A Q&A with Mark Hertsgaard, Author of Hot: Living Through the
Next Fifty Years on Earth
Q: You write about your daughter Chiara quite a bit in Hot. In
the prologue, you describe the moment when you came to
understand just what climate change would mean for her. You had a
kind of terrible epiphany while crossing Westminster Bridge in
London.
A: Yeah, that was on October 18, 2005. Hurricane Katrina had
struck seven weeks before, and Vanity Fair had sent me to
London to report what became the cover story for its first
"green" issue. I did an interview with David King, the chief
science adviser to the British government, who was way ahead of
the curve on this stuff. He shattered the conventional framing
of the climate problem and made me see that we had entered a
radically new era.
See, from the time global warming emerged on the world’s agenda
in the late 1980s, public discussion had focused on two basic
questions: Is global warming real? And if so, how can it be
stopped before it gets really dangerous, which is to say before
it triggers outright climate change, with stronger storms, deeper
droughts, harsher heat waves, and so forth? But King told me
that British scientists had shown that global warming had already
triggered climate change. His specific example was the record
heat wave that battered Europe in the summer of 2003, when
corpses were piling up outside the morgue in Paris. About half
of the excessive temperatures of the 2003 heat wave, King said,
were attributable to man-made global warming.
Anyway, in essence David King told me climate change had arrived
one hundred years sooner than scientists had expected. And that
wasn’t the worst of it. He went on to explain that the physical
inertia of the climate system—the laws of physics and
chemistry—guaranteed that average global temperatures would keep
rising for another thirty to forty years, even if humanity
somehow was to halt all greenhouse emissions overnight. The
up was that our civilization was locked in to a large
a of future climate change no matter how many solar panels,
electric cars, and other green technologies we eventually
embraced.
Q: Is that why you say your daughter belongs to what you call
Generation Hot?
A: Not only my daughter. Every child on earth born after June
23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot. Generation Hot includes
some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under
global warming and are ed to spend the rest of their lives
confronting its ing impacts.
I date Generation Hot to June 23, 1988, because that’s the day
humanity was put on notice that greenhouse emissions were
raising temperatures on this planet. The warning came from NASA
scientist James Hansen’s testimony to the United States Senate
and, crucially, the decision by the New York Times to print the
news on page 1, which made global warming a household phrase in
news bureaus, living rooms, and government offices the world
over.
Unfortunately, Hansen’s and countless subsequent warnings by
others went unheeded. The U.S. government, under Republican as
well as Democratic leadership, listened as much to
corporate-funded deniers of climate change as it did to actual
scientists. So instead of shifting to greener technologies, U.S.
emissions have soared over the past twenty years. That, in
turn, helped accelerate global warming to where it triggered
outright climate change. And as David King explained, once
climate change gets triggered, it can’t be turned off quickly.
As a result, my daughter and the other two billion young people
of Generation Hot are destined to live with rising temperatures
and stronger climate impacts for the rest of their lives. Which
is why our new mantra in fighting climate change has to be
“Avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.” On the one
hand, we must redouble our efforts to slash greenhouse
emissions and stop global warming before it unleashes an
unmanageable a of climate change. On the other hand, we
have to put in place better defenses against sea level rise, more
effective water conservation systems, and many other measures
to manage the climate change that is already unavoidable. In
short, we have to live through global warming even as we strive
to stop it.
Q: Where do you find hope for the future?
A: I’d like to underline that my feelings of hope are not merely
a matter of philosophical outlook. In the course of researching
Hot, I came across many concrete reasons for hope and quite
inspiring examples of how individuals, governments, and
nonprofit groups are facing up to these challenges.
The first two chapters of Hot explain the new realities of
global warming and specify the kinds of impacts that are
unavoidable during the lifetimes of today’s children. Members of
Generation Hot who live in New York City, for example, will
endure twice as many extremely hot summer days by the 2020s as
they do today, which is no small thing if you recall how
unpleasant the summer of 2010 was. By the time my daughter is my
age, the snowpack in California will have melted to where
shortages of drinking water will be a virtually permanent
condition. And the projections for Africa, South Asia, and
other poor regions of the world are often even more troubling.
Nevertheless, most of my book is devoted to solutions—to
answering the question I posed that day on Westminster Bridge:
What will it take for Chiara and her generation around the world
to live through all this? And what I’ve found during four years
of on-the-ground reporting is that a lot is already being done to
prepare to fight against these gathering threats.
Some of the most encouraging steps are being taken here in the
United States. In Seattle, the former chief county executive,
an amazing guy named Ron Sims, directed everyone in government to
"ask the climate question." That is, ask climate scientists
what conditions the region will face in the year 2050 and then
work backward to prepare for those conditions—by building
stronger levees, improving freshwater storage, and building more
resilient housing. Sims told me he championed this approach for
economic as much as ecological reasons. He thinks people and
businesses will move to his region because it is prepared for
what’s ahead.
Overseas, the clear leaders are in the Netherlands, where the
government has be implementing a 200-Year Plan to cope with
climate change. Planning that far ahead is almost inconceivable
here in the U.S., but the Dutch plan is well funded and
politically tough-minded. They are very serious about protecting
their nation from stronger North Sea storms and other projected
impacts, and there’s a lot we can learn from them.
But the single most hopeful story I came across was in West
Africa, where I saw large numbers of very poor farmers who are
already adapting to ferociously hot temperatures with remarkable
success. Their method sounds counterintuitive but is ingenious:
they grow trees amid their fields of millet and sorghum. The
trees provide shade for the crops, help the soil retain
rainwater, and offer a range of other benefits, with the result
that crop yields, in a land where hunger is a constant threat,
have doubled and sometimes tripled.
These are the kinds of examples that all of us—as individuals,
communities, governments, and businesses—can benefit from and
apply in our own lives. In that sense, Hot is a good-news story
about a bad-news predicament, and that gives me hope.
