Rafe Pomerance, the Paul Revere of Climate Change, Dies at 79

[H simmens]

Hats off to the New York Times for also recognizing Rafe’s importance with this fine obituary on its home page. See the gift link below. 

”He recognized that an enormous amount of warming was already baked in to the atmosphere, and he became a proponent of geoengineering — technological efforts to suck carbon from the air, which is controversial among environmentalists.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/science/rafe-pomerance-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.k1A.A7Wf.R2c3Jf8zoWjA&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Herb

Herb Simmens

Author  of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"

 Kim Stanley Robinson

@herbsimmens

[Douglas Grandt]

Herb et al,

Nice obit … and an informative history!

Sad excerpt …

<< Once in office, Mr. Bush appointed some climate advocates, notably the E.P.A. chief, William K. Reilly. But opponents of taking action, including John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, who rejected climate science and warned of damage to the economy if limits were put on fossil fuel use, won the day. The administration’s delegates to the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 1989 in the Netherlands, opposed cuts or even a freeze on global emissions.  

Mr. Pomerance attended that conference with no official role. Three decades later, he told Dædalus that it was a lost opportunity.

“We worked toward getting governments to commit to hitting certain emission targets over certain time scales,” he said. “That would have been the beginning of a major step toward a solution. We still don’t have that commitment in the United States.” >>

🙁

On May 24, 2026, at 4:05 PM, H simmens <hsim...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Aria Mckenna]

Wow. So glad they featured him like this.

 Quite an interesting last encouraging note, in regards to how many people at least know about the crisis at this point in time. Of course we all recognize the escalated.Urgency. 

I can't help but find it incredibly ironic that sucking carbon out of the atmosphere would be considered geoengineering, while putting it up into the atmosphere is not???? 

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[Ron Baiman]

Thanks Doug. I kind of remember this history a bit. Sunnunu as I recall was a big nuclear power advocate and I think had some role in supporting the Michael Milken junk bond funded Seabrook reactor that destroyed a beautiful north shore beach and became a dangerous and massive albatross for the state. Also, ironically the Kyoto mandatory cap and trade plan was developed and negotiated by the Argentinian who born economist Graciela Chichilnisky who was negotiating for the US delegation (the late Peter Eisenberg’s colleague at Columbia and co-founder of Global Thermostat). Graciela also (based on  the account in her book Reversing Climate Change) also initiated and negotiated 45Q with help from RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. But not extending Kyoto was a huge setback: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O4-xMSxxr3otWu0Qx-BZwSFtzvZKfkA5/view?usp=drivesdk

Best,

Ron 

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On May 24, 2026, at 3:56 PM, 'Douglas Grandt' via Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Aria Mckenna]

Thx Jim. Karen and I will be recording and discussing this further on Tuesday.  His work to establish an upper limit should be critical right now. 

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[Michael MacCracken]

Dear Doug et al.--I don't recall which modeler whom it was that spent a lot of time seeking to educate Sununu and also the Science adviser, Alan Bromley--actually working with him to construct a model.  I think it was early in my tenure heading the Office of the US Global Change Research Program, so early-mid 1990s, that I was invited to explain climate science at a meeting of the heads of the science associations, an association that Alan Bromley had become president of after his role as science adviser, and I was warned to be prepared. It all went well.

And as to the George H. W. Bush Administration, do note that it was the one (led various government and science officials that accepted that climate change was coming) that negotiated the founding of the IPCC in 1989 or so (it was never to be an advocacy entity and still is not--and at the time there was no convincing observational evidence of climate change in 1989--that took until the 1995 IPCC report and was quite controversial at the time--the whole Ben Santer affair on the wording of the chapter). The Bush I Administration in 1992 also was active in negotiating the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and got it signed by virtually every nation in the world and approved by the US Congress (Bush's slogan was something like 'I'm going to solve the greenhouse effect with the White House effect' and he did convene an international meeting at the White House on the issue and the two main organizers cleverly got past Sununu to arrange things.

The UNFCCC's first call was for nations to, on a voluntary basis, get their emissions back to 1990 level by the year 2000 and to begin negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1997. The main message of the draft of the first US quadrennial report to the UNFCCC due in 2001 being prepared by the Clinton-Gore Administration that voluntary measures during the 1990s in the US (which were all that the Republican Congress would allow) were not adequate to limit emissions--the George W. Bush Administration and took that message out of the report although the emissions levels reported in the report clearly showed that the US had not been able to return emissions to their 1990 levels and the Kyoto Protocol never got submitted to the Senate for approval as the Republican Congress required that a plan also be submitted to be able to meet the commitment and the Republican Congress (nor environmental groups--which I think was a big mistake) would not approve the measures that the Clinton-Gore Administration had for doing so.

Best, Mike

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[Douglas Grandt]

Mike,

Thanks. Your mention of the “the whole Ben Santer affair” caught my eye in particular, as he and I were among The Climate Project's first batch of “presenters” trained by Al Gore (you were on stage as his science advisor.)

Ben shared several key facts that Gore did not mention—he was quite knowledgeable and articulate. But not knowing Ben’s entire story, I just now googled and found this article which explains:

IPCC: the dirty tricks climate scientists faced in three decades since first report

Published: August 27, 2020 6:57am EDT

The following excerpt fills in what I didn’t know, and I share for any who are not familiar with Ben’s role.

Best,

Doug

The path to the summit

The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, had been worrying scientists since the 1970s. The discovery of the "ozone hole" above Antarctica had given atmospheric scientists enormous credibility and clout among the public, and an international treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals causing the problem, was swiftly signed.

The Reagan White House worried that a treaty on CO, might happen as quickly, and set about ensuring the official scientific advice guiding leaders at the negotiations was under at least partial control. So emerged the intergovernmental - rather than international - panel on climate change, in 1988.

Already before Sundsvall, in 1989, figures in the automotive and fossil fuel industries of the US had set up the Global Climate Coalition to argue against rapid action and to cast doubt on the evidence. Alongside thinktanks, such as the George Marshall Institute, and trade bodies, such as the Western Fuels Association, it kept up a steady stream of publishing in the media - including a movie - to discredit the science.

But their efforts to discourage political commitment were only partially successful. The scientists held firm, and a climate treaty was agreed in 1992. And so attention turned to the scientists themselves.

The Serengeti strategy

In 1996, there were sustained attacks on climate scientist Ben Santer, who had been responsible for synthesising text in the IPCC's second assessment report. He was accused of having "tampered with" wording and somehow "twisting" the intent of IPCC authors by Fred Seitz of the Global Climate Coalition.

In the late 1990s, Michael Mann, whose famous "hockey stick" diagram of global temperatures was a key part of the third assessment report, came under fire from right-wing thinktanks and even the Attorney General of Virginia. Mann called this attempt to pick on scientists perceived to be vulnerable to pressure "the Serengeti strategy".

As Mann himself wrote

By singling out a sole scientist, it is possible for the forces of "anti-science" to bring many more resources to bear on one individual, exerting enormous pressure from multiple directions at once, making defence difficult. It is similar to what happens when a group of lions on the Serengeti seek out a vulnerable individual zebra at the edge of a herd.

As the evidence became ever more compelling, the attacks on scientists escalated.

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On May 25, 2026, at 10:03 AM, 'Michael MacCracken' via Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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