Losing Earth

What if humanity had already been given a clear warning about climate change forty years ago—and chose to ignore it? In Losing Earth, Nathaniel Rich explores how, between 1979 and 1989, humankind came shockingly close to solving climate change before deciding not to act. He argues that this decade, when leading scientists, policymakers, and activists worked toward an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, represents one of the greatest moral and political failures in history. Rich contends that the problem was not a lack of knowledge or technology, but a failure of vision, leadership, and collective will—a warning as relevant today as it was then.

The book is part investigative history and part moral reckoning. It traces two main figures—Rafe Pomerance, a passionate environmental lobbyist, and James Hansen, a reserved NASA scientist—who together tried to alert the world to the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions. Around them swirls a cast of politicians, economists, oil executives, and bureaucrats who react with apathy, short-term pragmatism, or outright resistance. The story unfolds like a political thriller, yet its outcome is tragically anti-climactic: the world learns of the threat, then collectively decides to postpone action until it is too late.

The Decade We Could Have Saved the World

Rich begins in 1979, when the scientific understanding of global warming was already settled. The world’s top researchers, meeting at a conference led by meteorologist Jule Charney, confirmed that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise global temperatures by roughly three degrees Celsius—a prediction still accurate today. Their warning reached the highest levels of government: President Jimmy Carter, his advisers, and major oil companies all knew the stakes. Yet, rather than triggering a global transformation, this knowledge sank into political indifference. The following decade would offer several chances for decisive action—a binding treaty, a global carbon tax, or even national legislation—but each opportunity slipped away under the weight of caution and compromise.

By 1989, diplomats convened in the Netherlands for the first major climate summit. They were ready to set binding limits on carbon emissions, and many thought global policy was inevitable. Instead, a single figure—John Sununu, President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff—vetoed progress, arguing that uncertain science did not justify economic pain. His intervention collapsed the negotiations. Rich uses this moment to illustrate how fragile political will can be when confronted by vested interests and the comforting illusion of delay.

A Mirror of Human Nature

Ultimately, Losing Earth is not a book about climate science but about human behavior. Rich suggests that our collective failure stems from psychological and philosophical fatalism: the tendency to prioritize short-term comfort over long-term survival. He explores figures like the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who warned that global cooperation on such a vast scale would challenge the limits of human empathy. Economists, too, reinforced the problem: by discounting the value of future generations, they helped justify policies that treated the climate crisis as tomorrow’s concern, not today’s duty.

This fatalism runs through governments, corporations, and individuals. Despite ample warnings, people dismissed the danger as abstract, distant, or economically inconvenient. Even environmental activists struggled to convey urgency without a visible crisis. As Rich demonstrates, the climate threat was—and remains—the perfect catastrophe: incremental enough to ignore, but devastating when realized.

Why This Story Matters Now

Rich uses the decade between 1979 and 1989 as a microcosm of our ongoing dilemma. Every major argument—scientific uncertainty, economic cost, geopolitical rivalry—was articulated then and persists today. The book is a haunting reminder that inaction has a history; it was not inevitable but chosen. Rich invites you to reflect on this moral dimension: if humanity already had the knowledge, resources, and consensus to act, what stopped us? And what does that say about our ability to make sacrifices for an unseen future?

Through storytelling, investigative detail, and philosophical reflection, Losing Earth confronts readers with a sobering question: if we couldn’t save the world when it was easiest to do so, can we save it now? Its narrative is both a chronicle of missed opportunities and a call to reshape how we think about responsibility—not as an abstraction, but as a shared moral commitment to life itself.

In 1979, the scientific community already knew enough to act decisively on global warming. At the center of this realization was NASA scientist James Hansen, whose research helped quantify how carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere. His meticulous climate models, successors of those used to study Venus, warned of rising seas, crop failures, and mass displacement. Hansen’s work, combined with the findings of Jule Charney’s workshop at Woods Hole, left no scientific ambiguity: continued fossil fuel use would fundamentally alter life on Earth.

The Charney Report’s Ominous Prediction

The Charney Report distilled a century of climate science into one terrifying number: 3°C of warming if carbon dioxide doubled. The participants—leading modelers like Syukuro Manabe, Henry Stommel, and Carl Wunsch—confirmed that human activity was driving the change. Their conclusion circulated among government agencies and corporate scientists, including those at Exxon and Shell. Yet it triggered no immediate policy. The report noted, prophetically, that waiting for certainty might mean waiting until it was too late.

Hansen’s Data and the Turning Point

By the late 1970s, Hansen’s team at the NASA Goddard Institute was modeling both planetary and terrestrial climates. Using supercomputers to create “Mirror Worlds,” he simulated how rising carbon levels would affect temperature and precipitation. His findings were alarming but clear: the signal of human-induced warming could soon be detected within two decades—a prediction validated precisely by 1988. Hansen’s models gave policymakers an unprecedented ability to see the future, yet those with power chose to disbelieve their own prophecy.

(For comparison, in The Discovery of Global Warming, Spencer Weart notes that no other scientific field in history transitioned so quickly from theory to urgent policy relevance—then was shelved.)

Science vs. Political Convenience

Despite the scientific consensus, the transition from knowledge to action stalled. Carter’s administration acknowledged the threat but prioritized synthetic fuels for energy independence—essentially doubling down on carbon. Hansen’s warnings to Congress and the press were buried under bureaucratic indifference. In a world driven by quarterly profits and election cycles, decades-long climate horizons seemed abstract. As one official quipped, “If the world were to disappear thirty years from now, economists wouldn’t care.”

The tragedy of these years lies not in ignorance but in deliberate avoidance. By the end of the 1970s, humanity could already measure its impact on the atmosphere with unerring accuracy. Hansen and his peers had shouted the truth into the void—but the halls of power were tuned to other frequencies.

While scientists debated models, philosophers and economists wrestled with an even darker question: were humans psychologically or economically capable of saving themselves? From 1977 through 1980, a loose circle of thinkers—what Rich calls the “Fatalists”—argued that the climate crisis was less a technical problem than a moral and cognitive one. If the future demanded sacrifice today, could societies, or even individuals, act against immediate self-interest?

Discounting the Future

Economists like William Nordhaus and Lester Lave exposed the paradox at the heart of climate policy: under conventional economic logic, the future is always worth less than the present. Nordhaus’s models treated a degree of warming as a financial cost, not an existential threat, and thus favored slow, incremental actions. He proposed carbon taxes to internalize environmental damage but doubted they could ever be enforced globally. Lave was blunter: even if the world ended in thirty years, today’s economists wouldn’t adjust their calculations. The system, he suggested, was rigged for complacency.

A Crisis of Willpower

Philosophers like Margaret Mead went further. She predicted that collective action on a planetary scale would require humans to evolve socially faster than biologically. Could nations unite for problems whose worst effects lay beyond their leaders’ lifetimes? Mead’s question haunted policymakers: people worry about children and grandchildren, but are they willing to inconvenience themselves for descendants they’ll never meet? Most answered silently: no.

Political scientists such as Michael Glantz described government behavior as oscillating between “crisis management” and “muddling through.” Only visible, immediate disasters spurred reform—after people died in smog-choked streets or rivers caught fire. Incremental threats like greenhouse gases, invisible and slow, were destined to be managed by “muddling through.” Humanity, it seemed, was neurologically unsuited to slow-motion catastrophe.

The Logic of Futility

By the early 1980s, this fatalism hardened into political inertia. The consensus among those who understood the science was grim: even if the truth were clear, people wouldn’t change. The anthropologist Klaus Meyer-Abich concluded that adaptation—not prevention—was the only rational course. His reasoning was chillingly pragmatic: since even the 1970s oil crisis hadn’t changed energy habits, why expect an invisible future threat to stir transformation?

This mindset became self-fulfilling. Once leaders accepted that political consensus was impossible, inaction became policy. Climate change was no longer a looming danger—it was an inevitability to be endured. And from that resignation, modern denialism would later bloom.

Rafe Pomerance, a young environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth, emerges in Rich’s narrative as the story’s moral engine. After stumbling upon obscure government reports predicting catastrophic warming, he made it his mission to ensure policymakers understood the threat. Pomerance combined political savvy with moral urgency, forging alliances that transcended party lines. His question was simple: if we know the world is at risk, what could possibly be more urgent?

From Discovery to Advocacy

Pomerance’s early work resembled detective work. Meeting with geophysicist Gordon MacDonald, he organized briefings that brought scientific warnings directly into the corridors of power—from the EPA to the White House. He introduced NASA’s James Hansen to congressional leaders and convinced them to convene hearings. Pomerance understood that facts alone wouldn’t move Washington; emotional storytelling and political theatrics would. His mantra: “If you don’t dramatize it, it doesn’t exist.”

Clashes and Coalitions

In the late Carter and early Reagan years, Pomerance’s efforts collided with a new tide of anti-regulation politics. The Reagan administration gutted environmental protections, dismantled energy research programs, and dismissed climate science as alarmist. Yet Pomerance persisted. He found unexpected allies among moderates like Senator Al Gore and Republican Senator John Chafee, who together helped stage hearings that introduced “global warming” into mainstream media. These hearings momentarily pushed the issue to the forefront, but without a crisis to anchor it, public attention drifted away.

Hope in the Ozone

When international action on the ozone hole succeeded in producing the 1987 Montreal Protocol, Pomerance glimpsed a model for climate cooperation. He helped organize joint hearings on both issues, using vivid satellite imagery of the ozone hole to galvanize politicians and journalists. The tactic worked: media coverage exploded, briefly conflating ozone depletion with global warming. For a fleeting moment, Pomerance dared to believe an international accord on carbon emissions could follow.

But where the ozone crisis felt immediate—you could imagine UV rays burning your skin—the greenhouse effect remained abstract. The public could not visualize invisible gases. Despite his brilliance as a strategist, Pomerance confronted a paradox: knowledge without perception rarely motivates change. His frustration foreshadowed the fate of every climate communicator to come.

In 1988, nature delivered the proof scientists had been predicting for years. The hottest, driest summer in recorded U.S. history turned the nation into a literal tinderbox. Two million acres of Alaska burned. Rivers evaporated. New York sweltered, and Yellowstone’s inferno dominated television screens. Into this crucible stepped James Hansen, ready to announce what he believed everyone must finally accept: global warming had begun.

The Hearing that Made History

On June 23, 1988, Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate in a sweltering, camera-crowded room. He declared with “99 percent confidence” that human activity was warming the planet. His words dominated headlines: “Global Warming Has Begun.” Senator Timothy Wirth, who staged the hearing intentionally during the heatwave, understood optics as power—he ordered windows left open to emphasize the heat. Hansen, stoic and soft-spoken, became an unlikely symbol of truth challenging political inertia.

Public Awakening and Political Theater

For a brief moment, it worked. Americans demanded action, and politicians competed to sound proactive. George H. W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, promised to fight the “greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” Environmentalists believed the stars had aligned. Yet behind closed doors, the same pattern reasserted itself: corporate interests lobbied, aides softened language, and economic advisors argued for “further study.” The movement’s first crescendo became another false dawn.

That fiery summer symbolized the existential irony at the book’s core: even when the evidence burned around them, leaders found reasons to hesitate. The world’s first clear signal became another data point for historians studying how truth fails to overcome convenience.

After Hansen’s testimony, the stage seemed set for a binding international climate treaty. The creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 promised an institutional framework for global cooperation. By 1989, momentum converged at the Noordwijk conference in the Netherlands, where 60 nations gathered to freeze or reduce emissions. What unfolded there epitomized the tragedy of the age: consensus undone by a single obstruction.

Sununu vs. the World

John Sununu, Chief of Staff to President George H. W. Bush, viewed the climate movement through an ideological lens. A mechanical engineer by training, he distrusted scientists and saw environmentalism as an anti-growth plot. Despite growing bipartisan support for emissions targets, Sununu blocked U.S. commitments, arguing the science was “technical garbage.” His defiance at Noordwijk ensured no binding agreement would emerge. The deal fractured, and the moment passed.

EPA Administrator William Reilly—“the Great Includer”—fought to persuade delegates, but Sununu’s directives prevailed. The United States, responsible for nearly a quarter of global emissions, refused leadership. The conference that might have changed history ended in failure, its survivors comparing the obstructionist nations to “skunks at the garden party.”

The Industrial Counterattack

Even before Noordwijk, industry groups were hardening their defenses. The American Petroleum Institute and Exxon quietly began funding studies and messaging campaigns to emphasize uncertainty and caution. By 1989, phrases like “premature action,” “limited understanding,” and “further research” became corporate mantras. Soon, the Global Climate Coalition formed—a coalition not of scientists but of lobbyists trained to sow doubt. The seeds of organized denialism were planted just as public faith in climate science peaked.

Rich presents Noordwijk as both an ending and a beginning—the close of an era of rational optimism, and the birth of the propaganda war that would define the 1990s and beyond. In the ashes of this conference lay the world we now inhabit: one that knows its danger but postpones saving itself.

In his powerful conclusion, Rich shifts from history to moral philosophy. He argues that the climate crisis is no longer a scientific or technological problem—it is an ethical one. The science was settled decades ago; what remains unsettled is our willingness to accept responsibility. He asks us to confront a disturbing truth: every comfort in the modern world is powered by the same forces that now threaten it. To address global warming, we don’t need new data—we need a new moral imagination.

Everyone Knew

Perhaps the book’s most haunting refrain is “Everybody knew.” Governments, corporations, and even popular media had acknowledged the greenhouse effect as early as the 1950s. Time and Life magazines published stories about rising seas and melting ice caps. Oil companies funded early climate research, fully aware of the implications. Yet profit, politics, and denial converged into a machinery of silence. Rich likens this to a collective amnesia—an ethical blind spot that allowed civilization to continue its “large-scale geophysical experiment” as though asleep at the wheel.

Sin Against Creation

Drawing on Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew, Rich reframes climate change as a moral and spiritual crisis: “To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and against God.” He calls denialism not ignorance but a betrayal of reason and empathy—a sociopathy disguised as skepticism. This moral decay, he suggests, threatens not just our ecosystems but the foundations of democratic society itself. When truth becomes negotiable, so does humanity’s survival.

The Choice Ahead

Rich ends with cautious hope. Solutions—carbon pricing, reforestation, renewable energy—are well within reach. What’s missing is political and moral courage. He likens the climate battle to other moral revolutions—civil rights, abolition, suffrage—each requiring ordinary people to expand the boundaries of empathy. “If we speak about climate as only a political issue,” he warns, “it will suffer the fate of all political issues.” Only by seeing it as a fight for survival, as a moral imperative, can humanity rewrite the ending it so narrowly avoided in 1989.

In the end, Losing Earth is less a chronicle of failure than a mirror held to our species. It asks whether we are capable of moral evolution before ecological collapse forces it upon us. The answer, Rich suggests quietly but insistently, is still up to you.