The Heat is on: The High-Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1997 by Gregg Easterbrook

BY CHANCE, TWO BITS OF WRITING on the Antarctic ice shelf recently crossed my desk on the same day. One was a galley of The Heat Is On, a new book by veteran journalist Ross Gelbspan. It begins by asserting that the vast astral ice field may soon topple into the ocean, raising sea levels in "one of the most spectacular and nightmarish manifestations yet" of global-warming effects that may soon render the world "a storm-battered, insect-infested breeding ground of infectious disease, of temperature extremes, of intensive draught and desperate heat." Gelbspan goes on to say that there is no longer any controversy among mainstream scientists that artificial greenhouse warming is already happening and already poised to cause ghastly effects such as ice shelf collapse.

The other item to cross my desk was an article by a research specialist from the Geophysical and Polar Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, appearing in the technical journal Science and titled, "Rapid Sea Level Rise Soon from West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse?" This work concluded that the chance is one in 1,000 that the West Antarctic ice shelf could collapse during the next two centuries; and that if it did the cause would have to be natural, because "induced" climate effects such as global warming are not capable of cracking a body of ice that has changed little for four million years.

Hmm. If all mainstream scientists are in total consensus on this one, how come the world's preeminent scientific journal says otherwise?

My recent experience with environmental disputes has taught me that everyone claims to have "sound science" on his or her side. But invariably, what constitutes "sound science" is whatever supports what you want to believe anyway. In turn, everyone claims the other side is using distortion, junk science, PR, and so on-the definition of bad science, of course, being whatever you disagree with in that sense, environmental arguments have all gone Washington.

Pretending that the global warming issue can be divided up into righteous, noble truth and sinister, crooked distortions, is the primary flaw of The Heat is On. In the main, the book is a valuable work, doing a good job of showing that scientific thinking increasingly inclines in favor of taking the greenhouse effect seriously, as is unquestionably the case.

Gelbspan also makes an important contribution to understanding how the greenhouse debate has interacted with Washington cultural anthropology. The Heat Is On shows that conservatives in Congress have responded with lather to that portion of the business community which denies any global warming threat (mainly, the coal industry), while ignoring the sector of big business that is willing to undertake reform. Conservatives are delighted whenever industry trots to the Hill with cries of unfair treatment by liberal opinion, yet turn away when industry tells Congress it will support a liberal reform. As Gelbspan ably demonstrates, a surprisingly significant portion of the business community, including big transnationals such as Dow, DuPont, and General Electric, backs market efforts at greenhouse reform: in part because such firms now realize that (moderate) reductions in greenhouse emissions could be achieved at little cost through energy conservation. Hill Republicans pretend not to hear that. So too, apparently, does the White House, whose recently released greenhouse treaty proposal falls considerably to the right of what "leader" companies advocate. Like Hill conservatives, Clinton and Gore seem to have spent a lot of time listening to the lowest common denominator of the business community, and not much time listening to the forward-thinkers. It might be interesting to investigate if campaign contributions have anything to do with the difference.

The virtues of The Heat Is On are diminished by its one-dimensional alarmist point of view. Gelbspan takes the bleakest analysis of every angle, and often presents as scientific fact what are actually highly speculative claims. He writes, for instance, that greenhouse impacts mean "U.S. wheatfields could be deserts in a decade," a view that borders on goofy; or that even a mild future temperature rise could cause India's wheat crop to decline, a puzzling contention since Indian wheat production has improved 445 percent during this century's mild temperature rise. Gelbspan sees conspiracies everywhere: "In the United States, the truth underlying the increasingly apparent changes in global climate has largely been kept out of public view" How many times has global warming been on the cover of Time and Newsweek? Or: "The financial resources available to the oil and coal lobbies are almost without limit. They can buy Congress. They can buy...access to editorial boards, TV producers and every relevant reporter in the country...the captains of industry jockey for ways to suppress news." So if they've all been bought, how come reporters keep churning out worst-case stories on global warming? Or: "Almost every week international news wires carry stories about extreme, disruptive, and often record-breaking weather events. Unfortunately these stories normally get buried away, and powerful forces are at work to see that they remain obscure and their significance unrecognized." Can you think of any non-O.J. story of the past few years that's gotten more page-one play than unusual weather?