August 2018 by Sonia Fernandez, University of California – Santa Barbara At roughly 415,000 acres, Northern California’s Mendocino Complex Fire is now the state’s largest recorded wildfire, surpassing the record held by Santa Barbara and Ventura counties’ Thomas Fire, which occurred less than a year before. Roughly 10 […]
8.‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982 From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica […]
6.‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981 The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And Rafe Pomerance soon found himself wondering whether what had seemed to have been a beginning had actually been the end. After the election, Reagan considered plans to […]
5.‘We Are Flying Blind’ October 1980 Two days before Halloween, Rafe Pomerance traveled to a cotton-candy castle on the Gulf of Mexico, near St. Petersburg, Fla, that locals called the Pink Palace. The Don CeSar hotel was a child’s daydream with cantilevered planes of bubble-gum stucco and vanilla-white cupolas […]
3.Between Catastrophe and Chaos July 1979 The scientists summoned by Jule Charney to judge the fate of civilization arrived on July 23, 1979, with their wives, children and weekend bags at a three-story mansion in Woods Hole, on the southwestern spur of Cape Cod. They would review all the […]
By Nathaniel Rich Photographs and Videos by George Steinmetz August, 2018 2.The Whimsies of The Invisible World Spring 1979 There was a brown velvet love seat in the living room of James and Anniek Hansen, under a bright window looking out on Morningside Park in Manhattan, that nobody ever […]
By Nathaniel Rich Photographs and Videos by George Steinmetz August, 2018 Editor’s Note This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of […]
