Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
Global warming naysayers argue that we don't need to do anything to stop rising temperatures. Mainstream scientists used to be able to ignore them, but now they make White House policy.
Aug 7, 2003 | When the White House announced its 10-year strategic plan for its Climate Change Science Program this July, the more than 300-page document could be summed up in two words: more research.
The plan's No. 1 priority is to study the ways that the climate varies naturally, as in, for example, the El Niño phenomenon. A secondary priority is to gather more information on human, or non-natural impacts on the atmosphere. Whether caused by burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests or belching industrial pollution, man-made effects on climate can be "quantified only poorly at present," according to the plan. So, to "reduce uncertainty" more data collection is needed.
It's a research agenda that enshrines the suspicions of global warming skeptics into federal policy: "Looking at the executive summary, I'm generally pleased with it," says William O'Keefe from the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank that's received hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding from ExxonMobil. "The reason that they've focused on research is not a way to slow down taking action," he says. "Most of what we think we know about the climate system and human impacts on it comes from computer models that are based on hypotheses. There is a terrible deficit of real scientific information where you actually go out and gather data."
While the White House preaches the need for more study, more than 2,000 scientists from across the globe -- contributors to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- have been in agreement since 1995 that human activities are contributing to worldwide warming. The United States' own National Academy of Sciences reported in 2001 that some of the warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the last 50 years is caused by greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide generated by the burning of fossil fuels.
Environmentalists see the White House research plan as just another stalling tactic to avoid regulating pollution to mitigate global warming. "Most climate scientists around the world will see this as fiddling while Rome burns," says Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.
For years, industry-backed global warming naysayers have claimed that the rise in global temperatures is not a real problem, is not caused by humans, and if it is in fact happening at all, it's actually good for the world. The Marshall Institute, for instance, began making that case in 1989, when it released a report arguing that "cyclical variations in the intensity of the sun would offset any climate change associated with elevated greenhouse gases." The view that nature would save us from ourselves was refuted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but was still influential with the first President Bush's climate policy, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Now, more than a decade later, the new Bush administration is continuing to codify the naysaying view of global warming skeptics into government policy, counter to the growing consensus of most of the world's climate scientists. Their frustration is palpable: While more research is always good, they say, no amount of further study will change the fact that humans are in fact contributing to the warming of the planet.
"Ludicrous," is how Raymond Bradley, the director of the University of Massachusetts Climate System Research Center in Amherst, Mass., characterized the plan at a meeting of some 1,000 climate scientists in late July, reported on by the Associated Press. "Right now, we have good, strong scientific evidence supported by the vast majority of scientists who studied the problem to say we are facing a serious problem," he said.
Bradley charged that the White House is capitulating to "fringe science ... Politicians are always faced with making decisions in the face of uncertainty, but I think the uncertainty over this issue is relatively low."
It may be low among a preponderance of scientists who have spent their careers studying the problem, but their certainty isn't bending the ears of those who control the levers of power. The global warming skeptics, lavishly funded by precisely those corporations that have the most to fear from new regulations aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, have succeeded in perpetuating the notion that there's a genuine, ongoing scientific dispute as to the reality and causes of global warming. Fringe science is no longer on the periphery. Instead, it rules triumphant.
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