For the past 2½ terms in team climate, and prior to that in
my professional world, I’ve wondered with mild curiosity and increasing
frustration how we are still “debating” climate change. No longer are we calling it global warming (“we
had the coldest winter in ages!” is a common rebuttal; global weirding seems a more
appropriate term), but semantics aside, there is still an outspoken faction of
the American people who don’t believe this is a problem.
How does this happen?
Why are so many seemingly intelligent, educated people so vehemently
denying that a) climate change is happening (or even that the greenhouse effect
does in fact exist); or b) that it’s human-caused? For perspective, I’ve started reading climate
denier sites and articles, and especially the comments, to better understand
this strong conviction of my fellow Americans.
Some of the more entertaining comments I’ve come across:
- Climate change believers are “political radicals who want to destroy western civilization so that they can bring to fruition their dream of a great socialist utopia. It has nothing to do with science.”
- “GHGs don’t cause warming any more than insulating my house causes it to heat up.”
- “Applying scientific argument to political BS is like expecting math rules to apply in English class. The name of the joint is your tipoff: InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change.”
- “For the rest of us the “globalony” issue is just a global IQ test. If you believe mankind can affect the global climate either way, you fail the test. And really, there is no need to get into the weeds on this issue. If you believe man can affect the global climate, you are an easily fooled imbecile.”
There seem to be constant media battles on climate
change. An article last month on Fox
News takes a 10 year leveling temperature reading to “disprove” the data from
the past several hundred thousand years: “Climate
change skeptics seize on reports showing temperatures leveling”. "The idea that CO2 is the tail that wags
the dog is no longer scientifically tenable," said Marc Morano of
ClimateDepot.com, a website devoted to countering the prevailing acceptance of
man-made global warming. "In the peer-reviewed literature we're
finding hundreds of factors influence global temperature, everything from ocean
cycles to the tilt of the earth's axis to water vapor, methane, cloud feedback,
volcanic dust, all of these factors are coming together. They're now realizing
it wasn't the simple story we've been told of your SUV is creating a
dangerously warm planet."
There is still vast confusion among the general public, many
of whom believe that scientists are not in agreement about human-caused global
warming. James Lawrence Powell,
Executive Director of the National Physical Science Consortium, who holds a PhD
in Geochemistry from MIT and doctor of Science degrees from Oberlin and Berea
Colleges, conducted a study
to settle this question of whether scientists are in agreement about
anthropogenic climate change.
Of the 13,950 peer reviewed climate articles from 1991-2012,
24 “reject” human-caused global warming (see this great
pie chart detailing “Why Climate Change Deniers have no scientific
credibility). Stated another way, of
33,700 authors of peer reviewed climate change papers, only 34 reject that it’s
caused by humans. And from an earlier
study (Oreskes, Science 2005) cited by Powell (and introduced to me by our lead
instructor for the UnCommon Sense Business
Response to Climate Change module):
Someone who doesn’t understand science will never understand
the importance of science. But someone
who is constantly bombarded by misinformation and by the media will have a hell
of a time discerning what is true and what is hogwash. I work in this field and still get
overwhelmed by all the information and data.
I can only imagine how difficult it is for the average person to obtain
accurate, simple to understand information to be able to form an educated opinion
or have an understanding of the issue.
I just started reading “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of
Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”. It turns out that there is a war
being waged against the scientists who are providing evidence of
human-caused climate change. The
Guardian reported in 2007 that scientists and economists were being offered
$10K to “undermine a major climate change report” from the IPCC; an Exxon
Mobil/Koch/American Petroleum Institute funded scientist is writing papers
to flat out dismiss climate change. Conservative
Think Tanks are rolling out studies and providing highly paid lobbyists to cast
doubt on the “science of climate change”.
Not only the same tactics that were used in trying to convince the
American public that smoking wasn’t bad for us, but the same lobbyists, the very same people.
It hurts my head to read much of this, where it feels more
like smoke and mirrors diversion tactics than an actual rebuttal to scientific
findings. One could easily get lost in
the weeds and never find their way out (though if you’re interested, this library
is a good place to start looking for climate denier links and references).
There is a faint glimmer of light with our sitting
President, however. Our EcoSecurities
case cited that the leading candidates for the 2008 Presidential election all
had endorsed binding emissions reduction targets and a domestic carbon market. Upon reading this, I groaned, knowing how far
those endorsements had gotten us in reality.
Imagine my surprise when on April 25th, President Obama
tweeted to encourage the American people to urge Congress to stop ignoring
climate science:
They circulated a petition
to call out Climate Deniers in Congress.
And I got this email in my inbox,
inviting me to sign the petition and hold climate deniers accountable. The subject line: Unicorns Exist**. And the icing on the cake: “The sticky thing
about the truth is that it’s the truth whether Congress likes it or not.”
Now, I’m game for anything using Unicorns in an
argument. But the Organizing for Action
campaign is getting flack for stretching the truth a bit on this effort. In a video accompanying this media blitz, OfA
claims that 240 House members voted that climate change was a “hoax”. The video is quite entertaining and more than
a little scary, given the perspectives within.
A recent Washington Post (and others) article
states that the campaign “misleadingly cites a vote” on a climate change
bill. “We’ve written
before about the growing consensus among climate researchers that climate
change is the result of human activity; there’s little debate about that among
scientists, though surveys show increasing skepticism among the American
public. But we were intrigued by the video’s claim that 240 House lawmakers had
declared climate change to be a ‘hoax.’”
The 240 House members apparently voted against an amendment
to a proposed bill on taking regulatory power for carbon emissions away from
the EPA and giving it to Congress. That amendment
said: "Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental
Protection Agency that climate changes is occurring, is caused largely by human
activities, and poses significant risks for public health and
welfare." Sheesh. Might as
well be voting that climate change is a hoax.
As long as we keep going round and round on semantics, we
will remain in a life-threatening stale mate until this great Earth gets tired
of our shenanigans and neatly stamps out our species. Just this morning I got an email from 350.org
with the news that on May 9th, the carbon counter on Mauna Loa
observatory recorded a daily average of above 400 parts per million. Which, according
to a lot of people, is bad. Really
bad. What the (bleep) will it take,
people?!?
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