NOVEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 11
U N I V E R S I T Y , I N C .
NOVEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 11
U N I V E R S I T Y , I N C .
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what's happening on the planet, don't look to the op-ed
page of the New York Times. Not that the Times has done a poor job on reporting
on global warming.
But nearly every week its op-ed page carries a new quarter-page ad from Mobil
contending that the facts are not yet in on global climate change. A November 6
ad by the oil giant, for example, told readers "other variables could be much
more important in the climate system than emissions produced by man." The same
ad cited a statement by the lead author of a report by a UN panel of 2,500
scientists about the "'uncertainty' inherent in computer climate modeling."
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FOR 10,000 YEARS, the earth's climate has been moderated by the
heat-trapping effects of 280 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, the
primary "greenhouse gas" released by fossil fuel burning. Since the beginning
of this century, that concentration has been increasing (it is now 360 ppm) and
it is projected to double in the next century. Among the consequences of that increase are changes in drought and precipitation patterns, accompanied by storms of increasing strength. Today a significantly higher proportion of rain and snow is coming in intense, severe downpours than 20 years ago. The newly unstable climate is making itself felt, as well, in a relentless succession of extreme weather events all over the world. Nineteen ninety-seven has witnessed: major ice and rain storm damage to the Pacific Northwest; the heaviest rains in 30 years in Bolivia this spring which destroyed half that country's crops; the record flooding in March along the Ohio River; the worst winter drought in 150 years which destroyed 70 percent of Portugal's winter cereal crops; the epic Red River flood in April; a torrential rainfall in Manila that left 120,000 people homeless; the worst drought in a century in Chile followed by torrential rains which dropped six months worth of rain in a week; the worst flooding in a century in Poland and Czechoslovakia; a two-month drought, following two years of record flooding, which have left millions of North Koreans on the brink of starvation; the worst typhoon in a century in Vietnam and Cambodia which left 2,500 people missing or dead; a 60-degree Easter Sunday in Boston followed two days later by a 30-inch snowstorm, the third largest in the city's history; a three-foot blizzard in Colorado which killed thousands of cattle; and the worst flooding in memory in November in Somalia and Ethiopia which left about 200,000 people homeless. More fundamental changes are also occurring. Most of the earth's glaciers are shrinking at accelerating rates. Twenty years ago, one of the largest glaciers in the Peruvian Andes was retreating by 14 feet a year; today it is retreating by 99 feet a year. Plants are migrating up the Alps to keep pace with the changing climate. Whole populations of fish, birds and butterflies are moving northward to survive subtle increases in temperature. Three Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed in the last 3 years as warming has been detected in the deep waters of the southern oceans. The U.S. National Hurricane Center logged more hurricanes in 1995 and 1996 than in any two years since it was established in 1935, while surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic were at their warmest level since records began to be kept in 1865. A new desert is spreading through parts of Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy and scientists last year found that protracted droughts, punctuated by intense, soil-eroding downpours, have become the norm rather than the exception. The Alaskan tundra, which for thousands of years absorbed carbon dioxide and methane, now is thawing and releasing greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere. The melting of Alaskan permafrost has already caused extensive damage to roads, building foundations, and airport runways. Even the very timing of the seasons has shifted. Because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, spring is now arriving a week earlier in the northern hemisphere than it did 20 years ago. If this emerging unstable climate had begun 150 years ago, the planet might never have been able to sustain its current population of nearly 6 billion people, according to Dr. James McCarthy, who chairs one of the two scientific working groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. -- R.G. |
What the ad did not say is that there are no variables which are exerting anything close to as significant a distorting influence on the climate as emissions from the burning of coal and oil. Each year, humans pump six billion tons of heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere, the outer limit of which is a mere 12 miles above earth's surface.
More to the point, the selective quote from Dr. Benjamin Santer, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), omitted his conclusion. "I am not distancing myself from one of the primary conclusions of the IPCC -- that 'the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,'" Souter concluded. "Indeed it is my considered professional opinion that the scientific evidence that has emerged subsequent to the publication of the [1996] IPCC report reinforces and fully warrants the IPCC's discernible human influence conclusion."
Finally, the Mobil ad contradicts a basic tenet of climate science. Any effect from human-made greenhouse gases, it asserts, "will develop slowly over decades." This statement flies in the face of the accepted scientific knowledge that climate change happens in abrupt, non-linear shifts and frequently involves surprise changes in many natural systems.
The Mobil ad is just one of the latest manifestations of a sustained disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry which is designed to cast doubt on the fact that the planet has already entered an early stage of warming in the form of a more unstable climate.
The reason for the industry's campaign is quite simple. The world's leading scientists are nearly unanimous that restoring the planet's atmosphere requires a 60 to 70 percent cut in coal and oil burning. In other words, nature requires either a profound transformation -- or the demise -- of the world's giant energy corporations.
The fossil fuel industry has an obvious interest in concealing, distorting, obscuring and challenging this consensus view. And its campaign has gone far beyond the Mobil propaganda ads. Since 1991, the industry has spent millions of dollars, according to Internal Revenue Service data, to persuade the public and policymakers that there is too much uncertainty about global warming to warrant radical changes in energy policy.
In 1991, for instance, Western Fuels, a $400-million coal consortium, declared in its annual report that it was launching a direct attack on mainstream science and enlisting several scientists who are skeptical about climate change: Dr. Robert Balling of Arizona State University, Dr. Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia and Dr. S. Fred Singer.
These self-proclaimed "greenhouse skeptics" would normally not be worthy of much attention. Only about a dozen visible skeptics challenge the consensus of 2,500 leading climate scientists from 100 countries. But, with substantial amounts of undisclosed industry funding and extraordinary access to the media thanks to their corporate sponsors, they have been able to create the general perception that the issue is hopelessly mired in uncertainty.
GLOBAL WARMING ON ICE
Six years ago, Western Fuels and several coal utilities launched a half-million-dollar public relations campaign called the ICE Program. An ICE strategy paper called for local press, radio and TV appearances by Drs. Balling, Michaels and Singer to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact." The document identifies the campaign's target as "older, less-educated men ... [and] young, low-income women" in districts which receive their electricity from coal and, preferably, have a representative on the House Energy Committee. After the media exposed the ICE campaign, Western Fuels spent $250,000 on a propaganda video that seeks to convince viewers that enhanced carbon dioxide will benefit humanity by increasing crop yields to help feed an expanding population. But the video overlooks the bugs. One of the most sensitive of all natural systems to temperature change is insects; even a slight warming will trigger an explosion of crop-destroying, disease-spreading insects. Plant biologists point out an even bigger omission. While enhanced carbon dioxide may increase yields in northern latitudes, it will decimate food crop growth in the tropical latitudes where the majority of the world's hunger is concentrated. It will cause a substantial decline in rice yields in Southeast Asia -- and a dropoff of 20 percent of the wheat crop in India, where a third of the population -- more than 300 million people -- live in extreme poverty.
After producing the video, the coal industry began to underwrite the publication of a climate journal published by Dr. Michaels, World Climate Review. Michaels insists that World Climate Review is a scientific journal, even though it is funded by industry and its articles are not subject to scientific peer review. In one issue, he wrote: "The [idea] of global climate change-as-apocalypse is crumbling faster than Cuba. ... The decline and fall of this issue is sure to horribly maim the credibility of the green movement." More recently, in a successor publication, World Climate Report, he wrote: "There's no doubting that our federal government is a principal broadcast organ for the views of the United Nations."
This spring, reporter Richard Kerr wrote an article in Science Magazine detailing scientific differences over remaining uncertainties which need to be resolved to further refine climate computer models. The article concluded: "[These uncertainties are] no excuse for complacency, many climate scientists say. Basic theory, this century's warming, and geologic climate records all suggest that increasing carbon dioxide will warm the planet. ... [One scientist] suggests that while researchers are firming up the science, policy-makers could inaugurate 'some cautious things' to moderate any warming. The last thing he and his colleagues want is a rash of headlines saying the threat is over."
The following month, Michaels' "scientific journal" featured a large bold headline declaring: "THE THREAT IS OVER." The story under the headline began: "This is the last sentence in a stunning article by Science Magazine's Richard Kerr. You really have to wonder how much farther the white flag of surrender can be raised before people start jumping out of their lab windows."
The use of this tiny group of dissenting "skeptics" became clear when they were compelled to disclose under oath in a St. Paul, Minnesota administrative hearings two years ago how much funding they had received from industry sources -- funding they had never before publicly acknowledged. Dr. Balling received about $300,000 from coal and oil interests between 1990 and 1995. The money came from the British Coal Corporation, the German Coal Mining Association, Colorado-based Cyprus Minerals and OPEC. His book's publication in Arabic was funded by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. Michaels received $165,000 in three years from Western Fuels, the German Coal Mining Association and Cyprus Minerals. Cyprus Minerals, by the way, is a western mining firm which happens to be the largest single funder of the militantly anti-environmental Wise Use movement. Fred Singer has received funding from Exxon, Shell, Unocal and ARCO.
"SKEPTICS" ON THE LOOSE
For industry, the greenhouse skeptics have been a good investment. When Representative Robert Walker, R-Pennsylvania, the chair of the House Science Committee introduced legislation to drastically cut funding for global research programs, he cited statements by the "greenhouse skeptics" and ignored the testimony of four of the world's most accomplished scientists. Representative Dana Rohrbacher, R-California, said the industry-sponsored skeptics persuaded him that funding global warming research amounted to "throwing money down a rathole." The public relations arm of the oil and automotive companies, The Global Climate Coalition, has also effectively disguised the reality of what is happening to the global climate. In 1995, a major study by researchers at the National Climatic Data Center, a division of NOAA, verified the greenhouse-altered patterns of rain and drought, the onset of severe storms and increases in localized temperature extremes. Those events are precisely what the computer models project as early expressions of atmospheric heating.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Consequences, were countered, several months later, by a report commissioned by the Global Climate Coalition and prepared by the private weather forecasting firm Accu-Weather. A GCC press release on the report noted, "Accu-Weather experts say there is no convincing evidence that global weather is becoming more extreme." It quoted an Accu-Weather executive as saying: "Scientific evidence squarely disputes the hypothesis that hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent, that tornadoes have increased in number, and that droughts and floods are becoming more common. In fact, the data show that ... temperature and precipitation extremes are no more common now than they were 50 to 100 years ago."
The report was a laughingstock among mainstream scientists. It applied a very simplistic methodology to temperature readings from three towns in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Iowa. By contrast, the NCDC analyzed all the U.S. weather data compiled since the beginning of weather instrumentation. The data was enough to fill 500,000 1995 personal computers. The GCC report also flies in the face of insurance industry figures which show that the $2 billion a year in weather-related disaster claims in the 1980s has increased sixfold to $12 billion a year in the first half of the 1990s.
This summer, "greenhouse skeptic" Dr. Singer reported that the highly esteemed retiring chairman of the IPCC, Dr. Bert Bolin, told him during a meeting in Europe that he had a profound change of heart. Singer alleged that Bolin, a distinguished Swedish meteorologist, refuted claims by the Clinton Administration and environmentalists that any floods, droughts, hurricanes or other extreme weather patterns are the result of rising global temperatures. "There has been no effect on countries from any current change," said Bolin, adding that efforts by activists to establish such a link "is why I do not trust the Greens." In Singer's version, Bolin conceded that "man-made increases in temperature are so small as to be barely detectable."
Bolin, however, refutes Singer's statements as "inaccurate and misleading." He expressed support for statements linking recent extreme weather events to rising global temperatures, and said Vice President Al Gore was "scientifically accurate" when he said that this year's Midwestern floods "are consistent" with the predicted effects of climate change.
PHASE TWO FOR INDUSTRY
In late 1996, the major thrust of the industry public relations campaign shifted away from attacks on the science and onto the more honest issue of economic impacts. In the weeks leading up to the climate change treaty conference in Kyoto, Japan in December, executives of such industry giants as British Petroleum, General Motors and Shell did an about-face, acknowledging the destructive potential of climate change. Some have gone as far as to suggest carbon taxes to reduce energy use. But all have called for very gradual and minimalist changes to avoid widespread job loss and economic disruptions. Misleading industry forecasts of economic doom from substantial cuts in coal and oil burning are being disseminated as widely as their earlier attacks on global warming science. The oil lobby, for instance, argues that even a 15 percent reduction in emissions below 1990 levels could shrink the U.S. economy by more than 3 percent. More than 2,000 economists recently concluded that efficiencies and conservation measures alone could cut emissions 20 percent -- with a net gain in jobs and economic growth. This fall, the fossil fuel lobby spent another $13 million on television and newspaper ads opposing any U.S. acceptance of any restrictions on burning of coal and oil that are not also applied to India, China, Brazil and other developing countries. That condition contradicts provisions of a treaty signed by then-President George Bush which exempt developing nations from the first phase of any mandated emission cuts (on the grounds that industrialized countries are responsible for the overwhelming proportion of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and continue to contribute more). Nevertheless, under pressure from fossil fuel interests, President Bill Clinton insisted that any initial energy cuts be imposed on developing as well as wealthy countries. The policy debate over the greenhouse effect has long since passed the point at which there is any reasonable doubt as to whether or not there is a problem. It is time to clear away the industry-generated smokescreen of deception and decide -- on the basis of accurate and truthful information -- what to do about the problem.