OAKLAND, Calif. — IF you were looking for ways to increase
public skepticism about global warming, you could hardly do better than the
forthcoming nine-part series on climate change and natural disasters, starting
this Sunday on Showtime. A trailer for “Years of Living Dangerously” is
terrifying, replete with images of melting glaciers, raging wildfires and
rampaging floods. “I don’t think scary is the right word,” intones one voice.
“Dangerous, definitely.”
Showtime’s producers undoubtedly have the best of intentions. There are serious
long-term risks associated with rising greenhouse gas emissions, ranging from
ocean acidification to sea-level rise to decreasing agricultural output.
But there is every reason to believe that efforts to raise public concern about
climate change by linking it to natural disasters will backfire. More than a
decade’s worth of research suggests that fear-based appeals about climate change
inspire denial, fatalism and polarization.
For instance, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” popularized
the idea that today’s natural disasters are increasing in severity and frequency
because of human-caused global warming. It also contributed to public backlash
and division. Since 2006, the number of Americans telling Gallup that the media
was exaggerating global warming grew to 42 percent today from about 34 percent.
Meanwhile, the gap between Democrats and Republicans on whether global warming
is caused by humans rose to 42 percent last year from 26 percent in 2006,
according to the Pew Research Center.
Other factors contributed. Some conservatives and fossil-fuel interests
questioned the link between carbon emissions and global warming. And beginning
in 2007, as the country was falling into recession, public support for
environmental protection declined.
Still, environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate
change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks
Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global
Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many
Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be
weathered, not prevented.
Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through
the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency
standards.
Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A
frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the
scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale
representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook
for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not
motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to
trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory
experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to
use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the
problem.
Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an
obligation to convey the alarming facts.
But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming
simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves
and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme
weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that
this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural
disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and
wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel
noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”
Claims that current disasters are connected to climate change do seem to
motivate many liberals to support action. But they alienate conservatives in
roughly equal measure.
What works, say environmental pollsters and researchers, is focusing on popular
solutions. Climate advocates often do this, arguing that solar and wind can
reduce emissions while strengthening the economy. But when renewable energy
technologies are offered as solutions to the exclusion of other low-carbon
alternatives, they polarize rather than unite.
One recent study, published by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project,
found that conservatives become less skeptical about global warming if they
first read articles suggesting nuclear energy or geoengineering as solutions.
Another study, in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2012, concluded that
“communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better
society” rather than “on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.”
Nonetheless, virtually every major national environmental organization continues
to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them
an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key
climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of
technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely
feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated.
After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and
natural gas off the table?
While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning
down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve
efforts to slow global warming.
Ted Nordhaus is the chairman and Michael Shellenberger
is the president of the Breakthrough Institute,
an environmental research organization.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 9, 2014,
on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline:
CALL me a
converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate
studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming.
Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists,
I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the
rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost
entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and
objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I
founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average
temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit
over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over
the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of
this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic
consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only
that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It
was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming
before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a
substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.
Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed
largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth
land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised
by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural
data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of
the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor
station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from
human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and
hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially
troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the
emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such
events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface
for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and
other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the
“flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in
our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic
rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math
functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising
functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of
atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in
polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the
fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots.
That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility
that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of
cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the
temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes.
This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from
satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun
very little.
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a
better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with
the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation.
These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they
raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match
the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second
greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our
analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge
computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable
parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape
of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.
It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not
most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or
just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my
skepticism about them hasn’t changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of
hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for
intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan
glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently
no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period”
or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical
records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the
United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world,
so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.
The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now
online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from
1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide,
but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have
undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a
paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the
data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the
scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any
errors of data or analysis.
What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature
should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady
pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the
oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has
averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal
(it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could
take place in less than 20 years.
Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally
accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had
not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the
scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the
difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what
can and should be done.
Leaked
documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is
planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public
schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the
nation’s culture wars.
The documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland
Institute, outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the
scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of
the planet. “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist
perspective,” one document said.
While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the
campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing
for battle even before the leak. Efforts to undermine climate-science
instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear
a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
In a statement, the Heartland Institute acknowledged that some of its internal
documents had been stolen. But it said its president had not had time to read
the versions being circulated on the Internet on Tuesday and Wednesday and was
therefore not in a position to say whether they had been altered.
Heartland did declare one two-page document to be a forgery, although its tone
and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not
dispute. In an apparent confirmation that much of the material, more than 100
pages, was authentic, the group apologized to donors whose names became public
as a result of the leak.
The documents included many details of the group’s operations, including
salaries, recent personnel actions and fund-raising plans and setbacks. They
were sent by e-mail to leading climate activists this week by someone using the
name “Heartland insider” and were quickly reposted to many climate-related Web
sites.
Heartland said the documents were not from an insider but were obtained by a
caller pretending to be a board member of the group who was switching to a new
e-mail address. “We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison
for these crimes,” the organization said.
Although best-known nationally for its attacks on climate science, Heartland
styles itself as a libertarian organization with interests in a wide range of
public-policy issues. The documents say that it expects to raise $7.7 million
this year.
The documents raise questions about whether the group has undertaken partisan
political activities, a potential violation of federal tax law governing
nonprofit groups. For instance, the documents outline “Operation Angry Badger,”
a plan to spend $612,000 to influence the outcome of recall elections and
related fights this year in Wisconsin over the role of public-sector unions.
Tax lawyers said Wednesday that tax-exempt groups were allowed to undertake some
types of lobbying and political education, but that because they are subsidized
by taxpayers, they are prohibited from direct involvement in political
campaigns.
The documents also show that the group has received money from some of the
nation’s largest corporations, including several that have long favored action
to combat climate change.
The documents typically say that those donations were earmarked for projects
unrelated to climate change, like publishing right-leaning newsletters on drug
and technology policy. Nonetheless, several of the companies hastened on
Wednesday to disassociate themselves from the organization’s climate stance.
“We absolutely do not endorse or support their views on the environment or
climate change,” said Sarah Alspach, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline, a
multinational drug company shown in the documents as contributing $50,000 in the
past two years to support a medical newsletter.
A spokesman for Microsoft, another listed donor, said that the company believes
that “climate change is a serious issue that demands immediate worldwide
action.” The company is shown in the documents as having contributed $59,908
last year to a Heartland technology newsletter. But the Microsoft spokesman,
Mark Murray, said the gift was not a cash contribution but rather the value of
free software, which Microsoft gives to thousands of nonprofit groups.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Heartland documents was what they did
not contain: evidence of contributions from the major publicly traded oil
companies, long suspected by environmentalists of secretly financing efforts to
undermine climate science.
But oil interests were nonetheless represented. The documents say that the
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation contributed $25,000 last year and was
expected to contribute $200,000 this year. Mr. Koch is one of two brothers who
have been prominent supporters of libertarian causes as well as other charitable
endeavors. They control Koch Industries, one of the country’s largest private
companies and a major oil refiner.
The documents suggest that Heartland has spent several million dollars in the
past five years in its efforts to undermine climate science, much of that coming
from a person referred to repeatedly in the documents as “the Anonymous Donor.”
A guessing game erupted Wednesday about who that might be.
The documents say that over four years ending in 2013, the group expects to have
spent some $1.6 million on financing the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change, an entity that publishes periodic reports attacking climate
science and holds lavish annual conferences. (Environmental groups refer to the
conferences as “Denialpalooza.”)
Heartland’s latest idea, the documents say, is a plan to create a curriculum for
public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and budgeted
at $200,000 this year. The curriculum would claim, for instance, that “whether
humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”
It is in fact not a scientific controversy. The vast majority of climate
scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate and
putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the
exact magnitude of that risk. Whether and how to rein in emissions of greenhouse
gases has become a major political controversy in the United States, however.
The National Center for Science Education, a group that has had notable success
in fighting for accurate teaching of evolution in the public schools, has
recently added climate change to its agenda in response to pleas from teachers
who say they feel pressure to water down the science.
Mark S. McCaffrey, programs and policy director for the group, which is in
Oakland, Calif., said the Heartland documents revealed that “they continue to
promote confusion, doubt and debate where there really is none.”
Steven Yaccino
contributed reporting from Chicago.
I agree strongly that “we need to take steps to mitigate climate change — just
in case Governor Perry is wrong.”
The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, in what has become known
as Pascal’s wager, suggested that even people who did not believe in God should
act as if they did, since being wrong could be catastrophic.
I would say to the climate skeptics: If you do not believe in climate change but
act as if you did, even if you are right, the result would be a society with
clean, sustainable jobs, less dependence on Mideast oil and healthier lives. But
if you are wrong and we do not act immediately, the results would be
catastrophic.
Thomas L. Friedman is obviously correct to point out that Gov. Rick Perry’s and
Representative Michele Bachmann’s views on climate change are wrong. But it’s
clear that they won’t have their minds changed simply by showing them more
scientific data or by explaining to them that 97 percent of the most published
climate researchers — the group of people on the planet most knowledgeable about
the subject — agree that human activities are causing rapid climate change.
The problem is that their denial of reality is a byproduct of a culture that
marginalizes the scientific method as a way of thinking and promotes faith as a
virtue, even if it is in direct opposition to the facts. Changing their minds
about climate change will take more than presenting the evidence for it. It will
require a seismic shift in the way they choose to understand reality.
MARK BESSOUDO
Toronto, Sept. 15, 2011
To the Editor:
Like many people, I don’t know if the climate is actually changing or, if it is,
whether or not it is caused by carbon emissions, agricultural practices, solar
activity or even cow flatulence. I do know, though, that like most people who
want to breathe clean air and have a healthy planet, I strongly support
realistic, comprehensible and well-enforced regulations that will protect our
environment without stifling economic growth.
I think it is called common sense.
VAUGHN GILBERT
McKeesport, Pa., Sept. 14, 2011
To the Editor:
Thomas L. Friedman claims there is dispositive scientific proof of climate
change. The fires in Texas are a result of droughts, caused by the hottest Texas
summer on record, which was caused by climate change, which was caused by
manmade carbon emissions.
There’s just one little problem. The previous temperature record was set in
1934. This raises the question, if hot weather and droughts today are a result
of climate change caused by increased manmade carbon emissions, what were the
hot weather and droughts (remember the Dust Bowl?) in 1934 caused by? Maybe the
science isn’t so irrefutable.
FREDRIC MORCK
Redwood City, Calif., Sept. 14, 2011
To the Editor:
Thomas L. Friedman suggests that Representative Michele Bachmann and Gov. Rick
Perry are crazy for denying the existence of global warming. They’re not crazy;
they are ideologues. After all, it’s nearly impossible to deny that the planet
is warming. The only real debate is whether global warming is caused by humans.
Mr. Friedman says America needs to implement a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade
system to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases, which cause global warming.
I agree, but now is not the time for that regulation. For the 14 million
Americans who are currently unemployed, Washington has one job and that’s
getting American workers back to work. Increased environmental regulation would
only add to the uncertainty of economic conditions, discouraging corporate
investment in job creation.
MIKE BROST
Eau Claire, Wis., Sept. 14, 2011
To the Editor:
I can’t help but note that politicians like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, who
demand absolute scientific proof that climate change is real, are the same ones
who treat as undisputed fact the assumption that tax cuts for the wealthy create
jobs for the unemployed.
September
13, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Every time
I listen to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Michele Bachmann of
Minnesota talk about how climate change is some fraud perpetrated by scientists
trying to gin up money for research, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite
movie lines that Jack Nicholson delivers to his needy neighbor who knocks on his
door in the film “As Good As It Gets.” “Where do they teach you to talk like
this?” asks Nicholson. “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
Thanks Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy
right now. I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate
change while his own state is on fire — after the worst droughts on record have
propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by
the Texas Forest Service said last week: “No one on the face of this earth has
ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”
Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really “global
weirding.” The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the
dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine
Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluable
Climateprogress.org blog: “As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more
water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some
places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there
is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a
drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been
50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher
evaporation rates.”
CNN reported on Sept. 9 that “Texas had the distinction of experiencing the
warmest summer on record of any state in America, with an average of 86.8
degrees. Dallas residents sweltered for 40 consecutive days of grueling 100-plus
degree temperatures. ... Temperature-related energy demands soared more than 22
percent above the norm this summer, the largest increase since record-keeping of
energy demands began more than a century ago.”
There is still much we don’t know about how climate change will unfold, but it
is no hoax. We need to start taking steps, as our scientists urge, “to manage
the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” If you want a quick primer on the
latest climate science, tune into “24 Hours of Reality.” It is a worldwide live,
online update that can be found at climaterealityproject.org and will be going
on from Sept. 14-15, over 24 hours, with contributors from 24 time zones.
Not only has the science of climate change come under attack lately, so has the
economics of green jobs. Here the critics have a point — sort of. I wasn’t
surprised to read that the solar panel company Solyndra, which got $535 million
in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy to make solar panels in
America, filed for bankruptcy protection two weeks ago and laid off 1,100
workers. This story is an embarrassment to the green jobs movement, but the
death by bankruptcy was a collaboration of the worst Democratic and Republican
impulses.
How so? There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce “green jobs,”
and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price
of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained
private sector investment in, renewables. Without a carbon tax or gasoline tax
or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty
fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will
remain a hobby.
President Obama has chosen not to push for a price signal for political reasons.
He has opted for using regulations and government funding. In the area of
regulation, he deserves great credit for just pushing through new fuel economy
standards that will ensure that by 2025 the average U.S. car will get the
mileage (and have the emissions) of today’s Prius hybrid. But elsewhere, Obama
has relied on green subsidies rather than a price signal. Some of this has
really helped start-ups leverage private capital, but you also get Solyndras.
The G.O.P. has blocked any price signal and fought every regulation. The result
too often is taxpayer money subsidizing wonderful green innovation, but with no
sustainable market within which these companies can scale.
Let’s fix that. We need revenue to balance the budget. We need sustainable
clean-tech jobs. We need less dependence on Mideast oil. And we need to take
steps to mitigate climate change — just in case Governor Perry is wrong. The
easiest way to do all of this at once is with a gasoline tax or price on carbon.
Would you rather cut Social Security and Medicare or pay a little more per
gallon of gas and make the country stronger, safer and healthier? It still
amazes me that our politicians have the courage to send our citizens to war but
not to ask the public that question.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one
exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or
so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that
humans are largely responsible for global warming.
The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on
carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of
denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed
findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which
climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.
Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron
Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.”
Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not
sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the
Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.
A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be
singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on
the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as
out-of-control taxers.
In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding
principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying
its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked,
destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary
citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was
also remarkably heavy-handed.
According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr.
Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections
on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd
Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as
“brutal.”)
The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by
federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty
into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.
Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of
Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman
(who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the
energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual
checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.
In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most
definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney
insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to
slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which
Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that
with a straight face anymore.”
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush
promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break
through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s,
Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental
problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire
political party parroting the Cheney line.
Global warming scientists
are under intense pressure to water down findings,
and
are then accused of silencing their critics
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian
George Monbiot
The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of
climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets
published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel's reports are
conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a
scientific document can be.
Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and
seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their interests.
The scientists fight back, but they always have to make concessions. The report
released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that "North America is
expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial
ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events".
This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the rightwing press:
that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the
science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own
failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists no explanations are
required. The world's most conservative scientific body has somehow been
transformed into a conspiracy of screaming demagogues.
This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the wrong way round.
In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom
Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation is repeated that climate scientists and
environmentalists are trying to "shut down debate". Those who say that man-made
global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.
Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest
any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the Royal Society and
by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower
ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort
climate science. These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They
were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a
censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of
free speech.
In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4's film The Great Global
Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to "invisible censorship". He seems to
have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of prime-time television to expound his
theory that climate change is a green conspiracy. What did this censorship
amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the
Independent Television Commission. It found that "the views of the four
complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective
editing" and that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the
programmes when they agreed to take part". This, apparently, makes him a martyr.
If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has
been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research
demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened
and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.
The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists
working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that
they had experienced one of the following constraints: 1. Pressure to eliminate
the words "climate change", "global warming", or other similar terms from their
communications; 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors that
"changed the meaning of scientific findings"; 3. Statements by officials at
their agencies that misrepresented their findings; 4. The disappearance or
unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to
climate; 5. New or unusual administrative requirements that impair
climate-related work; 6. Situations in which scientists have actively objected
to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to
change scientific findings. They reported 435 incidents of political
interference over the past five years.
In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a report by the
Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references to studies showing that
global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study,
partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, that suggested that
temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section
altogether.
After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with
more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to
the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs
officer at NOAA rang the station and said that Knutson was "too tired" to
conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the "White House said
no". All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed
there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes.
Last year Nasa's top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported that his bosses
were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by
Nasa's PR officials that there would be "dire consequences" if he continued to
call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases.
Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service told its
scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand "the
administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will
not be speaking on or responding to these issues".
At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former White
House aide who had previously worked at the American Petroleum Institute,
admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate
change on behalf of the Bush administration. Though not a scientist, he had
struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases
suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming.
The guardians of free speech in Britain aren't above attempting a little
suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from
the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening us with libel proceedings
after I challenged his claims about climate science. On two of these occasions
he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man
who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to
ExxonMobil offends the corporation's "right of free speech".
After Martin Durkin's film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured,
Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been
misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter from Durkin's production
company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make
a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled.
Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people complain of
censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?
