[continued from previous message]

But when the group reconvened after breakfast, they immediately became stuck on
a sentence in their prefatory paragraph declaring that climatic changes were “likely to occur.”

“Will occur,” proposed Laurmann, the Stanford engineer.

“What about the words: highly likely to occur?” Scoville asked.

“Almost sure,” said David Rose, the nuclear engineer from M.I.T.

“Almost surely,” another said.

“Changes of an undetermined — ”

“Changes as yet of a little-understood nature?”

“Highly or extremely likely to occur,” Pomerance said.

“Almost surely to occur?”

“No,” Pomerance said.

“I would like to make one statement,” said Annemarie Crocetti, a public-health scholar who sat on the National Commission on Air Quality and had
barely spoken all week. “I have noticed that very often when we as scientists
are cautious in our
statements, everybody else misses the point, because they don’t understand our qualifications.”

“As a nonscientist,” said Tom McPherson, the congressman, “I really concur.”

Yet these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and
Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.

“It is very emotional,” Crocetti said, succumbing to her frustration. “What we have asked is to get people from different disciplines to come together and tell us what you agree on and what your problems are. And you have
only made vague statements
— ”

She was interrupted by Waltz, the economist, who wanted simply to note that climate change would have profound effects. Crocetti waited until he exhausted himself, before resuming in a calm voice. “All I am asking you to say is: ‘We got ourselves a
bunch of experts, and by God, they all endorse this point of view and think it is very important. They have disagreements about the details of this and that, but they feel that it behooves us to intervene at this point and try to prevent
it.’ ”

They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The
final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,”
Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”

Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about
the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice. Pomerance knew he wasn’t that person: He was an organizer, a strategist, a fixer — which meant he was an optimist and even, perhaps, a romantic. His job was to
assemble a movement. And every movement, even one backed by widespread consensus, needed a hero. He just had to find one.

.

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* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)