The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why?
Photo
In this July 15, 2011 photo, atop roughly two miles of ice, technician Marie McLane launches a data-transmitting weather balloon at Summit Station, a remote research site operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and situated 10,500 feet above sea level, on top of the Greenland ice sheet. Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that manmade greenhouse gases are warming the planet, accelerating the melt of Greenland's ice, and yet resistance to the idea appears to have hardened among many Americans. Why? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes one scholar who has studied the phenomenon. Analysts now see climate as another battleground in America's left-right "culture wars."
NEW YORK — Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.
"I don't think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that," the author recalls.
But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of "global warming" didn't set off an instant outcry of angry denial.
In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the "greenhouse effect" is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened.
What's going on?
"The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.
He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.
From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.
"The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger," the 79-year-old "grandfather of climate science" said in an interview. "But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized."
The solution: "Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit..." He stopped and laughed.
"Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up."
The basic physics of anthropogenic — manmade — global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.
"As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It's the physics that convinces me," said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, "to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world."
The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on.
In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland's buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.
By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists.
But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist's remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear.
That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain's Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts.
In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," the world's nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well.
"The statement that we'll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact," oil executive William F. O'Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto.
The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired.
"I'm not really surprised at the political reaction," the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. "I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner."
In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition's own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.
Kyoto's final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn't even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million — just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted — compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.
Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.
Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed — all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor.
The impact has been widespread.
An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared.
The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes.
From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world's seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere.
"We are scared, really and truly," diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific's Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.
Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.
The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world's coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.
The greatest fears may focus on "feedbacks" in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
The Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra's permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.
In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.
"Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee.
Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?"
The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change."
In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the 'angry' parts of the United States."
"Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism."
An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.
On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.
A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.
The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions.
Boehlert, the veteran GOP congressman, noted that "high-profile people with an 'R' after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, are saying it's all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad."
The quarterly study's authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America's hardening left-right gap.
"The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension," they wrote.
Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says "ferocity" in defense of false beliefs often increases "as the evidence proving them false builds."
In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history — the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation — when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached.
"This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer," Gore said. "As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'How long? Not long.'"
Even Wally Broecker's jest — that deniers could blame God — may not be an option for long.
Last May the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It's happening.
Said the pope's scientific advisers, "We must protect the habitat that sustains us."
Sep 29, 2011 at 12:49 a.m.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_f...
Sep 29, 2011 at 12:33 a.m.
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1. No data. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. WHERE IS THE DATA?!
2. Five minutes of research and what do I find? The "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" was founded by someone who split from Linus Pauling, hardly an auspicious beginning. Further, of the "faculty" listed on the OISM's own website, not one is a climate scientist; we have chemists, biochemists, an electrical engineer, a physician, and a veterinarian. These are not climate experts as you claim.
3. Further, of the 31,000 signatories, how many are climate experts?! From the article, only 30% of the signatories even hold PhDs! So, AT BEST, you have 9,000 people signing a political petition who are experts in *their* field of study.
It's like saying because Tom Seaver had a great arm, he should have been a great bowler or darts player or quarterback.
4. You'll note that I quite clearly state the facts indicate the Earth is heating up. I never claim the cause is understood. I state quite clearly that we cannot prove that man is responsible for the observed rapid warming. Your certitude that it is not man has NOT been proven either!!!
Sep 27, 2011 at 8:40 p.m.
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joeflint- here's 31,000 experts that say the man made global warming crisis is a myth. Those experts that are manipulating the data to "prove" global warming...their paychecks are dependent upon manufacturing a global warming crisis. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...
Sep 27, 2011 at 7:35 p.m.
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I invite everyone to read "The Death of Environmentalism" by Shellenberger and Nordhaus
http://thebreakthrough.org/PDF/Death_of_...
many answers to your questions lie within the article
Sep 27, 2011 at 5:10 a.m.
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Care to back those assertions up with facts and data?
Please show me a data set that illustrates the planet has not warmed extremely rapidly. Tell me why islands in the world's oceans are disappearing. Tell me why the oceans are warmer and more acidic. Why glaciers in most places are melting at unprecedented rates? The freaking Northwest Passage is open in the summer now. Care to tell us what mechanism is causing these factual events to occur?
Drop the politics, drop the Al Gore crap (could care less), and show me DATA.
Can't be done because the facts stand apart from the politics. You, the public, are watching the sausage of scientific consensus being made due to the meddling of politics.
The data and the vast, vast, vast majority of scientists who have studied the data have reached only one conclusion: the Earth is warming at an alarming rate.
The cause of the observed rapid warming is unclear but it, in part, appears to correlate with a sudden rise in certain atmospheric constituents including CO2.
"Correlation is not causation" but the observed facts are striking if you bother to open and look with your own eyes.
So to you non-experts who think it's made up, is "Gore-bull", stop insisting that one warm winter or one cool summer or one rainy weekend or a late spring blizzard is some profound climate observation. It's not. It's weather. Climate is extremely difficult to study and understand due to a myriad of sources (sunlight, CO2, CH4, NH3, H2O, ...) and sinks (ocean, clouds, convection, mixing, precipitation, ...) for all of the energy in the atmosphere. Weather is driven by climate, not the other way 'round.
Sep 26, 2011 at 9:06 a.m.
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There are still people who believe in the global warming scam ? After countless global warming data scandals, scientists resigning in shame from multiple agencies...it's one big data manipulation climategate.
Sep 26, 2011 at 2:42 a.m.
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Earth is actually billions (about 4.5)of years old. Even though you still have many morons who believe it's just 10,000 or so years old (magically created with fossils and all).
I don't think there is much doubt that man is adding tons of CO2, and likely making the planet warm. Question is, can we really do anything about it? Very unlikely. China, and other developing nations, are building coal plants by the week, literally...Funny; but they build the coal plants, to provide industrial power to manufacture "green" solar panels to sell to us at cut rate prices, and countless other things to export to us!
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The issue is so political now. Many on the far left are prophesying so much doom and gloom, that the fear they are trying to drum up, is nothing more then a MEGA CASH GRAB (notice many who preach this are invested in carbon off set companies, or markets). Many from the right, deny it to the point that they don't even bother to look at some of the rather obvious science (ice core samples, ext) that make a pretty clear case that the planet has been warming dramatically over the past 100 yrs.
Sep 25, 2011 at 11:45 p.m.
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This hole discussion is ideologically driven, and it is just a bunch of nonsense.
Let me help you out here on EARTH the human race consumes 88 MILLION barrels of oil EACH DAY! Link:
http://oildepletiondebate.blogspot.com/2...
The Citizens of Earth also burn 6 BILLION tons of coal each year. That is just 2 forms of air pollution.
To act as if this has ANYTHING to do with Fat Al Gore, or socialism is just laughable.
Do any of you people that deny global warming really believe that there is no consequences to our behavior that is UNPRECEDENTED in the history of this planet. This world is MILLIONS of years old, do any of you really believe that mass energy consumption is sustainable? Do you really believe that there are no long term affects by burning oil and coal the way we are?
The politics of this issue should be non-existent, it should be purely about facts, not about putting things off until we have completely irreversably destroyed the environment in the name of over-consumption of natural resources, and the people that fill their pockets from these "business" ventures that pay for their own studies designed to refute, or at very least dispute the claims made by the envirnmentalists.
My greatest point is , this should be about how we can do whats best for our planet going forward, not about Al Gore or socialism. If you think that burning that much oil and coal has no short and long term effects on the environment, i would say that you need some serious attention. Maybe your tinfoil hat is in need of adjustment. that one was for RAF!!:)
Sep 25, 2011 at 9:55 p.m.
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zoom, I didn't add it to the second posting as that was not relevant to the post. There are 2 kinds of folk who follow anthropomorphic climate change - the first are dupes who exemplify the term "useful idiot". The second are the perpetrators of this scam who either rake in tons of grant money to find "solutions" or stand to gain power over the masses (in the name of saving gaia).
Sep 25, 2011 at 9:47 p.m.
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"Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," Mr. Hanley quoted "scholar" Hamilton as saying, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism." No, these "experts" have it all wrong. The right doesn't loathe environmentalism, it loathes socialism. The environmental movement has been co-opted by the socialists. So these socialist masquerading as environmental advocates invariably end up advocating socialism as the cure for global warming. The Kyoto Protocol is proof of that.
Isn't it interesting how "science", as it is presented in climatology as well as a couple of other fields, has become the new orthodoxy, comparable to the orthodoxy of the dark ages all those years ago? Science is to be assumed to be correct just as the Catholic Church was to be back then. To question the veracity of scientists is like it was to question the veracity of priests, with something of an excommunication for any "scientist" who questions that orthodoxy. As for the "little people", how dare any of them attribute anything other than purity of thought, purity of purpose and purity of method of any scientist, it now seems (much as it was in the dark ages with priests). We're to ignore the scandal of East Anglia. Ignore the fact that million of dollars, perhaps billions in research grants hinge on finding only the "right" conclusions. Find the wrong conclusions and you don't get any more research grants and therefore, you can't make a living as a scientist anymore. The only thing those East Anglia scientists are guilty of is zeal, I suppose. And of course, the excesses of the high priest, Al Gore, and others like him with gas guzzling caravans, fuel gobbling globe trotting by private jet, CO2 spewing mansions with $10,000 + a month energy bills are to be accepted as a necessary part of this Holy Crusade?
The fact is that science and scientists have been politicized. Global warming is just a convenient excuse for transforming the world into the socialist utopia the socialists have always dreamed of. Is the global warming science established now as absolute truth? They would like us to think so. But be aware, physicist have for decades been convinced that Einstein's General Relativity has been essentially proven beyond question, until recently when a particle was observed traveling faster than the speed of light, a fact that could set that theory on its head. The truth is, we don't have all the facts. And we don't have enough to prove anthropomorphic global warming. If the global warming we think is going on isn't anthropomorphic, then destroying our economic system won't help.
Sep 25, 2011 at 9:39 p.m.
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well Moo, your mom had no problem....;)
(in the spirit of juvenile postings)
Sep 25, 2011 at 8:23 p.m.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC2rotlX9...
Sep 25, 2011 at 7:38 p.m.
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"Science will fly you to the moon, religion will fly you into a building".
Sep 25, 2011 at 7:34 p.m.
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sigma40-if you look at the data behind greenhouse gas emissions you will see how only after the Industrial Revolution did the CO2 levels rise exponentially, not before at any point, including the most volcanically active period in earths history...
Sep 25, 2011 at 7:09 p.m.
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resistance has hardened because it is a natural cycle the earth goes through and has gone through many times. The temp goes up and down all the time. We as humans have little to no impact on it. We are nothing compared to one volcanic eruption.. and how many has the earth seen now? Millions probably. Its a big stupid hype to create money some how.. like selling snake oil.
Sep 25, 2011 at 4:57 p.m.
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BunBub, in your reply, you completely left out your original assertion that climate change is a conspiracy to control everyone's lives. I don't blame you, really, for not repeating that crazy thinking.
Sep 25, 2011 at 2:59 p.m.
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Well moo, seems you can't get anything quite right. I'm a "she"? I should sue my family physician since they got that wrong on all my physical exams so far...
Yes the "climate change" (get with the program, your catechism is out of date- global warming is so yesterday.) topic is bifurcated, but not in the way you note here. One path says that there is a shift in climate patterns noted and claims that our way of life has caused it. The other path says that these changes are part of the larger pattern of climate cycles. What is noted is how the acolytes of the church of unlimited credit, led by pope ALgore I, scream "HERETIC..BURN THEM" when someone questions the contradictions in their own gospel.
Sep 25, 2011 at 2:46 p.m.
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You are misremembering, at best. Cheers, -- a scientist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Y...
Sep 25, 2011 at 2:28 p.m.
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I don't subscribe to "Gore-bull warming". I remember seeing a Nova episode in the '80's where the scientists removed core samples from the North Pole and concluded we had much warmer temperatures in the early 1800's than today.
Sep 25, 2011 at 12:57 p.m.
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MooShoo... well said.. excellent post..
Sep 25, 2011 at 9:24 a.m.
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Melting ice does not smell. the stench comes from those who are seeking control over everyone's life through using the pseudo religion of climate change aka: the "we're all gonna die" scam. these same "scientists" (though note that all the quotes are from politicians) also claimed (with all kinds of charts and paper "proof") we were all going to die because of the coming ice age in the 70's. If the seas are rising, why did Saint AlGore buy a giant mansion on the Pacific at Santa Barbara CA? Maybe he just smells a new source of money rather than rising tides?
Sep 25, 2011 at 9:22 a.m.
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I just don't think you get it RAF! LOL Try to get your mind off of Obama just for a moment if possible.
Sep 25, 2011 at 9:15 a.m.
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But obama said "I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal". So all the doom and gloom over the warming should be gone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbbIQFcEh...
Sep 25, 2011 at 8:46 a.m.
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De-Nile aint just a river in Egypt... And most are one paddle short. Wake up and smell the melting ice caps.
Sep 25, 2011 at 8:37 a.m.
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It's not just an allergy to global warming, it's a rejection of rational thought and an acceptance of "magical" thinking. The destruction of our way of life will be directly attributed to the far right, magical thinking that a divine deity will come and take the believers in some kind of fanciful rapture fantasy, and the by the rejection of science as some kind of evil entity. There is an evil entity, it's called willful ignorance, currently the soup du jour served up by the teapublican crop celebrity "presidential" goofballs and their sheep.
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