On Borrowed Time Read online

  September 2017

  * For those who do not follow Australian Football, Joel Selwood is the Geelong captain, famous for his courage, who rarely emerges from a game unbloodied.

  CLIMATE CHANGE

  A DARK VICTORY

  Some twenty years ago, climate scientists arrived at the conclusion that the vast acceleration in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution was causing the temperature of the Earth to rise. Almost all agreed that we were facing a genuine crisis. Some came to believe that we were facing a catastrophe deeper than any other in the history of the human species. James Hansen of NASA, perhaps the pre-eminent climate scientist in the world, argues in Storms of My Grandchildren that if over the coming decades and centuries we continue to exploit all the fossil fuels that have lain under the surface of the Earth for hundreds of millions of years – all the coal, oil, natural gas and tar sands that have been or are yet to be discovered – then inevitably all the polar ice on Earth will melt, raising the level of the oceans by seventy-five metres and turning the planet into an alien, barren and unrecognisable place. He contends we have already passed certain “tipping points”.

  So far nations and the international “community” have failed conspicuously to rise to the challenge posed by these dangers. Since the Rio Earth Conference of 1992, which initiated the search for an international agreement, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 40% or more. At Kyoto in 1997, a first, modest agreement was reached. It did nothing to prevent the pace of emissions increasing. Since the failure of the Copenhagen conference in 2009 to find a replacement for Kyoto, there has been no prospect of any new international agreement. Nothing was expected from the conference held at Rio in June 2012 on the twentieth anniversary of the initial international gathering. Nothing was achieved. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker has captured perfectly the world’s response so far to the warning issued by climate scientists twenty years ago: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

  As greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, as evidence of global warming has continued to grow, as the unwillingness of the world to act to curb emissions has become increasingly clear, a determination not to notice the looming catastrophe has taken hold of large parts of the population. At one level, this determination is psychological – the incapacity of a society of consumers to accept the need to sacrifice even a part of material prosperity to ensure the wellbeing of the Earth. At another level, the determination is political – the willingness of large numbers of people to listen to those who are telling them that the group of experts upon whom they customarily rely, the relevant cadre of trained and published scientists, have comprehensively got things wrong.

  For reasonable citizens there ought to be no question easier to answer than whether or not human-caused global warming is real and is threatening the future of the Earth. Thousands of climate scientists in a variety of discrete disciplines have been exploring the issue for decades. They have reached a consensual conclusion whose existence is easily demonstrated. Every authoritative national scientific body in the world supports the idea of human-caused global warming. So does one of the most remarkable collaborative achievements in the history of science – the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in which the research findings of the world’s leading climate scientists, as outlined in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, are periodically presented to and then accepted by the governments of the world.

  If a citizen was not convinced by this alone, three studies have been conducted that reveal an overwhelming core consensus. In 2004, Naomi Oreskes published in Science the result of her examination of the abstracts of every article in the world’s leading scientific journals published between 1993 and 2003 that was concerned with global climate change. There were 928 articles. Not one challenged the core consensus. In 2009, two scientists from the University of Chicago published in Eos the result of a survey they conducted among a group they called “Earth scientists”. They discovered that among those who called themselves climate scientists and who had published recently in the field, 97.4% agreed with the proposition that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”. And, in 2010, the eminent climate scientist Stephen Schneider revealed in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that 195 (97.5%) of the 200 most published climate scientists were convinced by the evidence of anthropogenic climate change.

  Consensus does not imply unanimity. Nor does it suggest that climate scientists are in agreement about the most difficult questions concerning either the past or the future – their calculations of temperature over the past centuries and millennia or their precise predictions about the pace and the nature of the changes that will be visited upon the Earth and its inhabitants as a consequence of the ever-accelerating injection of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It should go without saying that the existence of a consensus on the core issue of human-caused global warming does not provide any answers to the diabolically difficult public policy questions that arise for nations and the international community. What is clear, however, is that a rational citizen has little alternative but to accept the consensual core position of climate scientists. Discussion of this point should long ago have ended. That it has not is the most persuasive possible example of the feebleness of reason, the futility of argument and the failure of politics.

  There are three possible words to describe the political movement that has sought to convince citizens to reject the core conclusion of climate scientists: scepticism, contrarianism and denialism. “Scepticism” suggests an open mind. The minds of those who dispute the consensual core of climate science are closed. “Contrarianism” is a term commonly used, even by some of those who are best informed, like the climate scientist Michael Mann. “Contrarian” might be the right term for the small minority among climate scientists who have not accepted the consensual conclusion of their fellow scientists. The contrarian is a loner, perhaps cranky, but also genuinely independent of mind. Most of those who dispute the consensual conclusions of the climate scientists are not mavericks or heretics but orthodox members of a tightly knit group whose natural disposition is not to think for themselves. To dispute the conclusion drawn by climate scientists involves for them neither the open mind of the sceptic nor the cranky independence of the contrarian but the determination – psychological or political or both – to deny what those who know what they are talking about have to say. They are denialists.

  Denialism is not a general political movement of the world or even of the West. In Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism, James Painter outlined the results of a study of the profile of climate change denial in the press of six countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, India and China – in two three-month blocks of time – early 2007, and late 2009 to early 2010. Painter selected a quality newspaper on the left and on the right in five of the six countries studied. (China, of course, has no right-wing press.) In the official Chinese press and in both the right-leaning and left-leaning quality press in France, Brazil and India there was almost no sign of climate change denial. It was, however, a major element in the climate change journalism in both the United States and the UK. Significantly, the profile of climate change denial was much greater both in the United States and the UK in the later period. In addition, although the coverage of climate change scepticism was reasonably evenly spread between the right- and left-wing papers, the kind of coverage was very different. In opinion pieces and editorials, overwhelmingly the voices of climate change denial were uncontested in the right-leaning press and contested or dismissed on the left.

  Painter’s survey and others like it show that, as a political phenomenon, climate change denialism has grown greatly over the past
two or three years and is found predominantly on the Right. While climate change denial as a psychological phenomenon occurs across the West, as a high-profile political tendency it exists almost exclusively in the English-speaking democracies. And although it has spread to Canada, Australia and the UK, within the Anglosphere its place of origin and heartland is the United States.

  *

  The American climate change–denialist movement was organised quite rapidly in the late 1980s in response to two main developments. One was James Hansen’s unambiguous and dramatic evidence of human-caused global warming and what this meant for the future of the Earth, as delivered to Congress in 1988. The second was the creation, in the same year and under United Nations auspices, of the IPCC at the initiative of Bert Bolin, the scientist who had been a prime mover in the identification and solution of the cross-border problem of acid rain.

  Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt is the most important account of the movement’s political and intellectual origins. They show that by the time the problem of global warming moved from a concern of scientists to the centre stage of national and international politics, a small group of sometimes highly accomplished right-wing scientists existed inside a pro-Reagan scientific think tank, the George C. Marshall Institute. The most important were Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. By the late 1980s this group had already been involved in a series of set-piece battles with those they thought of as the anti-capitalist scientific Left – in particular, the Union of Concerned Scientists – over a series of health, strategic and environmental issues: tobacco; Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defence program and the “nuclear winter” controversy; acid rain and the thinning of the ozone layer. The Marshall Institute intellectuals were Hayekian neo-liberals who regarded arguments about the need for government economic regulation to prevent harm to health and environment as socialism by stealth. They were ideologically predisposed to disregard any problem that mainstream scientists attributed to market failure. They were also Cold Warriors who had once supported the Vietnam War and the neo-conservative hawkish policies of the early Reagan administration. As the Cold War drew to its end in the late 1980s, these intellectuals transferred their fears from Reds to Greens, that is to say from communism to environmentalism. Their mindset morphed easily from the Cold War to the culture war.

  As is now well understood, the key insight of climate change denial was the political potency of a technique pioneered in the struggle over tobacco in which both Seitz and Singer had been deeply involved – the manufacture of doubt. The principle was outlined in a now famous memo by a public relations adviser to the tobacco industry in 1969: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” The logic here was simple. To inhibit government regulation of tobacco or chlorofluorocarbons or fossil fuels, the commercial interests involved did not need to demonstrate that their product was safe. All they needed to do was to create confusion and uncertainty in the public mind. George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist, discovered documents of a phoney grassroots movement, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, created in 1993 by the tobacco company Philip Morris. They showed that the ASSC intended to counter claims about the dangers of passive smoking by linking its propaganda with other instances of “junk science”, like global warming. A decade later, in preparation for the 2002 Congressional elections, the tobacco strategy of manufacturing doubt was explicitly linked to global warming in an infamous piece of political advice offered to the Bush Republican Party by the spinmaster Frank Luntz: “The scientific debate is closing but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science … You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” The tobacco strategy was likely to be particularly effective when applied to global warming because the scope of the proposed actions was so vast and the potential interference in the lifestyle of the general public so real.

  In all contemporary societies the authority and prestige of science stands high. Of necessity, the struggle over global warming had primarily to be fought on the battlefield of science. As virtually all those with true expertise in the field of climate science were convinced that human-caused global warming was happening and that its potential for catastrophe was real, the climate change denialists had to construct an alternative scientific community, or what Oreskes and Conway call a “scientific Potemkin village”.

  One method of building this village was to locate and then to heavily promote an alternative cadre of scientific experts who could be mobilised to create the necessary confusion and uncertainty. In the early days of the denialist campaign, the fossil-fuel industry worked closely with a handful of climate change scientific mavericks – Richard Lindzen, Robert Balling, Patrick Michaels, Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. One or two were genuinely distinguished climate scientists, like the fanatically anti-communist Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others were second-raters in the field of climate science. As journalist Ross Gelbspan revealed in his pioneering 1997 study of climate change denial, The Heat Is On, Michaels and Balling received hundreds of thousands of dollars from coal and oil corporations. Greenpeace USA conducted detailed research into the funding that Soon, of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had received since 2001 from fossil-fuel corporations and conservative think tanks or foundations for his denialist-friendly publications on solar influence on climate change or on the resilience of the polar bear. The total came to over $1 million. The high profile of this handful of scientists over two decades has been critical to the success of the denialist movement. As careful research has shown, they have testified to Congress as frequently as the mainstream scientists. They have conjured the illusion of a hotly contested and evenly divided scientific debate, or what one scholar has called the “duelling scientists” false narrative.

  This is not the only way the denialist Potemkin village has been built. James Hoggan in Climate Cover-up shows just how industrious the denialists have been in creating and promoting phoney scientist public statements. In 1999, the Global Warming Petition Project, known as the “Oregon Petition”, was organised by an obscure chemist and fundamentalist Christian, Arthur Robinson, and launched by Frederick Seitz. Eventually it was signed by 30,000 “scientists”, the overwhelming majority with an undergraduate degree unconnected to climate science. In 1995, the Leipzig Declaration was launched, promoted by S. Fred Singer. Many of the supposed signatories had never heard of it. Many others had no climate science expertise. In 2007, the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank, published a list of “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares”. Many scientists named on the list were furious, even “horrified”. Sometimes the efforts to mislead were astonishingly crude. One article, co-written by Robinson’s son, Noah, and Willie Soon, was printed in the exact layout of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In answer to the IPCC, the denialists created their own ersatz alternative, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

  Yet there have been more serious attempts to sow confusion. One of the most powerful arguments of mainstream scientists is the near-total absence of peer-reviewed denialist publications. An obvious denier response was to characterise the peer-review process as corrupt and dominated by cronyism. Another was to create friendly peer-reviewed journals, like Energy and Environment. Yet another was to infiltrate first-rank journals. A New Zealander, Chris de Freitas, was appointed as an editor of the prestigious journal Climate Research. Odd articles began appearing. Eventually one by Baliunas and Soon was published in 2003. It attempted to reinstate one of the by now standard myths of the denialist movement, namely that temperatures were higher during the “Medieval Warm Period” than in the past twenty years. The science was shoddy. Four reviewers had independently argued against its publication. The newly appointed editor-in-chief, Ha
ns von Storch, was refused the right by the German publisher to print an editorial repudiating the article and resigned. Nonetheless the publication had done its work. It entered denialist cyberspace. Philip Cooney, a White House employee and former fossil-fuel industry lobbyist, even recommended it to Vice-President Dick Cheney as the knockdown refutation of the paper of which Michael Mann was lead author, which was illustrated with the famous “hockey stick” graph that calculated the world’s temperatures over the past thousand years.

  As important as the building of the scientific Potemkin village has been the effort to undermine the credibility of leading mainstream climate scientists through protracted campaigns of character assassination, which Mann has called the “Serengeti strategy” – hunting down supposedly vulnerable targets one by one. An early and infamous instance was the campaign launched in 1995 by the Marshall Institute Cold Warriors, Singer and Seitz, against Ben Santer, a distinguished young climate scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Santer was a lead author for one of the chapters of the IPCC’s second assessment report in 1995. Essentially, because he had summarised studies that had been completed but not yet published and had edited his chapter under instruction to align it with the style of the others – he was asked to remove a concluding summary because in other chapters summaries were found only in the introductions – he was accused by Singer in the pages of Science and by Seitz in the Wall Street Journal of removing material and of scientific fraud. Seitz wrote that in “more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community … I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process”. Singer and Seitz were supported by the most important denialist lobby of the 1990s, the Global Climate Coalition, which published a report accusing Santer of “institutionalized scientific cleansing”. Seitz and Singer had brought to climate science the unmistakable mental and rhetorical habits of the Cold War, where opponents were enemies and differences were deliberate deceptions. Santer never really recovered from their attacks.