HOT - Living through the next Fifty Years
by Mark Herstgaard
Continued
IPCC acknowledged and corrected, did not undermine the core
message of the report or the overall findings of climate science.
One amusing exception to the media's generally poor performance
came from Tom Toles, the veteran syndicated cartoonist. In
February 2010, he published a cartoon whose first panel showed a
man watching television at home while on the screen a talking
head announces, "After a comprehensive review of the climate
science, we have concluded that climate change is 99.5 percent
certain." In the second panel of the cartoon, the talking head
adds, "Not loo percent, as we previously stated:" In the last
panel, the man at home angrily pumps his fist in the air and
shouts, "Aha! I knew it." In the lower right corner of the panel,
a miniature version of the man adds, "It follows that it's all a
hoax."
Crime is a strong word, but it is one used by Schellnhuber,
Hansen, Gelbspan, and others angered by the carbon lobby's
deceptive campaign to put its financial interests ahead of the
future of our children and civilization. As a journalist, it
shames me that the lobby could never have succeeded without the
assistance of the media; if the deniers themselves committed a
crime by misrepresenting the science on climate change, many
mainstream news outlets aided and abetted that crime, a
journalistic failure as profound as any in modern U.S. history.
Personally, I rarely bother to engage with deniers anymore; it's
a waste of time. As a journalist, my credibility depends on being
open to new information and changing my views as necessary.
Deniers, by contrast, are true believers. They start with their
conclusion - global warming is a hoax--and then work backward to
assemble the supporting "evidence." Like those who dispute
evolution, they are ideologues: their minds are made up and will
not be confused by facts that do not fit their agenda. Thus they
seized on a regional cold spell that chilled the northeastern
United States in December 2009 to mock the very idea of global
warming, a stance that only illustrated how little they
understood actual climate science. It's pointless to explain to
them that global warming does not cancel winters or even rule out
individual cold snaps; it only makes winters, on average and over
time, shorter and warmer, which is exactly what happened globally
in the winter of 2009-10. (Indeed, NASA determined that 2009 was
the second-warmest year in the thermometer record and the decade
of 2000 to 2009 was the warmest ever recorded.) Nor are deniers
swayed by the fact that the United States National Academy of
Sciences, like virtually every other major national scientific
academy in the world, has repeatedly declared that man-made
global warming and climate change are real and pose profound
dangers to society. Hearing that only fortifies their conviction
that the climate conspiracy is larger and more nefarious than
they realized. The real conspiracy, of course, has been the
long-standing disinformation campaign mounted by the giant
corporations of the carbon lobby, but I doubt most deniers are
aware that they are mouthing talking points originally developed
by big money interests. Nor do I expect them ever to change their
views. "[Nobel Prize-winning physicist] Max Planck used to say
that people don't change their minds [because of evidence],"
observed Robert May, the former president of the Royal Society,
Britain's national academy of science. "Science simply moves on
and those people eventually die off."
The problem is, they may end up taking a lot of us with them.
Frederick Seitz and his fellow deniers may look silly on
scientific grounds, but they can claim enormous political
achievements. For many years, despite the evidence, they managed
to make millions of people, including journalists and others who
should have known better, question the reality of man-made global
warming and climate change. (Just a few days ago, a woman in the
wine business - in California, no less - told me that her
industry's slow response to global warming was entirely
understandable, "since there are some people who believe in it
and some who don't.") Most damaging of all, the deniers succeeded
in prolonging the Washington policy battle, and therefore global
action, long after the issue should have been settled. Thus they
delayed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions precisely when
such reductions would have mattered most. "Had some individual
countries, especially the U.S., begun to act in the early to
mid-1990s, we might have [avoided dangerous climate change],"
Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton geophysicist, told me. "But we
didn't, and now the impacts are here."
The Crime Continues
I recount all this history because it helps explain not only how
we got into this mess but also how we might get out of it. The
debate on climate change has shifted considerably in recent
years, even in the deniers' stronghold of the United States, as
more and more people and institutions recognize the urgency of
change. But actual change-tangible, far-reaching reforms in how
we produce, consume, and organize our economies - lags far
behind. That is in no small part because many of the same
interests and ideologues remain determined to obstruct progress.
The crime, in other words, continues. I believe that the rest of
us should respond accordingly: by calling the perpetrators to
account, bringing them to justice, and prohibiting them from
further imperiling our future and that of our children.
Tobacco companies were eventually made to answer for their crimes
in a court of law; the carbon lobby deserves no less. In 1994,
Mississippi attorney general Michael Moore filed a lawsuit
against the tobacco industry, claiming that its products had
caused a health crisis that was costing his state billions of
dollars in treatment expenses. Moore's suit sparked similar
litigation on the part of forty other states. By 1997, major
tobacco companies had agreed to a settlement that required them
to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to state governments
across the United States to offset the costs of treating
tobacco-related illnesses and to finance public education
campaigns against smoking. The point of the fine was not only to
punish the bad behavior of the past, but also to deter bad
behavior in the future.
Some climate activists have urged similar actions against key
members of the carbon lobby, especially ExxonMobil-long the most
outspoken opponent of climate action and the biggest funder of
denier activities. Calling the carbon lobby's disinformation
campaign "one of the great crimes of our era," John
Passacantando, the former executive director of Greenpeace USA,
said he was "quite confident" that class-action lawsuits will be
filed against the corporations involved. He told executives from
one company, "You're going to wish you were the tobacco companies
once this stuff hits and people realize you were the ones who
blocked [action]."
Beyond putting the carbon lobby on trial, the larger goal must be
to keep the lobby and its intellectual collaborators - the think
tanks and spokespeople who spread its message in the public arena
- from further distorting society's decision making. These
companies and individuals have, through their past actions,
forfeited any claim to credibility. They have been
wrong-repeatedly, sometimes deliberately, and for the most
..........
To be continued
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