Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (26 page)

The Chukchi Sea remained a perilous place for sailors even after the whaling industry died. In 1931, a Swedish cargo steamer called the
Baychimo
was trapped in the Arctic pack ice on October 1. For the next three decades, the abandoned
Baychimo
was a virtual ghost ship. It moved at the mercy of the ice. There were sightings of it in different places. The last place anyone saw it was in the Chukchi Sea, near Point Barrow, in 1968. It is now presumed, finally, to have sunk.

In his memoir of the doomed voyage, A. F. Jamieson, the
Baychimo’s
radio telegraph officer, recalled a moment earlier in the voyage when he’d scrambled up on deck to take his first look at the Arctic ice pack. According to Jamieson, he got his first look at solid Arctic ice on July 26.

“I was naturally very interested in seeing this for the first time,” Jamieson wrote. “The captain took the ship right up to the pack, had a good look around, and decided there was nothing to be done except to drop anchor and wait. The ice was one solid mass, stretching from the shore as far out as we could see, with no leads in it of any description.”

Shishmaref itself was spared the fate of the
Baychimo
and the
New Bedford whaling fleet by the permafrost that is fundamental to the island’s geology. Underlying the beaches, the permafrost took the brunt of the dying typhoons. Later in the year, when the ice formed, the permafrost staved off its relentless, grinding power. The formation of the ice allowed the people of Shishmaref to go out on the sea and hunt. The permafrost guaranteed they would have a place to which they could return. Nowadays, though, the ice is late and soft. The permafrost is thawing. And Shishmaref is falling, bit by bit, into the Chukchi Sea.

The estimates are that Shishmaref has lost perhaps as much as three hundred feet of its coastline, half of that in the past decade. With nothing to slow them down, and nothing to dissipate their power, the storms that now rage against Shishmaref have already cost the town so many of its boats that the local economy may never recover. Houses have collapsed into the sea. A school playground has been washed away. And while the storms are catastrophic, even without them, day by day, Shishmaref continues to recede. The ice forms later and dissolves earlier, so the beaches are eroding away beneath the bluffs. There is no permafrost beneath the beaches to hold the land there. Little by little, Shishmaref is being devoured.

John Sinnok remembers great hills, up and down the coastline of the little island. They’re all gone now. “We lost them all,” he says. “When you’re up here on the lagoon now, and you see people, you can recognize them right away. Back then, they were just little specks, because there was a bunch of hills here, then a lowland, then another bunch of hills. That’s the way it was.”

There is no question about the cause of Shishmaref’s whittling away. Global climate change—specifically, what has come to be called global warming—is gradually devastating the Arctic. Alaska’s mean temperature has risen five degrees in thirty years and the permafrost is receding everywhere. The Arctic Ocean’s ice pack, which so impressed A. F. Jamieson even as it
was swallowing his vessel, is shrinking about 10 percent a year, and the pace of that shrinkage is accelerating. In August 2007, scientists in the United States and Japan reported that the ice pack had shrunk that summer to the smallest size ever recorded and that, within twenty-five years, the earth might see the ice pack melt entirely one summer, an event that would have severe repercussions everywhere else in the world. A month later, a German team reported that the Arctic sea ice was 50 percent thinner than it had been in 2001. All over the Alaskan coast, small villages and larger towns are in peril. Point Hope nearly lost its airport’s runway to a flood that overwhelmed its seawall. Further north, the city of Barrow has been pounded to the point where its status as a vital oil terminal is seriously threatened.

The people of Shishmaref talk about global warming the way they talk about fishing in the lagoon or hunting seals on the ice. They’ve lived by internal clocks attuned to the weather and the land, the sea and the ice. The old whalemen learned their ways from them. Now, something has knocked askew the calibrations developed over thousands of years. There is no hunt without the ice, and the ice is not where it should be when it should be there. The land is falling into the sea. A nomadic people came to this island longer ago than anyone can remember and they’ve been living here ever since. In a very few years, they will be refugees.

“‘Global warming’ are new words for us in Shishmaref,” says Luci Eningowuk, who has become something of a spokeswoman for this dying place. “We’re used to getting spring, summer, fall, and winter. And now this global warming has made our lives unpredictable. We don’t know when it is going to become winter now.”

The evening comes late in the Arctic. The sea goes gray in the dying light. Darker still, almost black against the slowly pearling sky, gulls and geese wheel away inland toward the peace of the lagoon. The sound of the surf is steady and endless, not the
thunder that comes when the big storms rage, but the steady dirge of mighty tides, pulling bits of the island away and never bringing them back. It is drowned out by a huge truck, trundling around a battered point, its wheels half in the surf, hauling stone northward to where they’re building a seawall. From the cab of his steam shovel, Tom Lee watches the truck round the point, grumbling and splashing down the beach.

He’s been there for two or three months, building and reinforcing the island’s seawall. On the beach in front of him are piles of mashed asphalt and shattered concrete. These are portions of the earlier seawalls before the storms got them, before the ground beneath them got pulled away. They look like the machines of war left behind by a defeated army long ago.

“They tell us that this wall, this new one, might buy this place ten or fifteen years,” Tom Lee says, leaning on the tread of his machine. “Hard to argue with the ocean, though.” And, down all along the beach, the Chukchi Sea resounds in its remorseless pulsing power, unfrozen and unbound. It’s the first week in November.

IN
December 2007, not long before Christmas, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma issued a report declaring that “400 scientists” had announced that they had debunked the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding a human basis for the phenomenon of global warming. Upon closer inspection, the four hundred “scientists” Inhofe cited included a couple of local television weathermen, all consultant-bred and Dopplerized, one short evolutionary step up from the days when they got their forecasts from cat puppets and talking clams. Others were economists, and specialists in fields as distant from climatology as sociology is from astrophysics. Actual relevant expertise did
not matter. “Scientists” were talking about other “scientists.” The “debate” was all too confusing.

(Sometimes, you don’t even need to be a full-time scientist, just somebody who writes about them. The novelist Michael Crichton wrote
State of Fear
, a thriller about bands of eco-terrorists bent on using the global warming “hoax” to capture the world. Inhofe invited Crichton to testify before Congress as an “expert” witness, and he was warmly received at, among other places, the White House. By those standards, poor Dan Brown should have gotten an audience with the pope.)

That global warming—shorthand now for the effects of human activity on the earth’s climate—is taking place has been the consensus within the community studying the phenomenon at least since the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report in 1995. “The balance of the evidence,” said the IPCC report, “suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” This is as loud a clarion as judicious scientists are allowed to sound.

Since then, global warming has lodged itself firmly in the vocabulary of the age and become a pop culture phenomenon. A crack in the Antarctic ice shelf helps cause a new ice age in
The Day After Tomorrow
, a 2004 potboiler in which Dennis Quaid loses a partner who falls through the roof of the atrium section of a glaciated New Jersey shopping mall. And in
An Inconvenient Truth
, the Academy Award-winning documentary made out of Al Gore’s traveling PowerPoint presentation, global warming is as destructive a villain as Godzilla ever was. The Arctic ice melts, the seas rise, and whole cities are swallowed up. In one chilling slide, Gore shows the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan being inundated, a perfectly symmetrical collision of manmade catastrophes. We believe global warming is real and dangerous enough to entertain us, anyway.

What we accept in the darkness of the theater, however, is
often not what we accept in the light outside. The reality of global warming, beyond its value as a scary monster, has been fashioned into yet another kind of vaudeville debate, with each side lining up its team like children choosing up sides in a schoolyard, except that, in a schoolyard, the most expert players almost always get chosen first.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to the standards of that context, any scientific theory is turned into mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there came to be a “debate” over the very existence of global warming, even though the considered view among those who have actually studied the phenomenon renders the debate quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. It’s less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank or collecting contributions for your campaign from the oil companies. Even now that the skeptics accept the reality of global warming, they either dispute the importance of human activity to it, or argue that its origins don’t matter as long as we try to ameliorate the effects: the debate is still taking place in the provinces of the Gut.

The journalist Chris Mooney describes how the current debate was created. After the release of the 1995 IPCC report, the ascendant Republican Congress, behind Speaker Newt Gingrich, convened a series of hearings attacking the report’s scientific credibility, mostly on the grounds that the IPCC used computer models to predict climate change. These techniques have their shortcomings. Most systems devised to project future trends do, as anyone who’s ever been to the racetrack knows. “Obviously,” Mooney writes, “computer models cannot perfectly
simulate the massively complex climate system.” However, computer modeling is used to project future trends in almost every field. “In other words,” concludes Mooney, “should policymakers consider the range of possibilities suggested by these highly sophisticated attempts to project future climate change? Clearly, they should.”

Nevertheless, the “debate” was joined. The people arguing against the global warming consensus marshaled their own array of experts, drawn from think tanks, and they argued in the syntax of science, but not in its vocabulary. Their words were drawn from the language of sales and of persuasion, a language that appealed to, and drew its strength from, the Gut. It works to keep the debate in those precincts where the Gut can fight on an equal playing field and win.

It was the tobacco companies who drew up the template. In the 1950s, a scientific consensus was growing around the notion that smoking carried a serious risk of cancer. The consensus was reaching so deep into the mainstream that, in 1952,
Reader’s Digest
, the best-selling periodical in the country and a mainstay of small-town doctors’ offices across America, reprinted an obscure piece from the
Christian Herald
entitled “Cancer by the Carton.” This was the decade of
Sputnik
, and of the Salk vaccine that eradicated polio. Americans were proud of their science. They trusted it. It saved lives. It would protect them from the new Russian moon. The building momentum behind a science-based assault on smoking was increasingly perilous to those people who sold cigarettes. The pressure on the tobacco companies to respond to these new studies was overwhelming.

In response, the tobacco companies turned to John Hill of Hill & Knowlton, the most successful public-relations firm of the time. If any field of study was exploding as fast in the 1950s as the physical sciences were, it was the study of how to influence
Americans to do what your clients wanted them to do. Hill devised a canny strategy that turned on its head the pride that Americans took in their science. Instead of responding, point by point, to the studies themselves, the tobacco companies created their own Potemkin science almost from scratch. The CEOs of all the major tobacco companies met in New York in December 1953. Allan Brandt, in
The Cigarette Century
, describes the strategy: