Don't Even Think About It (24 page)

This inspiring vision conveniently ignores the billions of people who find life quite tough enough already and for whom “one more obstacle” could destroy their lives.

However, the narrative of technological solutions and elitist control that permeates bright-siding can all too readily embrace a darker vision of the future in which vast planetary-scale engineering solutions (usually known as geo-engineering, or more chillingly,
climate remediation
) remove carbon from the atmosphere or reflect sunlight away from the earth.

These technologies are fascinating to entrepreneurial billionaires such as Niklas Zennström, cofounder of Skype, and Bill Gates, who is described by
Fortune
as “the world’s leading funder of research into geoengineering.”

In 2007 Al Gore and Sir Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin airlines, announced a competition called the Virgin Earth Challenge offering twenty-five million dollars “to find commercially viable designs to permanently remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.” Curiously, the eleven finalists were announced in Calgary, Alberta, under the patronage of the Canadian tar sand industry.

While turning up the optimism about technological solutions, bright-siding turns down the volume of threat. It is only a few more notches on the dial before one is deep into outright denial. The libertarian Cato and Heartland Institutes, while strongly denying the existence of climate change, have no problem promoting the solution of geo-engineering as “more cost-effective” and “delivering measurable results in a matter of weeks rather than the decades or centuries required for greenhouse gas reductions to take full effect.”

The fact that outspoken free market deniers can endorse the positive solution, while refusing to accept the existence of the negative problem, is revealing and relevant. Bright-siding is ultimately a regressive narrative that validates existing hierarchies. It promotes an aspirational high-consumption lifestyle while ignoring the deep inequalities, pollution, and waste that make that lifestyle possible. And this is why, despite its upbeat tone, it is just as unappealing to many ordinary people as the apocalypse it seeks to replace.

28

Winning the Argument

How a Scientific Discourse Turned into a Debating Slam

I’m sitting in the cafe
in Union Station in Washington, D.C., watching Marc Morano demolish a plate of oysters. While Daniel Kahneman managed to make drinking tomato soup into a Taoist meditation exercise, Morano has found a way to ingest oysters without stopping talking, like a grazing shark. And boy, this fellow can talk. He is, in his words, a motormouth: loud, highly opinionated—I find him kind of fun and kind of appalling in equal measure.

Morano is one of the key communicators in anti-warming activism, constantly in demand for TV and other media and also as an informal media service to enable access to other deniers. So I was interested in obtaining his perspective as a communications specialist, rather than a campaigner, on how he shapes the story to make it more appealing.

His strategy is entirely reactive, waiting to see what evidence and narrative the other side comes up with and then, he says, “knocking it down.” The journalist Ross Gelbspan, who has interviewed almost all the professional contrarians, has concluded that they are “detached internally from the substance of what they are naysaying and motivated by the gamesmanship of showing how clever they are—as though it is all a game of chess.” Though, in Morano’s case, it is a more aggressive contact sport that comes to mind.

Not surprisingly, Morano thrives in the sound bite debate format beloved of live television and is promoted to the media by his employers, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), as a “credentialed counter guest” who will “offer a lively, fair and balanced discussion.”

There is no question that he makes great debate television using his remarkable recall to gun down opponents with a blast of citations. Andrew Watson from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit was so wound up after a live television debate with Morano that he forgot that his microphone was still on and could be very clearly heard saying, “Christ, what an arsehole.” Morano loves this: “Sure,” he says, “Morano’s an A-HOLE!”

Morano’s primary strategy is to play the enemy narrative and to discredit individual climate scientists. He says he likes to have fun, to go after somebody who is being particularly silly and ridiculous, and to use mockery. But it didn’t sound so fun when he wrote, on his blogsite, “We should kick scientists while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.” He laughs it off. “Come on,” he says, “it was a stupid
expression
!”

Scientists, especially those who have received a torrent of abusive and threatening e-mails after being featured on Morano’s blog, say he incites bullying and intimidation. When I tell one scientist that I have met Morano, he says, “I hope you had a shower afterward.” Another calls him “a vicious, nasty man” and says he would be “a leading Nazi propagandist—a storm trooper or worse.” Both are very concerned that I should not use their names.

Michael Mann, the much-abused director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, is now so battle-hardened that he doesn’t care anymore whether I use his name or not. He calls Morano a “hired assassin” who “spreads malicious lies about scientists, paints us as enemies of the people, then uses language that makes it sound like we should be subject to death threats, harmed, or killed.”

Morano is unapologetic. All he does, he says, is to post the contact details that he finds on the public websites of scientists and to suggest that his followers tell them what they think. In his mind he is performing a public service. “Scientists live in a bubble,” he says, “and this is the first time that they ever hear from the public. It’s refreshing. It’s healthy. It’s good for the public debate.”

Scientists welcome debates with their peers, especially the respectful exchange of views between experts at conferences and meticulously referenced responses in peer-reviewed journals. What they hate are the pure performance battles that can be won by the communicator who puts up the best fight. This is why, more than anything, televised debates are what campaigners like Morano want and need. These transform the complex “wicked” issue of climate change into a simple narrative of competing sides. As he knows full well, the mere existence of a debate is enough to persuade people that climate change is still debatable.

But debates are not just a fight. They reflect, in miniature, the process by which people come to form their views on climate change—enabling them to weigh the trustworthiness of the communicator, the social cues, the “narrative fidelity” and, finally, to pick a side.

On March 23, 2007, National Public Radio and fifty affiliated radio stations across the United States broadcast a debate between high-profile scientists and skeptics on the topic “global warming is not a crisis.” This debate was unusual because the audience held a ballot before and after the debate, making it into a large, albeit crude, experiment in testing different presentation styles and narratives.

The vote showed that before the debate, the advocates of mainstream science were comfortably in the lead. By the end of the debate, they had lost a third of their support. They had the best-qualified team and a position supported by every scientific institution and government in the world. And somehow they lost.

The decisive factor that won the debate for the skeptics appears to be their use of stories and social cues reinforced by humor. The skeptic Philip Stott, a retired professor of geography from London University, did not just say that climate is complex; he said it was as chaotic as Glasgow on a Saturday night, and that understanding it is like “trying to play Mozart’s wonderful Sinfonia Concertante 364 when you’ve no viola part and only a quarter of the violin part.”

While Stott played the English gentleman, his teammate, the novelist Michael Crichton, demonized the messenger. He posed a question: “Haven’t we actually raised temperatures so much that we, as stewards of the planet,
have
to act?” Then, without missing a beat, he added, “These are the questions my friends like to ask as they get on board their private jets to fly to their second and third homes.” The audience roared with laughter. Crichton returned regularly to these hypocritical environmentalists who, he said, buy a Prius, drive it around for a while, and give it to the maid.

The advocates tried hard with metaphor. Gavin Schmidt of NASA talked about scientists being like crime scene investigators—skilled experts tracking down the killer. Richard C.J. Somerville, a professor of meteorology at the University of California, San Diego, argued that choosing not to fight global warming is about as irresponsible as not making payments on a high-interest credit card.

The social cues were already clear. Advocates are judgmental elitists and hypocrites. Skeptics are relaxed and can enjoy life and have a laugh. As the famous election question has it: Who would you rather have a beer with? The man who wants to go drinking in Glasgow and listen to Mozart and or the one who doesn’t want to max out his credit card?

The advocates became frustrated and started to assert their scientific expertise. When Stott argued that cosmic rays are affecting climate, Schmidt said, “This is completely bogus. You don’t know that it’s bogus, but I know that it’s bogus.” The skeptics, he complained, were “not doing this on a level playing field that the people here will understand.” Thus, he managed to offend both his opponents and his audience, some of whom started shouting complaints and booing at this point.

I met Gavin Schmidt in his small, crowded office on New York’s Upper West Side overlooking Broadway. Curiously, it is directly above Tom’s Restaurant, scene of numerous
Seinfeld
episodes. The combative spirit of the show must have wafted up the airshaft because Schmidt turned out to be, without a doubt, by far the most argumentative person I interviewed for this book. I had not even reached the end of my first, rather prosaic question before Schmidt came back at me, challenging my terms and assumptions like a power attorney out to impress the jury.

Schmidt wished he had not gone on the NPR debate. “Looking back, I see that it’s all about ego: assuming that obviously I’m right so I can prevail against somebody who is obviously wrong.” He said he would not have done anything differently—except refusing to go on in the first place. “Political theater is not my game—it is never going to be a good venue for having a rational argument.”

All this was still on my mind that evening as I idly surfed hundreds of cable channels and found John Stossel on Fox, complaining that no scientist would come and debate his resident climate skeptic. However, said Stossel, “we did find a scientist who was willing to talk about this so long as it was not a debate. So let’s welcome NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt.” Well, well, well, I thought—for all of his loathing of political theater, Schmidt is prepared to appear on one of the most politically motivated programs on U.S. television.

Schmidt was excellent: clear, focused, and literate, presenting his science with the confidence that is such a crucial component in building communicator trust. Stossel demanded to know why he would not participate in the phony debate. “Because I’m not a politician,” Schmidt said. “Anytime you want me to come on and discuss the science, give me a call and I will do that. But I am not interested in arguing with anybody just to make good TV.”

Schmidt’s uncompromising argumentativeness, which had seemed overbearing in his small office, here seemed entirely appropriate. A man who had been so wary of entering into the political debate was the only scientist prepared to walk straight into the most politicized venue on television, sit under a sign reading “GREEN TYRANNY,” and explain his science on his own terms. Now maybe that needs a bit of attitude.

29

Two Billion Bystanders

How Live Earth Tried and Failed to Build a Movement

From his office in Beverley
Hills, aptly named the Control Room, Kevin Wall organizes the largest public events around the globe: the World Cup opening ceremonies, rock concerts for Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Elton John. He deals in mind-bogglingly big numbers. “Look,” he tells me, “how many people saw Al Gore’s documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
? Two million people, ten million people? That’s a real success. It’s the biggest documentary in history. I reckoned that I could create a twenty-four-hour show that touches on all the
Inconvenient Truth
stuff, and maybe one billion people, two billion people could see it.”

And so Live Earth was born—simultaneous concerts in eleven cities, seven continents (including Antarctica), the largest and most ambitious attempt ever made to mobilize a mass audience around climate change.

Wall freely admits that when he first saw Al Gore’s presentation, he had walked out halfway through because he found it so depressing. When the movie came out, his first thought was “Oh shit, it’s the same slideshow.” It did convert him to the issue, but he still had a big problem with the
slideshow
. Wall wanted to make an impact and that meant thinking big—big names, big venues, big aspirations, and putting his company on the line. “I might lose my money, my reputation, but I had an overriding passion and wanted to get that end result,” he says.