"Well, the problem is, there
are an awful lot of people who die of lung cancer
who never smoked. There are a lot of people who
smoked all their lives and die of something else.
So all you can say, even [though] the evidence statistically
is clear connecting lung cancer to smoking, is that
[the grandmother] upped her probability."
Just weeks before Katrina struck, Emanuel published
a paper in the scientific journal Nature demonstrating
that hurricanes had grown more powerful as global
temperatures rose in the 20th century. Now, he says,
by adding more greenhouse gases to the earth's atmosphere,
humans are "loading the climatic dice in favor
of more powerful hurricanes in the future."
But most Americans heard nothing about Hurricane
Katrina's association with global warming. Media
coverage instead reflected the views of the Bush
administration—specifically, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, which declared that
the hurricane was the result of natural factors.
An outcry from N.O.A.A.'s scientists led the agency
to backtrack from that statement in February 2006,
but by then conventional wisdom was set in place.
Post-Katrina New Orleans may eventually be remembered
as the first major U.S. casualty of global warming,
yet most Americans still don't know what hit us.
Sad to say, Katrina was the perfect preview of
what global warming might look like in the 21st
century. First, Katrina struck a city that was already
below sea level—which is where rising waters
could put many coastal dwellers in the years ahead.
In 2001, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), a peer-reviewed, international
collaboration among thousands of scientists that
is the world's leading authority on climate change,
predicted that sea levels could rise as much as
three feet by 2100. By coincidence, three feet is
about how much New Orleans sank during the 20th
century. That was because levees built to keep the
Mississippi River from flooding also kept the river
from depositing silt that would have replenished
the underlying land mass, explains Mike Tidwell,
the author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and
Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast. "You
could say that in New Orleans we brought the ocean
to the people," Tidwell adds, "which is
pretty much what global warming will do to other
cities in the future."
What's more, Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane,
the strongest there is. Such extreme weather events
will likely become more frequent as global warming
intensifies, says the I.P.C.C. Yes, Katrina's winds
had slowed to high–Category 3 levels by the
time it made landfall, but it was the hurricane's
storm surge that killed people—a surge that
formed in the Gulf of Mexico when the storm was
still Category 5. Thus, Katrina unleashed 10 to
15 feet of water on a city that was already significantly
below sea level.
To envision global warming's
future impacts, the illustrations accompanying this
article reflect this and other scenarios. [For illustrations,
see the May 2006 issue of Vanity Fair.] The three
large-scale illustrations are an artist's interpretations
of projections generated for Vanity Fair by Applied
Science Associates Inc. (asascience.com), a marine-science
consulting firm based in Rhode Island. The projections
do not account for small-scale features such as
coastal-protection structures.
The effects of a three-foot sea-level rise compounded
by a storm surge from a Category 3 hurricane are
shown in the image of the Hamptons, which would
suffer severe flooding. The image of Washington,
D.C., shows the effects of a 20-foot sea-level rise,
which is what scientists expect if the entire Greenland
ice sheet melts. The ice sheet has shrunk 50 cubic
miles in the past year alone, and is now melting
twice as fast as previously believed.
Finally, the image of New York City shows the effects
of an 80-foot rise in sea levels. That's what would
happen if not only the Greenland ice sheet but its
counterpart in the Antarctic were to melt, says
James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute
for Space Studies. Hansen, who put climate change
on the media map in 1988 by saying that man-made
global warming had already begun, made headlines
again earlier this year when he complained that
White House political appointees were trying to
block him from speaking freely about the need for
rapid reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Hansen
warns that, if global emissions continue on their
current trajectory, the ice sheets will not survive,
because global temperatures will increase by 2 to
3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. "The
last time the earth was that warm, sea levels were
80 feet higher than today," he says. It will
likely take hundreds of years for sea levels to
rise the full 80 feet, but the process would be
irreversible, and the rises would not be gradual.
"You're going to be continually faced with
a changing coastline, which will force coastal dwellers
to constantly relocate," he says.
This article's smaller, aerial-view illustrations
are based on simulations by the National Environmental
Trust, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. N.E.T.
relied on data from the I.P.C.C., the U.S. Geological
Survey, and the N.O.A.A. Additional N.E.T. simulations
are available at net.org. Philip Clapp, N.E.T.'s
president, says, "The U.S. government has never
released its own simulations. The Bush administration
doesn't want these pictures in front of the American
people because they show that a three-foot sea-level
rise plus storm flooding would have catastrophic
consequences."
In New York, it would leave much of Lower Manhattan,
including the Ground Zero memorial and the entire
financial district, underwater. La Guardia and John
F. Kennedy airports would meet the same fate. In
Washington, D.C., the Potomac River would swell
dramatically, stretching all the way to the Capitol
lawn and to within two blocks of the White House.
Since roughly half the world's 6.5 billion people
live near coastlines, a three-foot sea-level rise
would be even more punishing overseas. Amsterdam,
Venice, Cairo, Shanghai, Manila, and Calcutta are
some of the cities most threatened. In many places
the people and governments are too poor to erect
adequate barriers—think of low-lying Bangladesh,
where an estimated 18 million people are at risk—so
experts fear that they will migrate to neighboring
lands, raising the prospect of armed conflict. A
Pentagon-commissioned study warned in 2003 that
climate change could bring mega-droughts, mass starvation,
and even nuclear war as countries such as China,
India, and Pakistan battle over scarce food and
water.
These are just some of the reasons why David King
wrote in Science in 2004, "Climate change is
the most severe problem that we are facing today—more
serious even than the threat of terrorism."
King's comment raised hackles in Washington and
led a top press aide to Tony Blair to try to muzzle
him. But the science adviser tells me he "absolutely"
stands by his statement. By no means does King underestimate
terrorism; advising the British government on that
threat, he says, "is a very important part
of my job." But the hazards presented by climate
change are so severe and far-reaching that, in his
view, they overshadow not only every other environmental
threat but every other threat, period.
"Take India," King says. "Their
monsoon is a fact of life that they have developed
their agricultural economy around. If the monsoon
is down by 10 percent one year, they have massive
losses of crops. If it's 10 percent over, they have
massive flood problems. [If climate change ends
up] switching off the monsoon in India, or even
changing it outside those limits, it would lead
to massive global economic de-stabilization. The
kind of situation we need to avoid creating is one
where populations are so de-stabilized—Bangladesh
being flooded, India no food—that they're all
seeking alternative habitats. These, in our globalized
economy, would be very difficult for all of us to
manage."
The worst scenarios of global warming might still
be avoided, scientists say, if humanity reduces
its greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically, and very
soon. The I.P.C.C. has estimated that emissions
must fall to 60 percent below 1990 levels before
2050, over a period when global population is expected
to increase by 37 percent and per-capita energy
consumption will surely rise as billions of people
in Asia, Africa, and South America strive to ascend
from poverty.
Yet even if such a reduction were achieved, a significant
rise in sea levels may be unavoidable. "It's
getting harder and harder to say we'll avoid a three-foot
sea-level rise, though it won't necessarily happen
in this century," says Michael Oppenheimer,
a professor of geosciences and international affairs
at Princeton. Oppenheimer's pessimism is rooted
in the lag effects of the climate system: oceans
store heat for a century or longer before releasing
it; carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for
decades or longer before dissipating.
According to King, even if humanity were to stop
emitting carbon dioxide today, "temperatures
will keep rising and all the impacts will keep changing
for about 25 years."
The upshot is that it has become too late to prevent
climate change; we can only adapt to it. This unhappy
fact is not well understood by the general public;
advocates downplay it, perhaps for fear of fostering
a paralyzing despair. But there is no getting around
it: because humanity waited so long to take decisive
action, we are now stuck with a certain amount of
global warming and the climate changes it will bring—rising
seas, fiercer heat, deeper droughts, stronger storms.
The World Health Organization estimates that climate
change is already helping to kill 150,000 people
a year, mainly in Africa and Asia. That number is
bound to rise as global warming intensifies in the
years ahead.
The inevitability of global warming does not mean
we should not act, King emphasizes: "The first
message to our political leaders is, action is required.
Whether or not we get global agreement to reduce
emissions, we all need to adapt to the impacts that
are in the pipeline." That means doing all
the things that were not done in New Orleans: building
sound levees and seawalls, restoring coastal wetlands
(which act like speed bumps to weaken hurricanes'
storm surges), strengthening emergency-preparedness
networks and health-care systems, and much more.
Beyond this crucial first step—which most
governments worldwide have yet to consider—humanity
can cushion the severity of future global warming
by limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. Hansen says
we must stabilize emissions—which currently
are rising 2 percent a year—by 2015, and then
reduce them. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,
a book based on a scientific conference convened
by Tony Blair before the G-8 summit, estimates that
we may have until 2025 to peak and reduce.
The goal is to stop global warming before it crosses
tipping points and attains unstoppable momentum
from "positive feedbacks." For example,
should the Greenland ice sheet melt, white ice—which
reflects sunlight back into space—would be
replaced by dark water, which absorbs sunlight and
drives further warming.
Positive feedbacks can trigger the kind of abrupt,
irreversible climate changes that scientists call
"nonlinear." Once again, Hurricane Katrina
provides a sobering preview of what that means.
"Hurricanes are the mother of all nonlinear
events, because small changes in initial conditions
can lead to enormous changes in outcomes,"
says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
and the former chief environmental adviser to the
German government. "A few percent increase
in a hurricane's wind speed can double its destructiveness
under certain circumstances."
Although scientists apply the neutral term "climate
change" to all of these phenomena, "climate
chaos" better conveys the abrupt, interconnected,
wide-ranging consequences that lie in store. "It's
a very appropriate term for the layperson,"
says Schellnhuber, a physicist who specializes in
chaos theory. "I keep telling politicians that
I'm not so concerned about a gradual climate change
that may force farmers in Great Britain to plant
different crops. I'm worried about triggering positive
feedbacks that, in the worst case, could kick off
some type of runaway greenhouse dynamics."
Among the reasons climate change is a bigger problem
than terrorism, David King tells me, is that the
problem is rooted in humanity's burning of oil,
coal, and natural gas, "and people don't want
to let that go." Which is understandable. These
carbon-based fuels have powered civilization since
the dawn of the industrial era, delivering enormous
wealth, convenience, and well-being even as they
overheated the atmosphere. Luckily, the idea that
reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will wreck our
economy, as President Bush said in 2005 when defending
his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, is disproved
by experience. "In Britain," King told
the environmental Web site Grist, "our economy
since 1990 has grown by about 40 percent, and our
emissions have decreased by 14 percent."
Ultimately, society must shift onto a new energy
foundation based on alternative fuels, not only
because of global warming but also because oil "will
get harder and costlier to find" in the years
ahead, says Ronald Oxburgh, the former chairman
of the British arm of Royal Dutch Shell oil. "The
group around President Bush have been saying that,
even if climate change is real, it would be terribly
costly to shift away from carbon-based fuels,"
Oxburgh continues. "Of course it would, if
you try to make the change overnight. But that's
not how you do it. If governments make the decision
to shift our society to a new energy foundation,
and they make it clear to everyone this is what
we're doing by laying out clear requirements and
incentives, corporations will respond and get the
job done."
The opening move in this transition is to invest
massively in energy efficiency. Amory Lovins, co-founder
of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that
consults for corporations and governments around
the world, has demonstrated that measures such as
insulating buildings and driving more fuel-efficient
vehicles could reduce humanity's consumption of
energy and natural resources by a factor of four.
And efficiency investments have a demonstrated record
of creating jobs and boosting profits, suggesting
that emissions can be reduced without crippling
economies.
One of the first moves Angela Merkel announced
as the new chancellor of Germany last fall was the
extension of a Green Party initiative to upgrade
energy efficiency in the nation's pre-1978 housing
stock. Most of that housing is in the former East
Germany, where unemployment approaches 20 percent.
Replacing old furnaces and installing efficient
windows and lights will produce thousands of well-paying
laborers' jobs that by their nature cannot be outsourced.
Corporations, too, have discovered that energy
efficiency can be profitable. Over a three-year
period beginning in 1999, BP invested $20 million
to reduce the emissions from its internal operations
and saved $650 million—32 times the original
investment.
Individuals can cash in as well. Although buying
a super-efficient car or refrigerator may cost more
up front, over time it saves the consumer money
through lower energy bills.
Efficiency is no silver bullet, nor can it forever
neutralize the effects of billions of people consuming
more and more all the time. It can, however, buy
humanity time to further develop and deploy alternative-energy
technologies. Solar and wind power have made enormous
strides in recent years, but the technology to watch
is carbon sequestration, a method of capturing and
then safely storing the carbon dioxide produced
by the combustion of fossil fuels. In theory, sequestration
would allow nations to continue burning coal—the
most abundant fuel in the world, and the foundation
of the Chinese and Indian economies—without
worsening the climate problem. "If carbon capture
is not feasible, our choices are much less good,
and the cost of climate change is going to be much
higher," says Jeffrey D. Sachs, the director
of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and
a special adviser to the United Nations.
No one pretends that phasing out carbon-based fuels
will be easy. The momentum of the climate system
means that "a certain amount of pain is inevitable,"
says Michael Oppenheimer. "But we still have
a choice between pain and disaster."
Unfortunately, we are getting a late start, which
is something of a puzzle. The threat of global warming
has been recognized at the highest levels of government
for more than 25 years. Former president Jimmy Carter
highlighted it in 1980, and Al Gore championed it
in Congress throughout the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher,
the arch-conservative prime minister of Britain
from 1979 to 1990, delivered some of the hardest-hitting
speeches ever given on climate change. But progress
stalled in the 1990s, even as Gore was elected vice
president and the scientific case grew definitive.
It turned out there were powerful pockets of resistance
to tackling this problem, and they put up a hell
of a fight.
Call him the $45 million man. That's how much money
Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National
Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries,
Inc., give away to fund medical research in the
1970s and 1980s. The research avoided the central
health issue facing Reynolds—"They didn't
want us looking at the health effects of cigarette
smoking," says Seitz, who is now 94—but
it nevertheless served the tobacco industry's purposes.
Throughout those years, the industry frequently
ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar
research program as proof of its commitment to science—and
arguing that the evidence on the health effects
of smoking was mixed.
In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science
behind global warming was likewise inconclusive
and certainly didn't warrant imposing mandatory
limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. He made his
case vocally, trashing the integrity of a 1995 I.P.C.C.
report on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal,
signing a letter to the Clinton administration accusing
it of misrepresenting the science, and authoring
a paper which said that global warming and ozone
depletion were exaggerated threats devised by environmentalists
and unscrupulous scientists pushing a political
agenda. In that same paper, Seitz asserted that
secondhand smoke posed no real health risks, an
opinion he repeats in our interview. "I just
can't believe it's that bad," he says.
Al Gore and others have said, but generally without
offering evidence, that the people who deny the
dangers of climate change are like the tobacco executives
who denied the dangers of smoking. The example of
Frederick Seitz, described here in full for the
first time, shows that the two camps overlap in
ways that are quite literal—and lucrative.
Seitz earned approximately $585,000 for his consulting
work for R. J. Reynolds, according to company documents
unearthed by researchers for the Greenpeace Web
site ExxonSecrets.org and confirmed by Seitz. Meanwhile,
during the years he consulted for Reynolds, Seitz
continued to draw a salary as president emeritus
at Rockefeller University, an institution founded
in 1901 and subsidized with profits from Standard
Oil, the predecessor corporation of ExxonMobil.
Seitz was the highest-ranking scientist among a
band of doubters who, beginning in the early 1990s,
resolutely disputed suggestions that climate change
was a real and present danger. As a former president
of the National Academy of Sciences (from 1962 to
1969) and a winner of the National Medal of Science,
Seitz gave such objections instant credibility.
Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T.,
was another high-profile scientist who consistently
denigrated the case for global warming. But most
of the public argument was carried by lesser scientists
and, above all, by lobbyists and paid spokesmen
for the Global Climate Coalition. Created and funded
by the energy and auto industries, the Coalition
spent millions of dollars spreading the message
that global warming was an uncertain threat. Journalist
Ross Gelbspan exposed the corporate campaign in
his 1997 book, The Heat Is On, which quoted a 1991
strategy memo: the goal was to "reposition
global warming as theory rather than fact."
"Not trivial" is how Seitz reckons the
influence he and fellow skeptics have had, and their
critics agree. The effect on media coverage was
striking, according to Bill McKibben, who in 1989
published the first major popular book on global
warming, The End of Nature. Introducing the 10th-anniversary
edition, in 1999, McKibben noted that virtually
every week over the past decade studies had appeared
in scientific publications painting an ever more
alarming picture of the global-warming threat. Most
news reports, on the other hand, "seem to be
coming from some other planet."
The deniers' arguments were frequently cited in
Washington policy debates. Their most important
legislative victory was the Senate's 95-to-0 vote
in 1997 to oppose U.S. participation in any international
agreement—i.e., the Kyoto Protocol—that
imposed mandatory greenhouse-gas reductions on the
U.S.
The ferocity of this resistance helps explain why
the Clinton administration achieved so little on
climate change, says Tim Wirth, the first under-secretary
of state for global affairs, who served as President
Clinton's chief climate negotiator. "The opponents
were so strongly organized that the administration
got spooked and backed off of things it should have
done," says Wirth. "The Kyoto negotiations
got watered down and watered down, and after we
signed it the administration didn't try to get it
ratified. They didn't even send people up to the
Hill to talk to senators about ratifying it."
"I wanted to push for ratification,"
responds Gore. "A decision was made not to.
If our congressional people had said there was even
a remote chance of ratifying, I could have convinced
Clinton to do it—his heart was in the right
place.… But I remember a meeting in the White
House with some environmental groups where I asked
them for the names of 10 senators who would vote
to ratify. They came up with one, Paul Wellstone.
If your most optimistic supporters can't identify
10 likely gettables, then people in the administration
start to ask, 'Are you a fanatic, Al? Is this a
suicide mission?'" (Clinton did not respond
to e-mailed questions.)
James Hansen, without singling out any individual,
accuses global-warming deniers of "acting like
lawyers, not scientists, because no matter what
new evidence comes in, their conclusion is already
decided." Richard Lindzen responds that Hansen
has been wrong time and time again and operates
"one of the worst climate models around."
Lindzen agrees that both global temperature and
atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have
increased over the last century. But temperatures
won't rise much further, he says, because humans
aren't the main driving force in the climate system.
The reason most scientists disagree with him, Lindzen
explains, is simple careerism. "Once President
Bush the elder began spending $2 billion a year
on climate science, scientists developed a self-interest
in maintaining this is an urgent problem,"
he says, adding that the scientific community's
fixation on climate change will be remembered as
an episode of "mass insanity."
Among many rebuttals to the deniers' arguments,
perhaps the most authoritative collection is found
on the Web site of Britain's national academy of
science, the Royal Society. But such rebuttals have
little impact on true believers, says Robert May,
the Society's former president. "[Nobel Prize–winning
physicist] Max Planck used to say that people don't
change their minds [because of evidence],"
he adds. "The science simply moves on and those
people eventually die off."
But if the deniers appear to have lost the scientific
argument, they prolonged the policy battle, delaying
actions to reduce emissions when such cuts mattered
most. "For 25 years, people have been warning
that we had a window of opportunity to take action,
and if we waited until the effects were obvious
it would be too late to avoid major consequences,"
says Oppenheimer. "Had some individual countries,
especially the United States, begun to act in the
early to mid-1990s, we might have made it. But we
didn't, and now the impacts are here."
"The goal of the disinformation campaign wasn't
to win the debate," says Gelbspan. "The
goal was simply to keep the debate going. When the
public hears the media report that some scientists
believe warming is real but others don't, its reaction
is 'Come back and tell us when you're really sure.'
So no political action is taken."
Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat
who chaired the 1994 hearings where tobacco executives
unanimously declared under oath that cigarettes
were not addictive, watches today's global-warming
deniers with a sense of déjà vu. It
all reminds him of the confidential slogan a top
tobacco flack coined when arguing that the science
on smoking remained unsettled: "Doubt is our
product." Now, Waxman says, "not only
are we seeing the same tactics the tobacco industry
used, we're seeing some of the same groups. For
example, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition
was created [in 1993] to debunk the dangers of secondhand
smoking before it moved on to global warming."
The scientific work Frederick Seitz oversaw for
R. J. Reynolds from 1978 to 1987 was "perfectly
fine research, but off the point," says Stanton
A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University
of California, San Francisco, and a lead author
of The Cigarette Papers (1996), which exposed the
inner workings of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco
Corporation. "Looking at stress, at genetics,
at lifestyle issues let Reynolds claim it was funding
real research. But then it could cloud the issue
by saying, 'Well, what about this other possible
causal factor?' It's like coming up with 57 other
reasons for Hurricane Katrina rather than global
warming."
For his part, Seitz says he was comfortable taking
tobacco money, "as long as it was green. I'm
not quite clear about this moralistic issue. We
had absolutely free rein to decide how the money
was spent." Did the research give the tobacco
industry political cover? "I'll leave that
to the philosophers and priests," he replies.
Seitz is equally nonplussed by the extraordinary
disavowal the National Academy of Sciences issued
following his most visible intervention in the global-warming
debate. In 1998 he urged fellow scientists to sign
an Oregon group's petition saying that global warming
was much ado about little. The petition attracted
more than 17,000 signatories and received widespread
media attention. But posted along with the petition
was a paper by four global-warming deniers that
was presented in virtually the same layout and typeface
used by the National Academy of Sciences in its
scholarly journal. The formatting, combined with
Seitz's signature, gave the clear impression that
the academy endorsed the petition. The academy quickly
released a statement disclaiming any connection
with the petition or its suggestion that global
warming was not real. Scientific American later
determined that only 1,400 of the petition's signatories
claimed to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science,
and of these, some either were not even aware of
the petition or later changed their minds.
Today, Seitz admits that "it was stupid"
for the Oregon activists to copy the academy's format.
Still, he doesn't understand why the academy felt
compelled to disavow the petition, which he continues
to cite as proof that it is "not true"
there is a scientific consensus on global warming.
The accumulation of scientific evidence eventually
led British Petroleum to resign from the Global
Climate Coalition in 1996. Shell, Ford, and other
corporations soon left as well, and in 2002 the
coalition closed down. But Gelbspan, whose Web site
tracks the deniers' activities, notes that key coalition
personnel have since taken up positions in the Bush
administration, including Harlan Watson, the State
Department's chief climate negotiator. (Watson declined
to be interviewed.)
ExxonMobil—long the most recalcitrant corporation
on global warming—is still spending millions
of dollars a year funding an array of organizations
that downplay the problem, including the George
C. Marshall Institute, where Seitz is chairman emeritus.
John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace
USA, calls the denial campaign "one of the
great crimes of our era." Passacantando is
"quite confident" that class-action lawsuits
will eventually be filed against corporations who
denied global warming's dangers. Five years ago,
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]."
The public discussion about climate change in the
U.S. is years behind that in Britain and the rest
of Europe, and the deniers are a big reason why.
"In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce
and National Association of Manufacturers are deeply
skeptical of climate-change science and the need
to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions," says Fiona
Harvey, the environment correspondent for the Financial
Times. "In Britain, the equivalent body, the
Confederation of British Industry, is absolutely
behind the science and agrees on the need to cut
emissions. The only differences are over how to
do that."
America's media coverage is also well behind the
curve, says Harvey. "In the United States you
have lots of news stories that, in the name of balance,
give equal credence to the skeptics. We don't do
that here—not because we're not balanced but
because we think it's unbalanced to give equal validity
to a fringe few with no science behind them."
Prominent right-wing media outlets in the U.S.,
especially the editorial page of The Wall Street
Journal, continue to parrot the claims of climate-change
deniers. (Paul A. Gigot, the page's editor, declined
to be interviewed.) Few beat reporters are still
taken in, but their bosses—the editors and
producers who decide which stories run, and how
prominently—are another matter. Charles Alexander,
the former environmental editor at Time, complains
that, while coverage has improved recently, media
executives continue to regard climate change as
just another environmental issue, rather than as
the overriding challenge of the 21st century.
"Americans are hearing more about reducing
greenhouse emissions from BP ads than from news
stories in Time, The New York Times, or any other
U.S. media outlet," Alexander says. "This
will go down as the greatest act of mass denial
in history."
In 2002, Alexander went to see Andrew Heyward,
then the president of CBS News, after running into
him at a Harvard reunion. "I talked to him
about climate change and other global environmental
threats, and made the case that they were more dangerous
than terrorism and CBS should be doing much more
coverage of them," Alexander recalls. "He
didn't dispute any of my factual points, but he
did say the reason CBS didn't do more of that coverage
was that 'people don't want to hear all that gloom
and doom'—in other words, the environment wasn't
a ratings winner. He seemed to think CBS News's
job was to tell people what they wanted to hear,
not what they need to know, and I think that attitude
is increasingly true for the news business in general."
"That's bullshit," responds Heyward,
who left CBS in 2005. "I've never been one
of those guys who thinks news has to be light and
bright. And in talking to Charles, I wasn't stating
the policy of CBS News. I was just trying to explain
to an old college classmate why there isn't more
coverage of the environment on TV. Charles is an
advocate, and advocates are never happy with the
amount of coverage their cause gets."
American television did, however, give prime-time
coverage to the latest, and most famous, global-warming
denier: novelist Michael Crichton. ABC's 20/20 broadcast
a very friendly interview with Crichton when he
published State of Fear, a novel arguing that anyone
who bought into the phony scientific consensus on
global warming was a modern equivalent of the early-20th-century
eugenicists who cited scientific "proof"
for the superiority of the white race.
When Crichton was invited to testify before the
Environment and Public Works Committee, observers
in Britain were floored. "This is fairyland,"
exclaims Michael Meacher, the member of Parliament
who served as Tony Blair's environment minister
from 1997 to 2003. "You have a science-fiction
writer testifying before the United States Senate
on global-warming policy? I mean, you can almost
see the little boy off to the side, like in the
story of the emperor's clothes, saying, 'But he's
a science-fiction writer, isn't he?' It's just ludicrous."
The man who invited Crichton, committee chairman
James M. Inhofe, a Republican from oil-rich Oklahoma,
had already said on the floor of the Senate that
global warming was "the greatest hoax ever
perpetrated on the American people." In an
e-mail interview, Inhofe defended Crichton's appearance,
noting that the writer holds a medical degree from
Harvard. (Crichton is also a post-doctoral fellow
at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.) The
senator added that he stood by his hoax statement
as well.
David King responded that Britain's climate-science
research is headquartered within the Ministry of
Defense, "and you wouldn't find a group of
people less likely to perpetrate a hoax than the
people in the Ministry of Defense."
King has "extremist views," Inhofe replied.
If the I.P.C.C. and the world's leading academies
of science echo King's views, he argued, it is because
they actively silence dissidents: "Scientists
who believe warming trends are naturally occurring,
or benign, are almost always excluded from climate-change
conferences and meetings because their conclusions
do not support the political agendas of the others
who host the conferences." (The I.P.C.C. denies
this accusation.) The truth, Inhofe continued, is
that "there is no consensus on the science
of global warming." As proof, he cited—what
else?—Frederick Seitz's Oregon petition.
Paul H. O'Neill, who served nearly two years as
George W. Bush's secretary of the Treasury, does
not buy the common notion that Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney resist taking action on global warming
because they are oilmen. "I don't think either
one of them is an oilman," insists O'Neill.
"You have to have success to be an oilman.
It's like saying you're a ballplayer, but you never
got on the field."
In 1998, while running the aluminum giant Alcoa,
O'Neill was among the first U.S. business leaders
to recognize the enormity of climate change. He
says Bush asked him, early in the first term, to
put together a plan of action, but it was ignored.
Like Bush, O'Neill opposed Kyoto, so he proposed
other ways to move forward. But instead, he says,
the administration "cherry-picked" the
science on climate change to justify taking no action,
"just like it cherry-picked the intelligence
on weapons of mass destruction" to justify
the invasion of Iraq.
"The United States is the only entity on this
planet turning its back on this problem," says
Massachusetts senator John Kerry. "Even as
he talks about protecting the security of the nation,
the president is willfully choosing not to tackle
this problem. History will record it as one of the
greatest derelictions of duty ever."
Bush-administration officials counter that they
are doing more to fight global warming than anyone
else—just with different tools than those favored
by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol. James L. Connaughton,
the head of the White House Council on Environmental
Quality, starts by pointing out that Bush has raised
federal mileage standards for S.U.V.'s and light
trucks. When I point out that the increase is tiny
(a mere 0.3 miles per gallon, says Dan Becker of
the Sierra Club), Connaughton maintains that over
time further increases will result in substantial
energy savings, especially when paired with the
administration's new tax credits for efficient vehicles.
It's also important, he says, to "keep personal
income taxes in check" to encourage people
to buy these new cars. What's more, the administration
recently provided $10 billion in incentives for
alternative-energy development and $40 billion over
10 years to encourage farmers to plant trees and
preserve grassland that can soak up carbon dioxide.
The administration opposes the Kyoto Protocol,
Connaughton claims, because its mandatory emissions
cuts would punish the American economy, costing
as many as five million jobs. It would also dry
up the capital needed to fund the technological
research that will ultimately solve global warming.
"It's important not to get distracted by chasing
short-term reductions in greenhouse emissions. The
real payoff is in long-term technological breakthroughs,"
says John H. Marburger III, the president's science
adviser. Besides, "there is no question that
mitigating the impact of climate change as it takes
place will be much less [expensive] than the costs
of reducing oil and coal use in the short term."
"The world is now on a trajectory to slow
the growth in greenhouse-gas emissions," concludes
Connaughton, who as a lawyer represented mining
and chemical interests before joining the administration.
"I'm highly confident we will stabilize [those
emissions]." He says that's exactly what happened
over the last 80 years with air pollution. He seems
to take pleasure in observing that, under Bush,
the U.S. has actually reduced its annual emissions,
which, he says, is more than some of its harshest
critics overseas have done.
It's a cheerful story, but virtually no one else
believes it. Waiting 80 years to eliminate greenhouse-gas
emissions would guarantee runaway global warming,
says James Hansen. In January, six former chiefs
of the Environmental Protection Agency, including
five who served Republican presidents, said Bush
needed to do much more to fight climate change.
In Britain, Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative Party's
shadow secretary of state for the environment, says
his party is "saddened" by the Bush administration's
approach. "We would have preferred the Bush
administration to take a leadership position on
this problem … instead of allowing itself to
be seen as foot-dragging."
Outsiders doubt President Bush's desire to confront
the issue, pointing out that his right-wing political
base agrees with Inhofe that global warming is a
liberal hoax. Critics also question the administration's
faith in volunteerism. They argue that imposing
mandatory timelines and emissions limits would put
a price tag on carbon and push corporations and
individuals to use less of it. "Long-term research
is fine, but to offer that as a substitute for the
stark necessity of near-term cuts in emissions is
a kind of magical thinking—trusting that something
will happen to make everything all right,"
says Donald Kennedy, the editor in chief of Science.
In fact, despite Bush's call to end our "addiction"
to oil, his 2007 budget actually reduced funding
for alternative energy and efficiency.
Nor has the Bush administration cut short-term
emissions, says a European diplomat who requested
anonymity because he has to work with Bush officials.
Citing data from the Energy Information Administration,
the diplomat says Connaughton is correct to say
that U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions declined, but
only in the single year following the 2001 terrorist
attacks, owing to the ensuing economic recession.
U.S. emissions increased in every other year of
Bush's presidency, making it "complete hokum"
to claim that Bush's policies are cutting emissions,
the diplomat says, adding of Connaughton, "I'm
afraid Jim has drunk the Kool-Aid."
As for John Marburger's assertion that it will
be cheaper to adapt to climate change than to try
to head it off, Michael Oppenheimer says, "It's
a sad day when the president is being told by his
science adviser that climate change isn't worth
avoiding. It may be possible for rich nations and
people to adapt, but 90 percent of humanity doesn't
have the resources to deal with climate change.
It's unethical to condemn them just because the
people in power don't want to act."
"I think it is a slam dunk that we are on
a path of dangerous anthropogenic interference with
the climate, and it is also absolutely clear that
what this administration has proposed so far will
not get us off that path," says Jeffrey Sachs.
"The administration says several things I agree
with: technology is extremely important, global
warming is a long-term issue, and we can't do it
without China and India [because their greenhouse-gas
emissions will soon outstrip our own]. But none
of this adds up to taking no action. The fact that
China and other developing economies have to be
involved doesn't mean the United States refuses
to commit to specific actions; it means the U.S.
should commit itself, in part to help bring the
others in.
"I've had discussions with leaders in China
and India," adds Sachs. '‘They are very
concerned about climate change because they see
the effects it could have on them. We should help
to set up prototype carbon-capture-and-sequestration
power plants in China and India, and the rich countries
should help to finance them. It's hard to ask poor
countries to bear the full financial burden of these
technologies, especially when it is the rich countries'
past burning of carbon fuels that has created most
of the problem. But the U.S. takes every opportunity
to do virtually nothing to engage in practical steps
with the developing countries."
Ask Al Gore how to avoid dangerous climate change
and, despite his wonkish reputation, he doesn't
begin by talking about hybrid cars or carbon sequestration.
No, says Gore, the first imperative is to "punch
through the massive denial and resistance"
that still exist in the United States.
But the rest of the world is no longer waiting
for the Bush administration. At the international
climate conference held in Montreal last year, European
nations called the administration's bluff when it
refused to commit even to the breathtakingly modest
step of someday discussing what framework might
follow the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
At past summits, the administration's stubbornness
led other nations to back down in hopes of keeping
America involved in the process. At Montreal, the
world quit waiting for Godot and recognized, as
Elliot Morley, Tony Blair's minister of the environment,
says, "there are a lot of voices in the United
States in addition to the Bush administration, and
we will work with all of them to address this problem."
The same thing is happening inside the U.S. "It
is very clear that Congress will put mandatory greenhouse-gas-emission
reductions in place, immediately after George W.
Bush leaves office," says Philip Clapp of N.E.T.
"Even the Fortune 500 is positioning itself
for the inevitable. There isn't one credible 2008
Republican presidential candidate who hasn't abandoned
the president's do-nothing approach. They have all
adopted the approach the rest of the world took
at the Montreal talks—we're moving forward,
you're a lame duck, and we have to deal with it."
Regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C.,
state and local governments across America are aggressively
confronting the problem. Two hundred and eight mayors
have committed their cities to meet or exceed the
emissions reductions mandated by the Kyoto Protocol,
and some have gone further. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
has committed California to 30 percent cuts by 2020.
California officials have also held talks with
their counterparts in Oregon and Washington about
launching a so-called carbon-trading system like
the one currently in force in Europe. Such a system
allows efficient users to profit while wasteful
users must pay for burning more fuel. A similar
mechanism worked in the 1990s to dramatically reduce
emissions of sulfur dioxide—the cause of acid
rain—at far less cost than industrialists or
environmentalists anticipated.
New York and seven other northeastern states, which
together with California amount to the third-biggest
economy in the world, are also considering a carbon-trading
system. Their collective actions—investing
in energy efficiency, installing wind turbines,
sequestering carbon—could boost production
runs and lower costs to the point where the green
technologies needed to fight global warming become
affordable for everyone.
At the same time, investors and others worried
about global warming are pressuring corporations
and Wall Street to take the problem seriously. The
Investor Network on Climate Risk, a coalition of
pension-fund managers and institutional investors
representing $3 trillion in assets, has put corporations
on notice that its members will reconsider investing
in companies that don't pay enough attention to
climate change. In 2005, investment-banking giant
Goldman Sachs pledged to embrace carbon trading
and invest $1 billion in renewable energy.
"To use a term coined by George W. Bush in
the context of the Iraq war, I think this coalition
of the willing might be much more successful than
the Kyoto process," says Hans Schellnhuber.
"I've been to a lot of these international
conferences, and it's a pretty frustrating experience
that usually produces little more than cheap talk.
Whereas a true coalition of the willing can bring
together regional governments, enterprises, and
individuals and show that it is technologically
and economically possible to take meaningful action."
No matter what happens, the global warming that
past human activity has already unleashed will make
this a different planet in the years ahead. But
it could still be a livable, even hospitable, planet,
if enough of us get smart in time. If we don't,
three feet of water could be just the beginning.
For more information, contact Lee
Dooley by email, ldooley@asascience.com or by phone (401) 789-6224.
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