The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century
by Bill McKibben This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.---Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many havecalled the first book for a general audience on global warming. One ofthe more interesting reviews came from The Wall Street Journal. Itwas a mixed and judicious appraisal. "The subject," the reviewer said,"is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben arguesconvincingly." And that was not an outlier: around the same time, thefirst president Bush announced that he planned to "fight the greenhouseeffect with the White House effect."I doubt that's what the Journal willsay about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I knowthat no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledgingthat human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currentlycalling climate science "snake oil," and last week the Utahlegislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passeda resolution condemning "a well organized and ongoing effort tomanipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warmingoutcome" on a nearly party-line vote.And here's what's odd. In 1989, I could fit just about everyscientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science wasstill thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonethelessconvincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data.(You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstratedjust how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientificbody in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 ofthe warmest years on record have come in the two decades that havepassed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth's major natural systemshave all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic andglacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate changehas never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., nevermore obvious: Fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to considerglobal-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress toward any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.Climate-change denial as an O.J. momentThe campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, andenormously effective. It's worth trying to understand how they've doneit. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an eventthat's begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who wereconscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will makeit come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson's defense had aproblem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown's bloodwas all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So JohnnieCochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, RobertKardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing thatit put Simpson's guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all theyneeded. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how DennisFung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angelesdetective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to ascreenwriter in 1986.If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain ofevidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase thatthere will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed tofind, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance,Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him "a genocidalracist, a perjurer, America's worst nightmare, and the personificationof evil." His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had goodreason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the teammanaged to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in onTV as well. That's what happens when you spend week after week dwellingon the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science ofglobal warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boonfor those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that thebiggest problem we've ever faced is actually a problem at all. If youhave a three-page report, it won't be overwhelming and it's unlikely tohave many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latestreport of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That prettymuch guarantees you'll get something wrong.Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, aspurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. Itwon't happen by 2035, as the report indicated -- a fact that has nowbeen spread so widely across the Internet that it's more or lessobliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: Virtually everyglacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting. Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist'saccount, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, orat least talking about doing so. This is the so-called "Climategate"scandal from an English research center last fall. The Englishscientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his universitydecides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complyingwith Freedom of Information Act requests. Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough andmaybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence aboutclimate change that the world's scientific researchers have, in fact,compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fussJohnnie Cochran made -- that's what Rep. James Sensenbrenner(R-Wis.) did, insisting the emails proved "scientific fascism," andthe climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents "Hitleryouth." Such language filters down. I'm now used to a daily diet ofangry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrivedyesterday: "Nazi Moron Scumbag." If you're smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks thatcross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington, D.C. Itwon't even matter that such a record is just the kind of thingscientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor globalwarming is adding to the atmosphere. It's enough that it's super-snowyin what everyone swore was a warming world. For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website,the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred postspoking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believein, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to alive webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss,Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo onthe Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: "Al Gore's New Home." Theseare the things that stick in people's heads. If the winter glove won'tfit, you must acquit.Why we don't want to believe in climate changeThe climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks toExxonMobil and others with a vested interest in debunkingclimate-change research, their "think tanks" have plenty of money,none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climatechange. It's also useful for a movement to have its own TV network,Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a fewright-wing British tabloids that validate each new "scandal" and put itinto media play.That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even The New York Times ran a front page story,"Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel," which recycled most ofthe accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorioustestament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times:one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be calledsince he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a"former advisor to Margaret Thatcher," and he did write a piece for theAmerican Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for "the only way to stop AIDS":... screen the entire population regularly and ... quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month ... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic -- and now from above the fold in the paper of record.Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main,reason for the success of the climate deniers, though. They're notactually spending all that much cash and they've got legionsof eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely forfree. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tapinto the main currents of our politics of the moment with far moresavvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They'veunderstood the popular rage at elites. They've grasped the widespreadfeelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicionthat we're being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said:"On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who saythat global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, Ifeel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradictsthe models ... [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gorelook silly." But the passion with which people attack Gore more oftenseems focused on the charge that he's making large sums of money fromgreen investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scamdesigned to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong -- Gore hastestified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause --and scientists are not getting rich researching climatechange (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates withlots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: "The game isup. We're on to you."When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots ofpeople. O.J.'s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of blackwomen from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or theirfamilies had had "negative experiences" with the police. For them, itwas a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we'repretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces thecarbon dioxide that's at the heart of the crisis, and because we likethat life.Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, andgiven half a chance to think they don't need to, they'll take it.Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economystinks. Here's David Harsanyi, a columnist for The Denver Post:"If they're going to ask a nation -- a world -- to fundamentally alterits economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers'credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.""Unassailable" sets the bar impossibly high when there is adedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true thatthose of us who want to see some national and international effort tofight global warming need to keep making the case that the science isstrong. That's starting to happen. There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, andstrangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making thecase itself: If you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine-tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that'spretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind themagisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble ofPolitics is a mistake. It's a mistake because science can be -- and, infact, should be -- infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact,nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why itsounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that thescience is "settled." That's especially true of people who have beentold at various times in their lives that some food is good for you,only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.Why data isn't enoughI work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, soI'm surrounded by people who argue constantly. It's fun. One of thebetter skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They'reskeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the sciencesoon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, butless than we someday will. There will always be controversy overexactly what we can now say with any certainty. That's life on thecutting edge. I certainly don't turn my back on the research -- we'vespent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called "the largest ever coordinated global rally" around a previouslyobscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientistssay is safe, measured in parts per million.But it's a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for anotherreason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics ishow we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.So let's figure out how to talk about it. Let's look at ExxonMobil,which each of the last three years has made more money than any companyin the history of money. Its business model involves using theatmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is theinevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it dothis for free. It doesn't pay a red cent for potentially wrecking ourworld. Right now, there's a bill in the Congress -- cap-and-dividend,it's called -- that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a checkto everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass onthe charge at the pump, but 80 percent of Americans (all except the top-incomeenergy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send asignal that we should park that SUV, but it's also good politics.By the way, if you think there's a scam underway, you're right --and to figure it out just track the money going in campaigncontributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energycompanies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the lasttwo election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money fromgreen energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You're right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They're making the investments that meanfuture windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country,will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simplyby automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they'reusing their political power to make sure that miners' kids won't get tobuild wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed -- justnot at climate-change scientists.But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren't the only feelingsaround. They're powerful feelings, to be sure, but they're not all wefeel. And they are not us at our best.There's also love, a force that has often helped motivatelarge-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little powerto rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If youthink it's not real, you haven't been to church recently, especiallyevangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospelseriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungryand shelter the homeless. It's becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goalquite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change.That's why religious environmentalism is one of the most effectiveemerging parts of the global warming movement; that's why we were ableto get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last Octoberto signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in theatmosphere; that's why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox churchand leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, "Global warming isa sin and 350 is an act of redemption."There's also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. Wewere born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much ofmodernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn't reallywork. Any time the natural world breaks through -- a sunset, an hour inthe garden -- we're suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we careabout things beyond ourselves. That's why, for instance, the Boy Scoutsand the Girl Scouts are so important: Get someone out in the woods atan impressionable age and you've accomplished something powerful.That's why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongsidebar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org,we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconicspots that conjure up people's connection to their history, theiridentity, their hope.The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered byinsisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work toprevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that weshould leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We wantour kids to know the world we knew. Here's the definition of radical:doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you're notcompletely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove everypossible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocentman in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act moreconservatively.In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they'll be afootnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they'lllose because we'll all lose, because by delaying action, they will havehelped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there'sstill time. If we're going to make real change while it matters, it'simportant to remember that their skepticism isn't the root of theproblem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change.That's what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That's what weneed to overcome, and at bottom that's a battle as much about courageand hope as about data.
Related Links:
Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces a challenger from the left, but is he any better on the environment?
The ‘energy-only’ bill and Byron Dorgan’s deficit hypocrisy
