They’d never seen a heat wave that bad. What was really in line with greenhouse theory was the fact that the temperature didn’t go down at night. Nighttime temperatures are affected more than daytime temperatures when it comes to extreme heat.

And the storms that passed over Europe in 1990 — at the time when high winds blew hard enough to knock the roof off of a Cornwall school — that storm was “different” too?

Yes. And certainly, those storms had a big effect, even on BP, the oil company. They acknowledged that the greenhouse effect exists, which is a big thing. If you ask the man who used to run Amoco how they came to their decision to acknowledge the greenhouse effect, one of the things he brings up are those terrible storms in Europe and Britain.

Have any other oil companies acknowledged the greenhouse effect?

Shell.

And there have been other corporations that have acknowledged it.

Yes, but many corporations, not oil companies: Toyota, Lockheed, Maytag, 3M, Weyerhauser.

I thought it was interesting that the Swiss reinsurance company, Swiss RE, is conducting its own research on the greenhouse effect.

Yes, they’re panicked. At Kyoto and at the climate conferences, more and more, you see representatives from insurance companies who are urging countries to do something because they have watched their losses skyrocket.

Especially in the last 15 years?

Yes, gigantic, enormous, unprecedented losses all related to weather. Those guys are desperate to figure out whether this will get worse.

These corporations jump up and say that they’re going to consider being responsible, but the U.S. government still hesitates in huge ways. Which politicians have been good about it?

Tim Wirth and Al Gore were great. Under the last three administrations, the same basic dynamics have affected the way the White House has handled climate change. The EPA always thinks that the White House should do more about it, and the Treasury Department always thinks less. And the Treasury Department, regardless of whether it’s a Democratic or Republican administration, worries that actions taken to alleviate the greenhouse effect will severely hurt the economy. The EPA always says no, we have to do it anyway and it could even benefit the economy — which is my opinion.

You are very careful to note how much all this damage costs. Is there a figure for how much the ’90s weather damage cost the United States?

There are all kinds of direct and indirect effects of weather damage. Rebuilding a road — you can quantify that. People getting West Nile virus — that gets a little tougher. Sending the military to a part of the world that has been destabilized by an environmental problem mixes it up further. Do you figure in whether the insurance rates have gone up on your home if you live in Florida or the Carolinas? Do you figure in whether your insurance has been canceled in either of those places? There are so many things.

Do you think the public will get angrier if the government doesn’t take action on global warming?

There have been financial analysts who have suggested that the public will be so angry when global warming is proven, that they will seek legal retribution against oil or coal companies the same way they did against tobacco companies. People are always angry when they’ve been fooled, so if they start to think so, then they’ll do something.

What was also shocking about many of these disasters in the U.S. was that it didn’t seem that the government was responsive enough to the damage. In the Missouri floods of 1993, they needed $12 billion and the federal government gave them $6 billion. Are we thinking progressively about this at all?

George W. Bush doesn’t believe that global warming exists. He said it in his debate with Al Gore. He’s not sure if the greenhouse effect exists. That’s the derivation point of federal policy. If you look at the new energy policy, it favors coal plants and suggests deregulating some of the old Clean Air Act. Look at the way the Republicans have refused to change the fuel requirements on SUVs.

Do you think that Clinton did what he could? Were his initiatives derailed?

There are two schools of thought on that. One is that the administration caved to the Treasury Department, and the other is that the Clinton administration would never have been able to get anything through Congress. Even the Kyoto Protocol, which the Clinton administration negotiated and signed, was never brought to the Senate for ratification. They voted something like 95 to nothing that they wouldn’t ratify it. In many ways, the Clinton administration’s hands were tied. But in some ways they weren’t aggressive in terms of using the White House as a bully pulpit for educating Americans. Clinton and Gore talked about it a lot, but I think they could have been more aggressive.

Do you blame oil and coal companies for influencing our politicians?

I don’t blame corporations for the greenhouse effect. What we’re really talking about are the energy habits of Americans. You and I and most people we know use more energy than we should. We run our heat, we leave our lights on, we keep our computer on, we have a bigger car. We’re energy and power gluttons. The movie “A.I.” starts off showing New York under water and talking about the greenhouse effect and what happened in the past. The movie starts in the future. But then if you look at the energy habits of the people in the movie, you realize that they didn’t learn anything.

It’s a gigantic question of supporting research and development of alternative forms of energy. It’s unlikely that the people in the U.S. are going to cut back that extremely, but what the administration should be doing is coming up with a space program-size project for new kinds of energy.

BP has a solar energy project. They were expecting to have solar energy panels in 2001 on all their U.S. BP stations as a way of demonstrating how effective it could be. I’m unsure whether they’re still on schedule because I haven’t seen any of these things yet, but that was their hope. The reason they wanted to do that was because if you put a solar energy system on your house, it’s tremendously expensive. One way to cut down on the expense is if you mass produce it. BP is trying to jump-start that.

The problem is eventually you’re phasing out fossil fuels and that’s where you cut down on the greenhouse effect. And the funny thing is, whoever develops a solar energy program will be our trillionaire country of the future.

Are Americans the biggest abusers?

Yes, Americans are the biggest users of energy.

Didn’t a U.S. senator express surprise to the head of India’s Tata Institute when he learned how little energy the average Indian used compared to the average American? He said something like, “How do you manage?”

Well, in India “headload” — how much wood you can carry on your head — is a legal term. They don’t talk about kilowatt hours. But India and China will be big consumers of energy in the next 50 years.

It seems like at this point there are two questions: Is the earth warming? And, are humans causing that warming? Everyone believes that the answer to the first one is yes, right? Or are there still scientists and skeptics — besides lawyers for coal companies — who will say that this isn’t happening?

Definitely. That’s the nature of scientists. They disagreed the day before the moon rocket went off and the day before the first nuclear explosion and before the first heart transplant. The problem is that politicians on one side use this disagreement as an excuse to do nothing. Since there’s never going to be complete agreement, we might go forever on this. There are scientists who believe that the role of clouds will alleviate the warming. And those who say we’re still coming out of an ice age. And those who believe that natural climate variation is responsible for the weather and not humans. And those who believe that even if humans are involved, the effect is so minuscule compared to the natural one that the whole thing is ridiculous to talk about.

But the models do show that since industrialization the earth has changed at a faster pace than it used to. To what extent are we too late?

Too late?

Have we set forth changes in the earth that we can’t reverse?

I don’t know. At what point do you hit critical threshold? See, these are the scary questions that are not being addressed, and these are the scary questions that we’re not even taking out insurance against. What happens if there’s a runaway greenhouse effect?

If we wanted to reverse the greenhouse effect, how much emissions would we have to cut back?

Globally, the figure is something like 70 percent. What we want to do is hold it back while we develop alternative forms of energy. Carbon is increasing in the atmosphere, the automobile industry is surging in China, the world population is exploding in Asia, developing countries want the same thing that we have in America — they want air conditioning and a car too. Every single manufactured item you can think of contributes to the greenhouse effect. If you buy a pair of shoes, it came from a factory. The factory needed energy. You order water in a restaurant; it comes out of a faucet that was produced and that took energy. This conversation on the phone. Salon.com uses energy. My computer’s on and, look, I left the light on. It’s true. I’m going to go turn it off.