed that oce-
anic fisheries had a near-infinite capacity to replenish themselves.
Pushed by the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, fishery managers
around the world adopted a model known as maximum sustainable
yield (MSY) that reflected this faith in oceanic abundance. MSY elab-
orated the view that fish were resilient creatures capable of replacing
their numbers easily, at least up to a point (the maximum yield), before
they declined. By taking older and larger fish, so the argument went,
commercial fishing opened up more space for younger fish to find
food, grow to maturity faster, and reproduce quicker. Proponents of
MSY thus placed the emphasis upon harvesting, essentially mandating
that a species show signs of decline before conservation policies were
considered. The MSY approach presumed that scientists could esti-
mate fish populations, assign appropriate quotas, and thereby manage
fisheries sustainably. This confidence ignored the fact that marine eco-
systems were very poorly understood and always in flux, and that fish
are impossible to count.36
Increased fishing effort substantially increased the global catch after
1945, but it also had major consequences for the oceans. Deepwater
fishing, made ever more efficient by the new methods, severely reduced
the number of top predators such as bluefin tuna. Pelagic net fishing
took huge numbers of unwanted and unlucky species, euphemisti-
cally termed the “bycatch,” including seabirds, dolphins, turtles, and
sharks. Trawling reached increasingly deeper areas of the seafloor,

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 95

scouring and removing everything. These benthic environments con-

tained rich marine life that was hauled to the surface, the unmarket-
able portion of which would be thrown overboard. By the 1980s and
1990s, the world’s major fisheries were showing signs of stress, with
most going into decline and a few into collapse. The fishing industry was
able to keep up with demand by using ever more sophisticated tech-
nologies to chase ever fewer fish in ever deeper waters and by investing
in aquaculture, which by 2000 accounted for 27 percent of the fish,
crustaceans, and mollusks eaten worldwide.37
The whaling industry did much the same thing. During the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inventive whalers (many of
whom were Norwegian) began to use a range of new technologies, in-
cluding the cannon-fired harpoon, steam-driven chase boats, and huge
factory ships that allowed whale carcasses to be quickly hauled aboard
for processing. Together these technologies enabled whalers to expand
their efforts into remoter waters and to target species that had hereto-
fore been too fast to catch. Norwegian, Soviet, and Japanese whalers
(among others) now targeted blue, fin, and minke whales in addition
to the species such as sperm and right whales that had been hunted
with abandon during the nineteenth century. Driven by the profits
from selling whale oil, meat, bone, and other products, hunters took
more than a million whales worldwide during the twentieth century.
The industry was entirely unregulated until 1946, when a conference
of the main whaling nations resulted in the founding of the Interna-
tional Whaling Commission (IWC). Ostensibly dedicated to as-
sessing and managing the world’s stock of whales, the IWC proved to
be more interested in coordinating the industry’s effort than anything
else, a team of foxes guarding the henhouse. This only began changing
after whaling economics worsened, forcing many nations out of the
industry (by 1969, for instance, only Japan and the Soviet Union con-
tinued hunting in the most lucrative waters around Antarctica). Just as
critically, after 1970, pressure from environmentalists and the wider

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 96 • The Great Acceleration

A green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) and several species of butterfly fish swim along
the Great Barrier Reef, off Queensland, Australia, 2008. In the late twentieth
century, ocean acidification had begun to damage the world’s coral reefs, which are
home to an enormous diversity of marine life. (Jeff Hunter/Getty Images)

public forced the IWC to adopt ever-stricter quotas. Ultimately the

IWC agreed to a complete hunting moratorium (passed in 1982, im-
plemented in 1986). But the issue never went away entirely. A very
small number of nations with populations having strong tastes for
whale meat campaigned to get the IWC to partially lift the morato-
rium. Japan, Iceland, and Norway continued hunting a few species of
whales in small numbers under Article VIII of the IWC’s 1946 con-
vention, which allowed hunting for “scientific” research purposes. Japan
took about three hundred minke whales annually in Antarctic waters
between 1987 and 2014, and remained in defiance of the IWC in its
commitment to “lethal sampling” for purposes it alone regards as sci-
entific. The net effect of whaling and its modern regulation was to keep
all marketable whales near the edge of extinction without (so far) tipping

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 97

any over that edge.38 In Moby-Dick (1851) Herman Melville, a keen stu-
dent of whaling, opined that whales were numerous enough to with-
stand human hunting. So far he remains right, but just barely.
Beyond the challenges to life in the deep oceans, human activity
menaced shallow-water environments such as coral reefs. Among the
planet’s most biologically diverse habitats, coral reefs were built over
the ages by the accumulation of skeletons of tiny creatures called coral
polyps. Relatively untouched in 1900, reefs over the next century came
under heavy pressure. They were fished more intensively for food and
for the aquarium trade, because many of the fish that lurk around reefs
are brightly colored and popular among collectors. In many locales,
accelerating erosion sent river-borne sediments onto nearby reefs, suf-
focating the coral polyps. In the Caribbean and the Red Sea, tourist
resort pollution damaged still more reefs, as did the skin-diving tour-
ists themselves who enjoyed them. The gradual acidification of the
oceans (a result of pumping extra carbon into the atmosphere) also
proved hard on coral reefs. In the early 1980s scientists who studied
reefs began to notice general damage patterns, resulting in the first
conferences on reef protection. By the 1990s the worries included coral-
killing diseases and predators as well as coral “bleaching” (signifying
reef stress), especially from higher ocean temperatures. A 1998 global
bleaching outbreak was particularly worrisome, destroying an estimated
16 percent of the world’s coral reefs, mainly in the Indian and Pacific
Oceans. In 2005 a severe coral bleaching killed many reefs in the
Caribbean. Worldwide, about 70 percent of coral reefs showed signs
of ill effects by 2010. Although reefs sometimes showed remarkable re-
silience, the weight of evidence showed that climate change and other
forces damaged reef habitats and thereby diminished the oceans’
biodiversity.39

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 98 • The Great Acceleration

Biodiversity Conservation
Given the pressures on the world’s species during the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, it is tempting to adopt a gloomy narrative.
Yet the period also witnessed intense activity aimed at conserving
species and habitat. Wildlife-themed television programming became
popular in North America and Europe from the 1950s. New conserva-
tion organizations emerged, such as the World Wildlife Fund, spun
off by the IUCN in 1961. Within another decade the mass environ-
mental movement had succeeded in placing species conservation on
the popular agenda in some parts of the world. In 1973 the United
States passed the landmark Endangered Species Act (ESA). The ESA
has been controversial, but it has succeeded in reintroducing some spe-
cies, such as wolves, to some of their former habitats. Similarly, in 1973
India launched the Project Tiger program, designed to save the coun-
try’s remaining wild tigers; unlike the ESA, Project Tiger focused its
primary effort on setting aside large tracts of land (reserves) as protected
tiger habitat. During the 1970s organizations such as Greenpeace spear-
headed global campaigns to ban whaling, leading to the global mora-
torium in 1986.
Diplomatic activity matched these national efforts. Major interna-
tional agreements and initiatives focused on biodiversity conserva-
tion, beginning when UNESCO hosted a 1968 biosphere conference.
Others included the 1971 Ramsar Convention on wetlands, the 1973
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES),
the 1979 Bonn Convention on migratory species, and the Conven-
tion on Biological Diversity (CBD), negotiated at the 1992 Rio Earth
Summit. Since the 1970s, biodiversity concerns have increasingly gar-
nered political attention, both domestically and internationally.40
Nature reserves and national parks were the most common con-
servation tools. A legacy of the nineteenth century, reserves and parks
were created the world over during the twentieth and twenty-first

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 99

centuries. Game reserves in Africa, for instance, had been established

in Great Britain’s colonies starting around 1900 in order to protect
species favored by aristocratic white hunters. While these sportsmen
correctly surmised that hunting had reduced or eliminated some spe-
cies, they tended to blame African and nouveau-riche and plebian
white hunters for undisciplined slaughter of wildlife. Gradually the
idea of turning thinly protected reserves into national parks along
American lines took hold. Several such parks were created between
the 1920s and 1940s, including South Africa’s Kruger and Tanganyika’s
(now Tanzania’s) Serengeti. After independence, new African govern-
ments supported the parks, and in fact created several new ones, seeing
them as sources of national pride and identity as well as of tourist
income. In 2002 Gabon created thirteen national parks covering
10 percent of its territory, much of it lush rainforest. Gabon thereby
hoped to emulate Costa Rica as an ecotourism destination, but thus
far success has proven elusive.41
Toward the end of the twentieth century the reserve idea was also
applied to the oceans. The concept of marine reserves had been formu-
lated in 1912 and largely forgotten until the 1970s, when biologists
began conducting small-scale trials. These showed that marine re-
serves, areas where nearly all fishing was banned, might regenerate de-
graded ecosystems. Because there were few signs that commercial
fishing could be regulated sufficiently to protect oceanic biodiversity,
by the 1980s and 1990s biologists began pushing for large reserves. By
the early twenty-first century many such reserves existed. Moreover, a
few governments created several reserves of enormous size, including a
large chunk of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and immense areas around
the Pacific’s Marianas and Hawaiian Islands and the Indian Ocean’s
Chagos Archipelago.42
Science informed the campaign to create marine reserves for fish,
and it also contributed to debates about preserving whales. New re-
search showed that the world’s oceans might have been far richer

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 100 • The Great Acceleration

before modern commercial whaling. This was more than an academic

exercise, as it threw a wrench into whaling management. In 2010, for
example, a dispute erupted at the International Whaling Commission
(IWC) over plans to lift the 1986 whaling moratorium. The longtime
whaling nations Japan, Iceland, and Norway backed IWC models
showing that whale populations had rebounded enough to resume
hunting. Critics, however, pointed to genetics-based evidence suggesting
that historical whale populations might have been much higher than
the IWC models showed, implying that whale populations were no-
where near robust enough to resume hunting.43
Biodiversity conservation has become a global norm in a very short
period of time, in reaction to mounting evidence of biodiversity de-
cline. Despite real conservation successes, human activities since 1945
greatly intensified the number and severity of threats facing the world’s
living organisms. Human beings increasingly order the world. We
have selected a handful of preferred plant and animal species, living in
managed and simplified landscapes, and have unconsciously selected
another handful of species that adapt well to these landscapes (rats,
deer, squirrels, pigeons, and such). In so doing we have greatly reduced
or eliminated the number of other plants, birds, mammals, insects,
and amphibians that lived in and on these landscapes just a short time
ago. In this regard the ethical question is much the same as ever: Are
we content with a world containing billions of humans, cows, chickens,
and pigs but only a few thousand tigers, rhinoceroses, polar bears—or
none at all?44
The twenty-first century portends still greater pressure on biodiver-
sity than did the twentieth. Rising affluence, at least for some, plus
three to five billion additional people, will menace the world’s forests,
wetlands, oceans, seas, rivers, and grasslands. But climate change likely
will set the twenty-first century apart. Scientists fear that even modest
temperature rises will have serious negative effects on all types of eco-
systems. Some have estimated that a 2-degree Celsius increase might

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
 Climate and Biological Diversity • 101

send one-fi fth to one-third of the world’s species into extinction. Such
studies, it should be noted, often optimistically assume that species
will have perfect “dispersal capabilities,” meaning the ability to retreat
to adjacent cooler environments. But perfect dispersal is usually no
longer possible. There are now so many human-dominated landscapes—
farms, roads, fences, cities, dams, reservoirs, and so on—that many
species attempting to flee a warming climate will have no migratory
option whatsoever. Protectors of biodiversity in the twenty-first century
have their work cut out for them.45

EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]
EBSCOhost - printed on 11/12/2024 8:32 AM via UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES. All use subject to [Link]