geophysical experiment" on a scale unseen in human history (Revelle and Suess, 1957). Revelle was to be an influential professor of Al Gore's at Harvard, with ramifications reverberating today (Gore, 2006). By the late 1960s, Syukuro (Suki) Manabe, to my mind, an "Einstein" of atmospheric science, had worked out the detailed physics of how greenhouse gases affect atmospheric temperature from the surface to the stratosphere, including the water vapor feedback that roughly doubles warming from CO2 alone (Manabe and Weatherald, 1967).

The discovery of global warming is a fascinating chapter in the history of science (Weart, 2003). Many phenomena that we are now seeing-heat going into the oceans, greater warming at the Arctic, volcanic and aerosol effects-were predicted decades ago. One group, including Steve Schneider, Richard Sommerville, Jim Hansen and this author, worked on this problem in the 1970s, primarily as an intellectual challenge in theoretical climate modeling and computer science at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), a NASA-funded research institute near Columbia University started by Robert Jastrow while he was still in his twenties.

Back then, global warming was not yet politicized as it is now (figure 1). A "back of the envelope" calculation I did at GISS in the 70s

suggested fossil fuel greenhouse warming would emerge from background temperature variations by the late 80s. So I thought it might be a good idea to publish some papers predicting this, which I did, as did colleagues at GISS and elsewhere. That limiting CO2 emissions to avoid adverse global warming might disrupt consumerist civilization and multinational energy companies while putting a damper on industrialization of China and India was implicit, but academic.

Ironically, in light of the conclusive support for it developed at the research institute he founded (Hansen et al., 2005), Jastrow was highly critical of the global warming hypothesis. He never published peer-reviewed climate research, in stunning contrast to the present GISS director, Jim Hansen; but, on taking early retirement from NASA, Jastrow and Fred Seitz of Rockefeller University founded the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C., a bastion of climate change deniers allied with the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and other conservative think tanks in opposition to US participation in the CO2emissions-limiting Kyoto Protocol-the first implementation of the UN Framework Climate Change Convention (FCCC).

The United States, China, and India have not ratified Kyoto. Indeed, 850 new coal-fired power plants to be built in these countries by 2012 will overwhelm Kyoto emission reductions by a factor of five (Clayton, 2004). Avoiding “dangerous human interference with the climate system," the goal of the UN FCCC, is a daunting technological challenge because 85 percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuel; and stabilizing global temperature at acceptable levels will require a revolutionary change in the world's energy systems (Hoffert et al., 1998; 2002; "Energy's Future," 2006). Although global warming is settled science, a public relations battle continues to rage.

Problems exist on both sides of the red-blue divide. In a searing critique of environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the National Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2005) argue that, despite major campaigns, environmental lobbies have had little success on the global warming front. The authors discount efforts by states in the United

States to create renewable energy portfolios with ambitious targets for alternate energy as so much public relations. They claim, with some justification, that "not one of America's environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis."

Why? Global warming is not only different in scale from prior environmental challenges (acid rain, heavy metal contamination, DDT, etc.)-its long-term planet-changing nature requires forethought and imagination to a much greater degree than the threats to which Homo sapiens has evolved adrenaline-pumping instinctive responses. The growth of human population, CO2 emissions, and global warming in the past millennium are very recent from a human evolutionary perspective. For the first time in its history, Homo sapiens has begun to interact more or less as a unit with the global environmental system (Eldridge, 1996). Because modern technology developed after we evolved biologically, we lack appropriate instincts to deal with it-these having been unlikely to confer survivability in our evolutionary past. By default, we have to deal with the climate/energy problem cognitively. So far, we are

not doing too well. As Carl Sagan observed, our reptilian brains motivate aggressive and tribal, as opposed to thoughtful, responses in ways we barely perceive and across many spheres of human behavior.

In the climate wars, deniers often get more vociferous as the evidence against their views gets stronger (Hoffert, 2003). The socalled hockey stick curve (developed by paleoclimatologist Mike Mann and colleagues) was recently attacked from the floor on Congress by Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), based on cherry-picked information suggesting their statistics were flawed reported in the Wall Street Journal. Would that Rep. Barton, and legislators in general were better educated in statistical and scientific issues. But my experience briefing legislators and aides is that scientific illiteracy and intellectual laziness are rampant. Educated mainly as lawyers, many do not get it that nature does not care about human politics. (Unfortunately, some academics that should know better likewise argue that science is more a "consensual reality" than an objective description of nature deduced by the scientific method.) Too few bright and imaginative students pursue careers in science and engineering today. We need such students badly.

The hockey stick curve that shows a dramatic recent uptick in global temperature with much more to come is easily perceived as a threat not only to Big Oil and Big Coal, but also to election campaign funds. Easier to blame the messenger than think critically about this. The general trend of the Mann et al. (2003) hockey stick was independently verified by other researchers in a recent report by the National Research Council (NRC, 2006). Overwhelmingly, research-active climate scientists know we are entering climatic territory unseen in human history (Hansen, 2006). Our rapidly melting planet is so dominated by humankind's emissions that the present climatic era is being called the anthropocene (Crutzen and Ramanathan, 2003).

Most knowledgeable researchers are very concerned about global warming. Some, including this author, argue for research and development programs on an Apollo space program-like scale to create lowcarbon alternate energy supply and demand-reducing technologies in

time to make a difference (Hoffert et al., 1998, 2002; Rees, 2006). This effort should include prompt implementation of energy conservation, efficiency, and existing alternate energy sources (Lovins, 1989; Metz et al., 2001; Pacala and Socolow, 2004; Socolow, 2006).

Whatever the deep evolutionary reasons, the climate/energy issue competes for attention with other problems in the mind of the average citizen. A frequently asked question is: "Why even care about global warming and climate change?" The worst effects occur decades to centuries from now. In cost-benefit accounting, many economists strongly discount the present value of adverse future impacts and "externalize" (that is, neglect) the cost of environmentally degrading the global commons (Daly and Townsend, 1994). Economics is, of course, a legitimate branch of behavioral biology dealing with the allocation of scarce resources by Homo sapiens, one of millions of biological species inhabiting this planet. But, so far, in its predictive mode, it resembles astrology more than a hard science. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith went so far as to say, “The only reason for economists to produce forecasts is to make astrology look respectable" (Jaccard, 2005). Undaunted, Bjorn Lomborg, the "skeptical environmentalist" (Lomborg, 2001), convened a group of economists to prioritize investments in various challenges facing humankind. The group concluded in its "Copenhagen Consensus" that climate change, even if real, is near the bottom (Bohannan, 2004). Reading the group's findings, one is struck by how evolutionarily blind our species can be to existential threats. Among the problems with this indifference-noted by Harvard energy policy analyst John Holdren, and in his film and book, An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore—is that climate change is more an ethical than an economics problem.

An even more basic flaw to this physical scientist is that the environmental constraint of global warming on energy was entirely missed by the Copenhagen group. The late Nobel laureate Rick Smalley astutely observed that, although civilization has many problems, energy is key to them all. Smalley's list of problems encompasses energy, water, food, environment (including global warming), poverty, terrorism and war,