Reality Check - environment

E: The Environmental Magazine, Sept, 2000 by Ross Gelbspan

The Global Warming Debate Is Over. It's Real, Inexorable, and Headed Our Way

IN 1995, MORE THAN 2,000 SCIENTISTS FROM 100 COUNTRIES REPORTED TO THE UNITED NATIONS THAT OUR BURNING OF OIL, COAL AND NATURAl, GAS IS CHANGING THE EARTH'S CLIMATE. Five years later, many of the same researchers are very troubled by two things: The climate is changing much more quickly than they projected even a few years ago; and the systems of the planet are far more sensitive to even a very small degree of warming than they had realized.

The long-anticipated federal report "Climate Change in America," was first leaked to the press last June, and it forecast a dire future of disappearing alpine meadows, loss of coastal wetlands and barrier islands, and a dangerous upsurge in insect-borne diseases such as malaria. Forests will be replaced with grasslands, said the government study, and water quality problems will mount. Average U.S. temperatures, the report said, will rise by five to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (F) by the end of the 21st century.

In March, researchers at the National Climatic Data Center also published alarming findings: Until the mid-1970s, the planet had been warming by one degree F per century--a rate at which most ecosystems can adapt. But for the last 20 years, Earth has instead been warming by four degrees F per century.

That same month, researchers announced that absorption of heat in the deep oceans over the last 40 years had temporarily masked the rapidly rising temperature of the planet. The findings prompted a number of scientists to revise upward their projections of future warming.

Unintentionally, we have already set in motion massive systems with huge amounts of inertia that had kept them relatively hospitable for the last 10,000 years. We have reversed the carbon cycle by about 400,000 years. We have heated the deep oceans. We have loosed a wave of violent and chaotic weather. We have altered the timing of the seasons. We are living on a very precarious out-cropping of stability, and the evidence is everywhere around us.

A Dose of Reality

Why, then, is there any doubt in the public mind about the reality of climate change? And why is this E Magazine article necessary? Why send reporters to 10 global "hot spots"--from New York City to Fiji--for firsthand progress reports on the warming world? The answer lies in the millions of dollars spent by a shrinking number of industry players to maintain the illusion of "scientific uncertainty." Also to blame is the U.S. press, which has been too lazy to look at the science and too intimidated by the fossil fuel lobby to tell the truth.

Even as villagers in Mozambique buried casualties of the horrendous rains that swamped the country last spring, ExxonMobil declared in an ad on the op-ed page of The New York Times: "Some ... claim that humans are causing global warming, and they point to storms or floods to say that dangerous impacts are already under way. Yet scientists remain unable to confirm either contention." But that is categorically untrue.

The Greening Earth Society, a creation of the Western Fuels Coal Association, takes a slightly different tack. Citing the opinion of a few "greenhouse skeptics"--most of whom are on its payroll--Western Fuels trumpets the idea that more warming and more carbon dioxide ([CO.sub.2]) is good for us because it will promote plant growth and create a greener, healthier natural world.

They forget to mention that peer-reviewed science indicates the opposite. While enhanced [CO.sub.2] creates an initial growth spurt in many trees and plants, their growth subsequently flattens and their food and nutrition value plummets. As enhanced carbon dioxide stresses plant metabolisms, they become more prone to disease, insect attacks and fires.

The media, however, continue to report the issue as though the science was still in question, giving the same weight to the "greenhouse skeptics" as they do to mainstream scientists--all in the name of "journalistic balance." Real balance, reflecting the weight of opinion within the scientific community, would accord mainstream scientists about 85 percent of an article and leave a couple of paragraphs to the skeptics. Only recently have journalists begun to dismiss the industry-sponsored naysayers.

Nevertheless, the news media still find it very difficult to cover the biggest story of the century and, perhaps, in modern history, thoroughly and consistently. Asked about this failure, a ranking editor at one network replied, "We did include a line like that once. But we were inundated by calls from the oil lobby warning our top executives that it is scientifically inaccurate to link any one particular storm with global warming." The editor concluded, "Basically, our executives were intimidated by the fossil fuel lobby."

And resistance to the solution is staggering. We need to be generating as much energy from non-carbon sources by the year 2050 as we generate from coal, oil and natural gas today, according to a peer-reviewed article in the journal Nature. That means, say the authors, that we need to begin to move toward a global energy transition within this decade and we need to pursue it "with the urgency of the Manhattan Project," which developed the atomic bomb in less than three years.