John Schwartz

The case turns on the claim that Exxon kept a secret set of financial books that seriously underestimated the costs of potential climate change regulation while claiming publicly that it was taking such factors into account. It follows a sprawling investigation that included millions of pages of documents and allegations of a chief executive’s secret email account.

In his opening statement, Kevin Wallace, a lawyer with the New York Attorney General’s Office, argued that “the gap between what Exxon said it was doing and was actually doing was significant, and had an impact on the bottom line.”

While “we are not telling Exxon how to run its business,” Wallace said in closing, the company, he said, “has to be honest with investors.”

Representing Exxon, attorney Ted Wells Jr. said in a vehement opening statement that while the company has long acknowledged climate change is real, “climate change does not permit the New York Attorney General to bring a meritless complaint, and one that is so unconnected from the truth.”

The case is only the second climate-change lawsuit to reach trial in the United States, but it could be a bellwether for the long line of other suits awaiting trial that are intended to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for the costs of climate change.

The lawsuit was filed last year by the New York Attorney General’s Office and claims that the oil industry giant engaged in a yearslong “fraudulent scheme” that “in effect erected a Potemkin village to create the illusion that it had fully considered the risks of future climate change regulation and had factored those risks into its business operations.” The deception “exposed the company to greater risk from climate change regulation than investors were led to believe,” according to the lawsuit.

Exxon has vigorously fought the charges, and maintains that the government’s theory of its financial tools is flawed at best and, at worst, disingenuous. “The evidence will show Exxon Mobil did not commit securities fraud, did not make any misleading statements,” Wells said. “Exxon Mobil did nothing wrong.”

He called the company’s procedures “robust,” and accused the attorney general’s office of engaging in a politically motivated effort to “vilify” the company with lies.

Before the trial began, about 50 protesters stood in front of the courthouse with signs and an enormous banner that read “CLIMATE CRISIS #ExxonKnew MAKE THEM PAY.”

More than 1,000 climate change lawsuits have been filed in the United States, said Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia University Law School. (The first was brought more than a decade ago by automotive industry companies to challenge Vermont’s ability to set emissions standards.)

What the Exxon case is not about is whether climate change is real, or caused by human activities — or Exxon’s efforts over decades to muddy the public discussion of climate change while its own research showed the urgency of the issue. Those topics are “what everyone thought it was going to be when the investigation started,” Gerrard said. Instead, the case will focus on narrower, more technical grounds, he said.

Exxon has long conducted research into climate change, and published much of it in the scientific literature. In 2015, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times used materials from corporate archives to show the extent of that research and how it was used in long-term planning, even while the company was funding groups that sought to spread doubt about climate science.

Exxon pledged to stop funding such groups in the mid-2000s, and now says that it accepts the science and the need for action to blunt the worst effects. The company supported the Paris climate deal, the global pact aimed at reducing emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

The state filed the lawsuit last year. Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, has been pursuing a similar investigation and is expected to file a lawsuit soon.

In recent filings, New York said that for years, the company “repeatedly represented that it expected governments to adopt more costly and stringent climate change regulations over the coming decades” for projects like those that would extract oil from Canadian tar sands.

“Exxon Mobil’s statements would have led a reasonable investor to believe that it used this cost of carbon in projecting the costs associated with the company’s emissions from its investments and operations,” the state said. “But Exxon Mobil did no such thing.”

The suit claims the company used a lower cost of carbon in its internal estimates — and when employees did try to apply the publicly disclosed higher costs, the resulting price tags were so high that the company “instructed its employees not to apply those costs.” The result was that “Exxon Mobil made its assets appear significantly more secure than they really were, which had a material impact on its share price.” The emphasis on shareholder value is crucial to the state’s legal authority under the Martin Act, New York’s sweeping shareholder protection law.

Justice Barry R. Ostrager of New York state Supreme Court, who is presiding over the case, has thrown out most of the claims of selective political prosecution as potential defenses in the case. Exxon has pursued those claims in a separate federal court case that is now before the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, after a federal district judge ruled forcefully against the company’s arguments.

The case comes to trial as other lawsuits over climate change are making their way through the courts. In two cases involving the city of Baltimore and the state of Rhode Island, the industry has asked the Supreme Court to intervene before the process of discovery begins. The Supreme Court ruled against the companies on Tuesday, allowing the cases to proceed. And a federal case brought on behalf of young plaintiffs against the government of the United States for not fighting climate change, which was supposed to begin a year ago, is caught up in procedural appeals at the Ninth Circuit that could conceivably derail it.

If the state prevails, it could prove to be expensive for Exxon Mobil. A state expert has estimated the cost to shareholders of Exxon Mobil’s actions at somewhere between about $476 million and $1.6 billion. (The company posted earnings of $20.8 billion for 2019.)

Ann E. Carlson, co-director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles law school who has consulted pro bono with attorneys in some of the state and local cases, said if the state proves what it is claiming, “this is a company that has been engaged in denial and deception across several fronts, and I think that denial might be coming back to haunt them and may end up costing them millions and even billions of dollars.”

This article originally appeared in

Fossil Fuels on Trial: New York's Lawsuit Against Exxon Begins

After four years of legal sparring and finger-pointing, oil-industry giant Exxon Mobil went to court on Tuesday to face charges that the company lied to shareholders and to the public about the costs and consequences of climate change.

Houston, Monday, July 21—Men have landed and walked on the moon.

It is deceptively simple. It has heft. As he recalled in a recent interview: “That word, the ‘moon.’ It was the code word for inaccessible, unreachable.”

This opening sentence, he said, put the amazing shift in humanity’s perception of the moon into terms of everyday life that any reader could relate to: “Not only have we reached it, but we walked on it!”

We all walk. It is, literally, a pedestrian thing. But this is walking made glorious: “Landed. And walked. On the moon.”

This is the story behind that story, which even today can wow a reader with the excitement of the moment: how it was reported and how Wilford — a giant of science writing and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner — turned a technically challenging human achievement into a narrative suffused with drama, felicitous language and even humor.

The lede — the word is an artifact of the days of Linotype machines and is used to distinguish the leading sentence of an article from the metal used in those days to form type — was also un-Timesian, especially in 1969. Wilford had been hired away from Time magazine in 1965 to take on the space beat.

The editor who hired him, Harrison Salisbury, told him that The Times did not “want someone to write a science story or a flight story or an engineering story.” He recalls Salisbury saying that the moon landing should be “a story of a big adventure.”

Salisbury was part of a faction of editors who were looking to “put some life into The Times,” Wilford recalled. But the newsroom was also still filled with “old-fashioned shirt-sleeve editors who went by the old book.”

So Wilford was not just worried about the first eight words of the article. He was also concerned about whether the old guard would require him to come up with something more stuffy and clunky.

“I was deathly afraid they were going to want me to do some kind of old-fashioned, ‘who what when and where’ lede, and I did not want that,” he said.

Another thing he did not want was “to have ‘historic’ in the lede,” he said. “It’s a lame way to say something is important.”

Wilford called his editor at the time in New York, Henry Lieberman, to clear the way for the unconventional line, with its ring of authority, of history, of a new age in human activity. “I told him what I wanted to do and why, and I said, ‘Do you think that’s going to be all right?’”

He said Lieberman replied, “Well, I’ll run that by the editors.”

“I guess that he did, I never heard any more,” Wilford added. “I took nothing as a positive answer.”

He then went on to the kind of stylistic flourishes he has always been known for, as in his segue into one of Neil Armstrong’s immortal quotes:

Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four-legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.

Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old civilian commander, radioed to earth and the Mission Control room here:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Wilford reported on the launch in Florida, arriving days before with other Times reporters, all working in a rusty trailer that the newspaper maintained at the Kennedy Space Center press site.

He wrote three versions of the article that night for successive editions of The Times. By deadline of the first edition, the astronauts had landed but not exited the lunar module; by the third edition, two astronauts’ boots had touched the gritty soil of the moon. There was no email; to get his article to New York, Wilford banged it out on a typewriter and then read each word over the phone, making small changes on the fly as he read, to the “recording room,” where transcriptionists quickly typed up pages and passed them to editors.

But after writing up the launch in Florida, there was the problem of how to cover the transition of management of the spacecraft to Mission Control in Houston. For earlier launches, Wilford often ended up on a late-night flight. This launch was different. So the publisher of The Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, “let us use his private jet.” After meeting the newspaper’s deadlines, they traveled speedily and in luxury to Houston.

In Houston, the setup for reporters was different, but Wilford still had his desk, his background materials and his yellow pad with notes about what to expect from the mission — elements of the day-by-day flight plan that he could track as things went along.

His preparation for this reporting was extensive; he had even “flown” a simulator of the lunar lander to get a feel for what Armstrong was up against in piloting the spidery craft. Wilford repeatedly crashed the vehicle.

Wilford’s storytelling switched back and forth in time between the landing and the moon walk, to a congratulatory phone call from President Richard M. Nixon, then back to the details of stepping down to the surface. Then he deftly transitioned to a stirring paean to exploration:

On the second step from the top, he pulled a lanyard that released a fold-down equipment compartment on the side of the lunar module. This deployed the television camera that transmitted the dramatic pictures of man’s first steps on the moon.

American Dream Fulfilled

It was man’s first landing on another world, the realization of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination. The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring.

“I started using ‘spacefaring’ even before the lunar landing,” Wilford said; he was drawn to the word’s historical echoes. “Seafaring, spacefaring — it’s part of the same thrust.”

The structure of the article was determined in part by an editorial requirement to get the details of the landing and first steps on the moon, and the call from Nixon, “before the jump” — that is, within the part of the article that can be read on the front page. And he found space for flashes of dry humor, as well:

They turned on the electrical power, checked all the switch settings on the cockpit panel and checked communications with the command ship and the ground controllers. Everything was “nominal,” as the spacemen say.

“Eagle has wings,” Mr. Armstrong replied.

The two ships were then only a few feet apart. But at 2:12 P.M., Colonel Collins fired the command ship’s maneuvering rockets to move about two miles away and in a slightly different orbit from the lunar module.

“It looks like you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you’re upside down,” Colonel Collins commented, watching the spidery lunar module receding in the distance.

“Somebody’s upside down,” Mr. Armstrong replied.

What is “up” and what is “down” is never quite clear in the absence of landmarks and the sensation of gravity’s pull.

At Mission Control’s press area, Wilford wore earphones to hear the public affairs officer’s commentary and watched closed-circuit television to see what the spaceship’s cameras were showing.

He kept his ears attuned to whenever anything fresh and amusing occurred, such as that exchange between Armstrong and Michael Collins.

“If you hear a particularly good quote, if you have anything that helps to give some narrative connection to events, you make a quick, scribbly note that no one but me could decipher,” he said. “I didn’t tape the air-to-ground, and you didn’t usually get a transcript of air-to-ground until several hours later.”

The most dramatic element of the landing — the need to fly farther than planned to find a safer landing place — was overshadowed at the time, Wilford recalled, by a series of alarms from the lander’s computers that mission controllers safely disregarded. The search for a landing spot was described in detail at a briefing later in the evening, and he worked it into the article’s chronology of events:

The brownish-gray panorama rushed below them — myriad craters, hills and ridges, deep cracks and ancient rubble on the moon, which Dr. Robert Jastrow, the space agency scientist, called the “Rosetta Stone of life.”

“You’re ‘go’ for landing,” Mission Control informed the two men.

The Eagle closed in, dropping about 20 feet a second, until it was hovering almost directly over the landing area at an altitude of 500 feet.

Its floor was littered with boulders.

It was when the craft reached an altitude of 300 feet that Mr. Armstrong took over semimanual control for the rest of the way. The computer continued to have control of the rocket firing, but the astronaut could adjust the craft’s hovering position.

He was expected to take over such control anyway, but the sight of a crater looming ahead at the touchdown point made it imperative.

As Mr. Armstrong said later, “The auto-targeting was taking us right into a football field- sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks.”

For about 90 seconds, he peered through the window in search of a clear touchdown point. Using the lever at his right hand, he tilted the vehicle forward to redirect the firing of the maneuvering jets and thus shift its hovering position.

Finally, Mr. Armstrong found the spot he liked, and the blue light on the cockpit flashed to indicate that five-foot-long probes, like curb feelers, on three of the four legs had touched the surface.

“Contact light,” Mr. Armstrong radioed.

He pressed a button marked “Stop” and reported, “O.K., engine stop.”

There were a few more cryptic messages of functions performed.

Then Maj. Charles M. Duke, the capsule communicator in the control room, radioed to the two astronauts: “We copy you down, Eagle.”

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“Roger, Tranquility,” Major Duke replied. “We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We are breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

Throughout the piece, Wilford alternated between lyrical passages and those rich in scientific information and data, framed in ways that could grip the reader. These lines about Armstrong’s heartbeat speak volumes:

Although Mr. Armstrong is known as a man of few words, his heartbeats told of his excitement upon leading man’s first landing on the moon.

At the time of the descent rocket ignition, his heartbeat rate registered 110 a minute — 77 is normal for him — and it shot up to 156 at touchdown.

Stephen Dubner, a co-author of the “Freakonomics” book series, has called this “one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article,” adding, “Someday I would like to write two sentences as good as those.”

Near the end of the article, Wilford returned to Collins, still orbiting the moon as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the surface:

At the time of the landing, Colonel Collins was riding the command ship Columbia about 65 miles overhead.

Mission Control informed the colonel, “Eagle is at Tranquility.

“Yea, I heard the whole thing,” Colonel Collins, the man who went so far but not all the way, replied. “Fantastic.”

Wilford recalled that the return to Collins was an attempt to bring some balance to the distribution of glory, an act of empathy for a man as alone as any human has ever been.

“I still think of what Collins must have been thinking,” he said. “He’s up there in orbit. And Armstrong and Aldrin are landing on the moon, walking on the moon, and you think if something happens that they can’t come back, he has no choice. He can’t rescue them. He has to make the flight back on his own. That would have been the hardest thing in the world, I think.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-john-noble-wilford.html" id="50fa6a83-a7c3-396e-a8ed-9d6a6b5c6b82">The New York Times</a>.

John Noble Wilford knew that he was writing one of the most important stories of the century: The first human landing on another world. His article — for the front page of The New York Times on July 21, 1969, needed to begin with a sentence that conveyed the immensity of the moment. And so, after the launch on July 16, but before the landing, he spent a sleepless night trying to come up with an opening sentence, known in the journalism business as a lede:

The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11

The night before the waters flowed over the backbreakingly stacked sandbags, Guckert recalled, “I walked into the house, and looked at my wife and said, ‘We’re going to lose the campus.’” In all, the raging waters caused $750 million in flood damage, with $36 million in equipment lost in one building alone. Twenty-two major buildings were damaged, some of them irreparably; a quarter of the school’s classroom space was lost, and one-sixth of the university’s 2.6 million square feet of space was closed. The level of flooding “was unfathomable to those of us who lived through the previous record flood” of 1993, said Rod Lehnertz, the university’s senior vice president for finance and operations.

Now Guckert has a side gig. He travels the country, telling other institutions what he and the University of Iowa have learned from the disaster, and explaining how others can prepare for the worst. Guckert said that in a changing world, people might not know what the worst could mean.

In his talks, he presents the lessons he learned from the 2008 flood, with slides titled “Plan for your next disaster, not your last one” and “Plan for Failure (Because Mother Nature Always Wins).”

Climate change is already affecting extreme weather events around the world. Hurricanes are wetter, and wildfires are bigger. And scientists expect conditions to get worse over time.

Little wonder, then, that Guckert said that his presentations were increasingly in demand: “I’ve gotten more requests in the last five years than the first five.” His audiences are realizing that they have to be prepared for events they haven’t seen before, or even thought were possible.

With flooding along the Mississippi River at record levels in parts of Iowa, an 11-year-old disaster has much to teach about what it takes to recover. Parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and nearby states, including Native American reservations, are cleaning up from recent intense flooding. The city of Davenport, Iowa, has been inundated by a levee breach, and last Friday, the Coast Guard temporarily closed the Mississippi River near St. Louis to boat and barge traffic because of high water levels, a blow to the multibillion-dollar shipping industry that uses the river.

The story of Iowa’s effort to restore its campus shows how hard it is to come back from a disaster, even with the university’s myriad resources. While the school reopened quickly with makeshift power and cramped facilities, it took eight years to fully rebuild. And 11 years later, the school’s art museum has yet to be replaced.

Flooding is a complex phenomenon that depends on many factors, including the lay of the land, development and the amount of precipitation, as well as the ability of the ground to soak up water. But climate change is, increasingly, part of the mix, said Larry Weber, a professor of engineering at the University of Iowa and a co-founder of the Iowa Flood Center, an internationally recognized resource that the state legislature created at the school after the 2008 flood.

Research has shown an increase in the frequency of flood events in parts of Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest. The Iowa Flood Center estimates that what was once considered a 500-year flood in Iowa City is now an 80-year flood, meaning the probability of a flood of that magnitude occurring in any given year has risen from 0.2 percent to 1.25 percent.

Back in 2008, Guckert and thousands of volunteers had been working to fight the rising Iowa River for more than a week, and it looked as if the makeshift defenses would hold.

Three inches of rain fell in less than an hour, and forced the school to tell its workers to stand down. By the next morning, the river had overwhelmed the makeshift barriers. The level of water in Hancher Auditorium, the school’s largest performance space, would rise to more than a foot above the stage, and moved up the slope of the audience seats, reaching Row O.

Floodwaters knocked out the university’s power plant, inundated the Iowa Memorial Union’s basement, which housed the school bookstore, and badly damaged the school’s art museum. (Though a herculean effort in the preceding days had gotten thousands of pieces, including the museum’s well-regarded collection of African art and a Jackson Pollock piece, to safety.) Many buildings sitting high enough to avoid being flooded from ground level got water in their basements when the steam tunnels that connect campus buildings became a conduit for damage.

The destruction would have been far less severe if the school had listened to advice offered more than 100 years before. The school, expanding from the small amount of land given to it by the state when the capital moved to Des Moines in the 1850s, had been warned in 1905 by its landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, not to build close to the water.

Squeezed by a growing city around it, however, the university built critical facilities close by. “It struggled to find the land that it did,” said Charles Connerly, the director of the school of urban and regional planning at the university, “and some of them turned out to be bad choices,” he said.

Waterside construction expanded after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the Coralville Dam upstream in 1958.

The dam “gave them a sense of safety,” Connerly said, but “in the end, that was not the case.” In 2008, the dam slowed the water and allowed more time to prepare, and even reduced the level of flooding that might have otherwise occurred. (Nearby Cedar Rapids had no such protection on its Cedar River, and the damage to that city was enormous.) But the Coralville Dam could not control nature. And the waters came.

In the ensuing years, the school replaced two structures that had been destroyed, including Hancher Auditorium, which it rebuilt at a safer elevation. Some of the damaged architectural gems on the campus, including an art building designed by Steven Holl, are now protected by barriers that can be erected and put in place in a matter of days. The Iowa Memorial Union had a sunken courtyard facing the water before the flood; now a high patio sits atop a flood barrier, protecting the building and giving the university community commanding views of the waterway.

Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get the federal portion of rebuilding costs was “a challenge,” recalled Sally Mason, the president of the university during the flood and its aftermath. The complications included navigating arcane federal rules and dealing with a changing cast of officials. That the process ended up a success story is a testament to the university’s persistence, patience and the deployment of the university’s resources to address the problems.

Jerald L. Schnoor, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, noted that the school’s success suggested what such crises could mean for places without similar resources and expertise: “You can imagine if you’re the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, how hard it is to come back from these events.”

The school has come under criticism for its decision to continue building in the floodplain, including a 1,000-bed dormitory near the water. An extensive 2016 study, which is co-authored by Connerly, argued that such decisions mean “the University’s historical mistakes may be compounded rather than negated.” School officials said, however, that the university built the dormitory, like other new and repaired buildings near the water, at a higher elevation than it previously required, designing it to be quickly repaired if water strikes and without important equipment or facilities on the ground floor.

In his presentations around the nation, Guckert shows slides that depict efforts to protect the school before the 2008 flood, and the startling images of the aftermath. He tells the audience to lay in the supplies for fighting floods, because when a crisis hits a region, everyone is scrambling for sandbags, pumps and generators.

But many people don’t like to hear bad news, said Weber, the flood expert, recalling a speech he gave in the western part of Iowa in 2009 on the newly founded Iowa Flood Center. A man in the audience said, “As far as I’m concerned, you may as well call it the Eastern Iowa Flood Center, because here on the Missouri River, we don’t flood.” The man has since been proven wrong.

Of all the lessons from 2008, perhaps the most important is that “mother nature’s changing on us,” Lehnertz said, and although the campus is better protected than ever before, “you can never feel quite comfortable about something you don’t control,” he said.

As Guckert put it, “We haven’t seen our worst flood yet.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/climate/iowa-floods-disasters-lessons-learned.html" id="80c0cf17-5d15-3693-a6c0-ef6dba03fc0f">The New York Times</a>.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Don Guckert’s job is keeping the buildings on the University of Iowa’s charming campus up and running, and safe. His most important lessons came from the worst days of his career, in June 2008, when the waters of the Iowa River washed across the campus, causing catastrophic damage.

In a Flood-Prone State, Past Disasters Have Lessons to Teach

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, his academic home for 67 years. It said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Broecker, a geologist by training whose questing mind led him to rove from field to field, had an uncanny ability to draw a comprehensive understanding of the Earth’s climate system from research into the oceans, the atmosphere, the planet’s ice and more.

He gave early warning of a planetary crisis if humans continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He published a landmark scientific paper in 1975 that asked in its title, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”

A blunt man, Broecker (pronounced “broker”) had a knack for phrasemaking. He was fond of saying, “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.” He meant that the climate is unpredictable, sensitive to small changes and susceptible to major shifts with startling speed.

He also coined the term “the global conveyor” for the important ocean currents that circulate warm water around the globe; that phrase, too, remains in use today.

Broecker pioneered techniques using carbon isotopes and other trace elements to map the world’s ocean currents; those techniques made their way into an expanding body of knowledge in many other fields, even archaeology.

He suggested that radical climate swings could result in regional periods of cold weather if those warmth-bringing streams of ocean water were disrupted, as occurred in Europe with the most recent ice age, about 12,000 years ago. Hollywood distorted that theory into horror fare in the 2004 film “The Day After Tomorrow,” about a sudden, catastrophic onslaught of ice age conditions.

He sought not only to warn the world about the risks of climate change, but also to propose solutions. He argued to colleagues and to Congress that the world had to reduce its use of fossil fuels.

Pessimism about whether people would act to limit carbon dioxide emissions in time led him to search for ways to remove them from the atmosphere, and even to change the degree to which the atmosphere reflects light, through a kind of global dimmer switch to counteract the warming trend.

Broecker is best known for his “Climatic Change” paper in 1975. In it he noted that while the global climate had been experiencing a natural cycle of cooling, he predicted that planetary temperatures would soon begin to rise because of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 1976, they obligingly did, and the warming curve has correlated well with his projections.

He based the predictions, however, on a simplified model of the climate system, and he later realized, as he wrote in 2017, that some of his analysis had been flawed. He would later write a follow-up paper stating that, as accurate as his prediction turned out to be, “It was dumb luck.”

Still, the link between carbon dioxide and climate change, first suggested by researchers in the 19th century, has only grown more clear. NASA announced this month that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year since the advent of accurate record-keeping some 140 years ago. The five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five, and 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001.

Broecker could be combative and even curmudgeonly, recalled Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “He was quite opinionated and often fought hard to make his scientific interpretations the prevailing doctrine,” he said.

Calling him a “true Renaissance man” who had generated discoveries in a wide range of fields, Mann said Broecker had “held his competitors to a high standard by expressing honest skepticism and demanding convincing arguments and evidence.”

Wallace Smith Broecker was born on Nov. 29, 1931, and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, the second of five children of Wallace and Edith (Smith) Broecker. His father ran a gas station; his mother was a homemaker.

His parents, evangelical Christians, sent Wallace to Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in Illinois, where he met Grace Carder, whom he married in 1952. She died in 2007.

They had six children, five of whom survive him: Sandra Broecker, Cynthia Kennedy, Kathleen Wilson, Scott Broecker and Cheryl Keyes. In 2009, Broecker married Elizabeth Clark, who had worked with him in his laboratory; she also survives him, as do his sisters Judith Redekop and Bonnie Chapin, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

At Wheaton, he planned to become an actuary, but a friend helped him land an internship at what became the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia. It was there that he fell in love with scientific instruments and carbon dating, the technique that helps researchers determine the ages of materials that are tens of thousands of years old. He decided to transfer to Columbia from Wheaton.

He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in geology there and to join Columbia’s faculty in 1959.

Throughout his career, Broecker worked through problems with a pencil and paper, avoiding computers. He was dyslexic, and had staffers retype his manuscripts and emails, said Clark, who helped edit his papers. “He said he needed the pencil and paper because that’s how he thought,” she said in an interview.

The author of more than 500 research papers and some 17 books, Broecker received many science awards, including the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Prize money was often attached to the honors, his daughter Kennedy said, but he plowed most of it back into his research. “Money was never important to my father,” she said.

She said that his travels for research had kept him away from home much of the time, but that when he was home he had kept things lively, with treasure hunts in the house and croquet in the yard.

Though he was often referred to as the “grandfather of climate science” or the “father of global warming,” Broecker disdained such titles, which he said were better deserved by others. He even offered $200 to anyone who could find the phrase “global warming” used before he published his 1975 paper.

Some occurrences were found, but his usage had made the phrase stick. Still, he wrote, “It is my hope that the title “Father of Global Warming” does not appear on my tombstone.”

In any case, there will be no tombstone, Clark said. Instead, she intends to comply with his wishes that on her next ocean research trip, a colleague, Dr. Sidney R. Hemming, scatter his ashes at sea.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/obituaries/wallace-broecker-dead.html" id="f11ab5d1-73b0-3387-a954-b883de8a3f60">The New York Times</a>.

Dr. Wallace S. Broecker, one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change and the researcher who popularized the term “global warming,” died Monday in Manhattan. He was 87.

Wallace Broecker, 87, Dies; Sounded Early Warning on Climate Change

Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and 3 points since last March.

The rise in the number of Americans who say global warming is personally important to them was even sharper, jumping 9 percentage points since March to 72 percent, another record over the past decade.

The survey is the latest in a series from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. It was conducted online in November and December by Ipsos, which polled 1,114 American adults.

The results suggest that climate change has moved out of the realm of the hypothetical for a wide majority of Americans, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program.

“It is something that is activating an emotion in people and that emotion is worry,” he said. The survey found that 69 percent of Americans were “worried” about warming, an 8-point increase since March.

“People are beginning to understand that climate change is here in the United States, here in my state, in my community, affecting the people and places I care about, and now,” Leiserowitz said. “This isn’t happening in 50 years, 100 years from now.”

Asked whether people in the United States were being harmed by global warming “right now,” 48 percent of the respondents agreed, an increase of 9 percentage points since March. And 49 percent said they believed they would be personally harmed by global warming, a 7-point jump over the same period.

While public opinion on climate issues has fluctuated over the years, many of the recent changes were large enough to fall outside the margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

“I’ve never seen jumps in some of the key indicators like this,” Leiserowitz said.

Americans’ growing understanding of global warming is part of a long-term trend, he said. But he attributed the recent increase to a number of extreme weather events with plausible connections to a warming planet, and to the publicity that surrounded two major scientific reports on climate change last year.

Those reports, from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change and the U.S. government, laid out grim prospects for the future if action is not taken to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

The changes in public opinion over the last year were also tied to politics, Leiserowitz said, and to the efforts of President Donald Trump to deny the scientific evidence of climate change.

“Every time he talks about climate change he drives more media attention to the exact issue,” Leiserowitz said.

Political party affiliation is strongly associated with acceptance of the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, with Democrats tending to accept it and Republicans tending to reject it. But Trump’s approach to politics is so divisive, Leiserowitz said, that when he takes a strong stand on climate change and other issues, “he tends to drive a majority of the country in the opposite direction.”

In the poll, a record 62 percent of respondents understood that humans are the main cause of climate change, a 4-point rise since March; those attributing it mostly to natural causes were at a record-low 23 percent, a drop of 5 points over the same period.

About two-thirds of those surveyed believed global warming was affecting weather in the United States, with about half saying that warming made last year’s wildfires in the West and hurricanes Florence and Michael worse. The realm of attribution science — which studies how climate change influences individual weather events — is still evolving, but it has been well established that warming can make wildfires more frequent and hurricanes more destructive.

Disasters like these have brought once-abstract concepts home, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who was not involved in the survey.

“Today, nearly everyone can point to a way that they are personally witnessing and are being personally affected by the impacts of a changing climate in the places where they live,” she said.

Global warming and its effects are increasingly part of the national discussion, said Sunshine Menezes, an expert in climate communication at the University of Rhode Island and executive director of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting.

She noted that 41 percent of respondents in the poll said they talked about global warming with family and friends “often” or “occasionally,” and 56 percent said they heard about the topic in the news media at least once a month, a 13 percent increase since 2015. “It’s becoming harder and harder to avoid conversations about climate change,” she said.

Though it is impossible to attribute shifts in public opinion like this to any one factor, Menezes said, “I’m just thrilled that it’s happening.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/climate/americans-global-warming-poll.html" id="e18ed43f-5171-3bf4-a023-45e6e294ea19">The New York Times</a>.

Global Warming Concerns Rise Among Americans in New Poll

A record number of Americans understand that climate change is real, according to a new survey, and they are increasingly worried about its effects in their lives today.

Americans’ growing understanding of global warming is part of a long-term trend, he said. But he attributed the recent spike to a number of extreme weather events with plausible connections to a warming planet, and to the publicity that surrounded two major scientific reports on climate change last year.

About two-thirds of those surveyed believed global warming was affecting weather in the United States, with about half saying that warming made last year’s wildfires in the West and hurricanes Florence and Michael worse.

Record Numbers of Americans Say They Care About Global Warming, Poll Finds

It’s a question that will become only more urgent as climate change continues to fuel extreme weather. And it is especially resonant here in New Orleans, which has suffered untold extreme weather events in its 300-year history. The most damaging, of course, was 13 years ago, when the winds and rains of Hurricane Katrina breached the city’s flawed hurricane defenses.

It could apply to San Juan, Puerto Rico, still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria; to towns in California virtually erased by forest fires; to neighborhoods in Houston repeatedly soaked by rising waters.

The rebuilding question was asked by Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times and a native of New Orleans, during a discussion with Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor and lieutenant governor of Louisiana, and Walter Isaacson, the best-selling author and professor of history at Tulane University.

Baquet described driving around San Juan after Hurricane Maria and wondering whether some areas were so damaged and are so delicate that they should not be rebuilt. He said the same of driving around New York City after Hurricane Sandy.

It is a question many people asked about New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina, when so much of the city was under water and so much essential infrastructure had been destroyed. Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, said flatly that rebuilding “doesn’t make sense to me.”

That kind of thinking rankles Landrieu, who was Louisiana’s lieutenant governor during Hurricane Katrina. “The people in New Orleans get really defensive about this,” he said.

But, simply saying that people should not live in a place ignores reality, he said. “You can’t just pick up people and say, ‘You have to go somewhere else.’ The world doesn’t work that way.”

About 85 percent of Americans live in places that might be considered at risk, he said. “You have to protect yourself by making yourself stronger,” he added, with design and construction that help the population withstand and recover from disaster.

Isaacson, also a native New Orleanian, said the lessons of Hurricane Katrina had yet to be learned in other vulnerable parts of the country. Hospitals in the city had to be evacuated in 2005 because the hurricane caused extensive power blackouts — seven years later, during Hurricane Sandy, New York hospitals also had to be evacuated. Now, New York is doing what New Orleans had to do, taking steps like strengthening buildings, hardening power infrastructure and elevating generators.

To a large degree, New Orleans has made its way back since Hurricane Katrina. More than 17.7 million people visited the city in 2017 and spent an estimated $8.7 billion, a record. There are more restaurants for them to choose from than there were before the storm.

The city has regained roughly 81 percent of its pre-Katrina population, and many neighborhoods no longer show signs of the flood. But the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward still has less than half its pre-hurricane population.

The city still struggles with a stubbornly high crime rate, and roughly 27 percent of residents live in poverty. Rents are significantly higher since Hurricane Katrina, and so are housing prices and homeowner’s insurance.

The new mayor, LaToya Cantrell, took office this year and inherited a rickety water and drainage system that will be expensive to fix, yet that infrastructure will have to be upgraded for the city to thrive.

The nation has spent billions of dollars since Hurricane Katrina on levees, flood walls, gates and pump stations around the city. But even if that is effective, Landrieu said, “If climate change continues to do what it does, if sea levels continue to rise, if the land continues to shrink, in 30 or 40 years New Orleans is going to be an island protected by this $14.6 billion barrier that we have.”

Following are excerpts from a conversation between Baquet and Landrieu. They have been edited and condensed.

Baquet: After Katrina, I know the city has made a dramatic comeback. But let me ask a challenging question. What are the things that New Orleans failed to do? What were the lost opportunities?

Landrieu: As a mayor, there are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars. And given what we had to do, we did really great. But it’s obviously true that we haven’t solved all of our problems.

So what did we miss? The city was too corrupt in a state that was too corrupt. We let education get away from us; our kids were being educated in awful buildings, and they weren’t learning very much. Although crime and the murder rate continue to go down, it’s still way too high. Income inequality continues to plague us.

So if the city’s going to succeed like all great cities — Detroit’ll survive, Chicago, which was in a bad place in the ‘60s, has come back — you need a good couple of generations of really good leadership. The city’s got a long way to go. It’s still one of the great cities of the world. But from an infrastructure perspective, we’re in a really bad situation.

Baquet: Are there places that shouldn’t be rebuilt? I’m not just talking about New Orleans. I’ve spent six years in California — there are places where the wildfires are that people once didn’t live. Do you rebuild all of New Orleans East? Do you rebuild the parts of San Juan that are going to get whacked in the next storm?

Landrieu: We’re going to get hit by a lot of stuff. In the West, you’re going to continue to get wildfires; you’re going to get earthquakes. In the heartland, you’re going to get tornadoes. In the East,you’re going to get hurricanes. Eighty-five percent of the people in this country live in and around what we would call vulnerable areas.

If climate change continues to do what it does, in 30 or 40 years New Orleans is going to be an island protected by the $14.6 billion levy barrier that we have, and everything south of I-10 is going to be compromised.

If you back up a little bit — and don’t get too afraid — within 100 years, the parallel where Austin and Atlanta are, is going to be the southern part of the country. That requires you to do a lot of thinking about prevention, about where people can live, where to put massive infrastructure investments. And the country’s really not having an honest discussion about that.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/after-a-natural-disaster-is-it-better-to-rebuild-or-retreat.html" id="c2ae5072-1912-3d23-a1e5-c6dd817096da">The New York Times</a>.

After a Natural Disaster, Is It Better to Rebuild or Retreat?

NEW ORLEANS — Should communities hit over and over again by natural disasters — like hurricanes, fires, earthquakes and tornadoes — keep rebuilding? Or should they retreat from areas that are especially disaster prone?

John Schwartz

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