President Obama surprised many – including me – by
highlighting the challenge of global climate change in his second inaugural
address on Monday.
“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing
that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr.
Obama said. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none
can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and
more powerful storms.”
Predictably, the president’s remarks drew criticism from his
opponents. Tim Phillips, president of Americans for
Prosperity, a group financed by the oil-billionaire Koch brothers, had this
to say about the president. “His address read like a liberal laundry list with
global warming at the top,” Mr. Phillips said. “Americans have rejected
environmental extremism in the past and they will again.”
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| "We will respond to the threat of climate change...." |
Some readers may be curious about the term “extremism.” I think the
more interesting link is between “global warming” and “liberal laundry list.”
It turns out that Mr. Phillips isn’t alone. Nearly every
pundit I heard after the speech – on both the right and the left – made the
linkage: climate change is a liberal cause. To some of us, that’s like calling
cancer research, quantum physics or the ozone layer a liberal cause – or a
conservative one, for that matter. But we still can’t deny the facts: Americans everywhere know
that on the whole, progressives tend to take climate science more seriously,
and conservatives tend to discount it.
I’ve looked into this before,
and shown that we’ll look long and hard before finding an atmospheric scientist
of any political persuasion whatsoever who doesn’t take human-caused climate change
seriously. But despite ever-more-exhaustive scientific research, in the political realm, the debate rages on,
and the liberal-conservative labels persist.
Well, yesterday, I read a small book by MIT atmospheric
scientist Kerry
Emanuel. Listed on Time Magazine’s “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our
World,” Dr. Emanuel summed up the brief history of the politicization of the
climate discussion in a few insightful – and surprisingly even-handed –
paragraphs. I thought I’d share them with you:
From: What We Know
About Climate Change; Kerry Emanuel
Especially in the United States,
the political debate about global climate change became polarized along the
conservative-liberal axis some decades ago. Although we take this for granted
now, it is not entirely obvious why the chips fell the way they did. One can
easily imagine conservatives embracing the notion of climate change in support
of actions they might like to see anyway.
Conservatives have usually been
strong supporters of nuclear power, and few can be happy about our current
dependence on foreign oil. The United States is renowned for its technological innovation
and should be at an advantage in making money from any global sea change in
energy-producing technology: consider the prospect of selling new means of
powering vehicles and electrical generation to China’s rapidly expanding
economy. But none of this has happened.
Paradoxes abound on the political
left as well. A meaningful reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions will require a
shift in the means of producing energy, as well as conservation measures. But such alternatives as nuclear and wind power are viewed
with deep ambivalence by the left. Senator
Kennedy, by most measures our most liberal senator,
is strongly opposed
to a project to develop
wind energy near his home in Hyannis, and environmentalists have only just begun to rethink their visceral opposition to nuclear power.
Had it not been for green opposition, the United States today might derive most of its electricity from nuclear power, as does France; thus the environmentalists must accept a large measure
of responsibility for today’s most critical environmental problem.
There are other
obstacles to taking a sensible approach to the climate problem. We have preciously few representatives in Congress with a
background or interest in science, and
some of them display an active contempt for the subject. As long as we continue to elect scientific illiterates like
James Inhofe, who believes global warming
to be a hoax, we will lack the ability to engage in intelligent debate….
… The evolution of the scientific
debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of
skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship. Although the notion that
fossil-fuel combustion might increase CO2 and alter climate originated in the
19th century, general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of
Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a
three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature.
Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of
controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a
global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability. At
that time, less was known about natural climate variability before the
beginning of systematic instrumental records in the nineteenth century, and
only a handful of global climate simulations had been performed. Most
scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was. It is
important to interpret the word “skeptical” literally here: it was not that we
were sure of the opposite, merely that we thought the jury was out.
At roughly this time, radical
environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into
the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the
politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers
and big oil, responded with counterattacks. This also marked the onset of an
interesting and disturbing phenomenon that continues to this day. A very small
number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost
credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased
search for answers.
On the left, an argument emerged
urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings so as to
galvanize an apathetic public, an idea that, fortunately, failed in the
scientific arena but which took root in Hollywood, culminating in the 2004 release
of The Day After Tomorrow.
On the right, the search began for
negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative
ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to
observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the
scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists,
who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the
public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of
competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose
hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to
emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers
constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for
balance.
While the American public has been
misinformed by a media obsessed with sensational debate, climate scientists
developed a way forward that helps them to compare notes and test one another’s
ideas and also creates a valuable communication channel. Called the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, it produces a detailed
summary of the state of the science every four years, with the next one due out
in [2014]. Although far from perfect, the IPCC involves serious climate
scientists from many countries and has largely withstood political attack and
influence….
Emanuel concluded his discussion on a somewhat hopeful note:
“The extremists are being exposed and relegated to the sidelines, and when the
media stop amplifying their views, their political counterparts will have
nothing left to stand on. When this happens, we can get down to the serious
business of tackling the most complex and perhaps the most consequential
problem ever confronted by mankind.”
We pray for this day to come soon. We note, with sorrow,
that Emanuel wrote those hopeful words in 2007. And six years later, the media
is still amplifying the pronouncements of discredited spokesmen claiming to
rebut mainstream climate science. And whatever our political views, we will all
equally bear the consequences of an injured climate system.
Let us work and pray for the national will and global
resolve to protect our Father’s beloved planet while we can still make a meaningful difference -- for ourselves, and for God's most vulnerable people and creatures.
Thanks for reading, and may God bless you.
J. Elwood
