Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (3 page)

That’s wonderful, or it would be if it could be proven. But if Lomborg has some secret source of information for this contention, he is not sharing it with readers. Instead, he throws these assertions out without attribution or substantiation. He runs to the cliff, grabs the
Globe and Mail
megaphone, and shouts, “Jump!”

Again, that is his right. But why is Canada’s leading newspaper promoting this as a reliable viewpoint? Lomborg is not a scientist (his Ph.D., in
political
science, concentrated on game theory), and his previous work has been widely and publicly criticized for its inaccuracy. (See Chapter 10 for more on Lom-borg’s checkered track record.) Why, even under the guise of “opinion,” would a serious newspaper present this unsourced and inexpert argument as worthy of public attention?

It’s not as though the true state of the world’s environment is a mystery—or that it is left unstudied by leading and highly qualified scientists. For example, a collection of 1,360 such experts completed the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005. Those scientists, all leaders in their fields, concluded that, “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.”

“Substantial and largely irreversible.” That sounds more dramatic than Lomborg’s reassuring promise of “no ecological collapse.” The whole Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report suggests very specifically that humankind is destroying the environment at a frightening pace. We are burning down forests, trashing the ocean, and changing global climate in a way that is making it extremely difficult for other species to survive—substantial and irreversible. In a way, we have to hope that Lomborg is right: we have to hope that this Earth
is
enough—and it may be, especially if humans pay attention to the warning signs and start behaving differently. But Lomborg is mounting a transparently fatuous argument to convince us that we don’t have to pay attention to our ecological footprint. While more than thirteen hundred of the world’s leading scientists try in good faith to back us away from the cliff, Lomborg grabs a soiled lifeguard T-shirt from a bin at the nearest thrift shop and tells us to keep jumping, ignore the risks. And the
Globe and Mail
cheers him on.

A third story broke in the early spring of 2009 that cast light on the weakness of modern lifeguard recruitment. On April 23, 2009, the
New York Times
’s excellent science writer Andrew Revkin reported on a now-defunct organization called the Global Climate Coalition, primarily a group of companies whose operations or products are heavy producers of greenhouse gases. For more than a decade, ending in 2002, the coalition spent millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying campaigns aimed at convincing public officials specifically and the public generally that climate change was not proven and that mitigating action was unnecessary. Yet, as Revkin reported, recently released court documents show that the Global Climate Coalition’s own scientists had said in their 1995 report
Predicting Future Climate Change,
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

It seems clear from the record that the Global Climate Coalition wasn’t really interested in the science of climate change. Revkin reports that someone within the organization deleted the above reference and, even then, never distributed the report. And the group didn’t actually invest in any climate change research. Instead it spent a fortune (the 1997 budget alone amounted to US$1.68 million) sowing confusion and lobbying against climate change policies, a gesture that, coincidentally or not, would serve the financial interests of the coalition’s major funders: ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum (now BP), Texaco, General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, the Aluminum Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and others.

To take the crowded-cliff analogy one step further, it was as if some of the lifeguards had been charging thrill-seekers money to jump into the water, and they didn’t want to give up the income. Not only did they pass up the opportunity to check the rocky bottom themselves, but when they hired someone to check, and that someone (in this case, a Mobil Corporation chemical engineer and climate expert named Leonard S. Bernstein) came back and said there was trouble below, they buried the report—and kept selling tickets.

You will in the coming pages meet a cast of lifeguards that in some instances may shake your faith in humanity. You will read about industry associations (the Western Fuels Association, the American Petroleum Institute) that commissioned strategy documents aimed at confusing people about climate science. You will see specific efforts to deny the gathering consensus that humans are endangering the planet—and you’ll see how a group of think tanks and political operatives helped to implement the strategy, polluting the public conversation in North America and, increasingly, in Europe as well. You will read about “scientists” who strayed casually outside their field of expertise and then collected guest-speaker fees for also denying the advanced state of climate science understanding. You’ll see a matter of well-established science skillfully recast as a subject for debate, as something that was primarily and hotly political and—until the intervention of admirable Republican leaders like John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger—destructively partisan. You will read about lobbyists like Steven “The Junkman” Milloy, who took money from companies like Philip Morris, Monsanto, and ExxonMobil and then promoted himself as an expert commentator. Perhaps worst of all, you will see the great (and sometimes not-so-great) journalistic bastions of free speech employ or feature Milloy and others like him without ever telling the audience about the strained credentials or the conflicts of interest that might have affected the credibility of these wannabe lifeguards.

You may conclude from all this that reputable newspapers and magazines are today acting in a confused and confusing manner because a great number of people have worked very hard and spent a great deal of money in an effort to establish and spread that confusion. You will also see that their efforts have been disastrously successful. We have lost two decades— two critical decades—during which we could have taken action on climate change but didn’t, because we were relying on bad advice. We were listening to lifeguards whose primary agenda had nothing to do with protecting our safety.

It’s possible that when you see the full extent of the sometimes strategic, sometimes accidental campaign of confusion, you will drift into irritation, even into anger. You may want to blame the bad advisors—the freelance lifeguards whose real goal was often something other than swimmer safety. You may, especially, lose faith in mainstream media as a reliable source of credible information. After all, we rely on them for their judgment as well as for the accuracy of what they present in their newspapers and broadcasts, and on so many occasions they have let us down.

Finally, you might begin to lose hope. You might come to question our ability to have a credible public conversation about science and to arrive at a reasonable set of policies to address climate change. You might be tempted to throw up your hands in despair.

That would be the worst possible result. Just by picking up this book, you have made the first, critical step toward being part of the solution. The information that follows will at least help to inoculate you against the public relations spin, the confusion and misinformation that has led us through two decades of inaction. At best, it will inspire you to learn more about climate change and more about the practical, affordable, and essential things that we all need to do to conquer the problem.

Our species has proved itself capable of great stupidity and palpable evil. Human history is too full of pogroms and holocausts, of wars, genocides, and societal collapses. Equally, however, we have proved ourselves intelligent and adaptable. When we stepped back from the brink of global nuclear annihilation, we showed that when the conversation is open and accurate, we can make good, even altruistic decisions. It’s time for such a decision now. It’s time for good people to inform themselves, to help lead and guide their families, their friends, and their neighbors back from a path that threatens the habitability of planet Earth to one that will be sensible and sustainable. We don’t have to jump off the cliff, and if someone tells you that we do, the message of this book is this: check his credentials. You may be surprised (and disappointed) by what you find.

[
two
]
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Who says climate change is a scientific certainty?

N
o one, really. Certainties are rare in science. Even the reappearance of the sun over the horizon tomorrow morning can be reduced to a question of probability. On the question of climate change, scientists say they are more than 90 percent sure that it’s happening and that humans are responsible, but you just never know.

Scientists embrace that kind of skepticism. It is through doubting the certainties of the world (the flatness of the Earth, the usefulness of bloodletting) that scientists advance human knowledge. But no serious scientist will stand up and denounce a widely accepted scientific theory without making a verifiable argument to the contrary. Scientists—real scientists—bind themselves to a strict discipline, setting out their theories and experiments carefully, subjecting them to review by other credible scholars who are knowledgeable in their field, and publishing them in reputable journals, such as
Science
and
Nature.

The people who approach the science of climate change with that kind of integrity have agreed on its underlying components for years. The greenhouse effect, by which gases such as carbon dioxide absorb heat, setting up a warming blanket around the world, was first postulated by the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier in 1824. Fourier understood that solar energy heated the Earth, which then reflected that heat back into space in the form of infrared radiation. In effect, the sun’s heat bounced off the Earth’s surface. But Earth’s atmosphere seemed to be blocking or slowing the release of that infrared energy, warming the planet. In the 1850s the Irish physicist John Tyndall figured out a way to actually test and measure the capacity of various gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, and ozone, to absorb and transmit radiant energy. By 1858 he had effectively proved Fourier’s theory.

At the end of the century—the 19th century—the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius advanced the theory even further. Arrhenius, who is considered the founder of physical chemistry, was the first person to predict that humans might actually increase the temperature of the Earth by burning fossil fuels and, in the process, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels themselves represent millions of years of stored carbon. Every living thing on Earth is composed of carbon in one form or another. Plants inhale carbon dioxide, which comprises one molecule of carbon and two of oxygen, then convert the carbon to carbohydrates and release the oxygen back into the atmosphere. Animals eat the plants. Over hundreds of millions of years these plants and animals have fallen dead into swamps or drifted lifeless to the bottom of the ocean, there to be covered up by layers and layers of other carboniferous matter. Under the right conditions—heat and pressure—those massive carbon piles have been converted to coal, oil, or natural gas. And over the last two centuries humans have been digging up those fossil fuels and setting fire to them, reintroducing the carbon to oxygen and releasing the resulting carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. When Arrhenius considered the effect of this trend, he tried to calculate the effect of that increased carbon dioxide. He estimated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase Earth’s temperature by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a stunning bit of science for the time, given that the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a doubling of carbon dioxide will increase the global average temperature by between 3.6 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also unnerving, in that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen since 1850 by more than one-third, from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 385 ppm, and we are on track to hit Arrhenius’s feared doubling by sometime near the middle of this century.

The next scientist to ring the climate change alarm was the American oceanographer Roger Revelle, the man who explained the greenhouse effect to former U.S. vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore when both men were at Harvard in the late 1960s. In 1957 Revelle published a paper with the chemist Hans Suess in which they predicted a global warming. At the time Revelle suggested that such warming might even be a good thing, but he and Suess prescribed caution in their paper, saying that humans were conducting “a great geophysical experiment” with almost no conception of the consequences.

Befitting a society in which scientific understanding guides important social decisions, concern about this issue began to crop up in the political sphere as early as the 1960s. Then-president Lyndon Johnson said in a special message to Congress in February 1965 that “this generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

By the late 1970s scientists were beginning to get twitchy, starting to speak with one increasingly concerned voice. A National Academy of Sciences report authored in 1979 by the scientist Jule Charney said, “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus that climate changes will result from man’s combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land use.” It also was becoming apparent that global warming was not as benign as it sounded. Scientists were beginning to understand that even a small increase in global average temperature could throw off a balance that had existed in Earth’s climate since long before the time of humans. They began warning of melting glaciers and collapsing ice caps, of floods and droughts and rising tides. They began to contemplate a change in world living conditions that was more dramatic than anything in human history and more sudden than anything that had happened in hundreds of thousands of years.