A week ago, the American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectable institution can to screaming an alarm.
“As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do,” it said as it began one of those sentences one knows will build to a “but,” “But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes.”
In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world’s pre-eminent educational institutions — the US — were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why were their warnings not leading the news?
In one sense, the association’s appeal was not new. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the Royal Institution (a London-based organization devoted to scientific education and research), NASA, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the national science bodies of about 30 other countries have said that human-made climate change is on the march. A survey of 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the past 20 years found that 97 percent said that humans were causing it.
When opponents of anthropogenic global warming talk about the “scientific debate,” they either do not know or will not accept that there is no debate. The suggestion first made by biological researcher Eugene Stoermer that the planet has moved from the Holocene epoch, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the human-made Anthropocene epoch in which we now live is gaining support everywhere. Human-made global warming and the human-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and — one hopes — brief epoch in the world’s history.
If global warming is not new, it is urgent — a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the association’s warning, the British government’s budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who once promised that if whoever voted for the Conservative Party would go “green,” appointed Owen Paterson — a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science, but proud of his ignorance — as the UK’s secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, who once promised that the British Treasury would be “at the heart of this historic fight against climate change,” now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industries, cuts funding for onshore wind farms and has stripped the Green Investment Bank (a funding institution created to attract private funds for the financing of the British private sector’s investments related to environmental preservation) of the ability to borrow and lend.
All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won, and please, I want no e-mails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing “you cannot call us ‘global warming deniers’ because ‘denier’ makes us sound like ‘Holocaust deniers’ and that means you are comparing us to Nazis.” The evidence for human-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.
Tempting as it is to blame cowardly politicians, the abuse comes too easily. The question remains: What turned them into cowards? Right-wing billionaires in the US and the oil companies have spent fortunes on blocking action on climate change. A part of the answer may therefore be that conservative politicians in London, Washington and Canberra are doing their richest supporters’ bidding. There is truth in this bribery hypothesis.
In my own little world of journalism, I have seen right-wing hacks realize the financial potential of denial and turn from reasonable men and women into beetle-browed conspiracy theorists. Yet the right is also going along with an eruption of know-nothing populism. Just as there are leftish greens who will never accept that genetically manufactured foods are safe, so an ever-growing element on the right becomes more militant as the temperature rises.
Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed.
The movement was in the grip of “cognitive dissonance,” a condition first defined by US social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s. They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the Earth on Dec. 21, 1954, and they would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.
When doomsday came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the Earth after all — her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.
Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free-market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted that they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grassroots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that human-made climate change is happening, but do not want to think about it.
I am no better than them. I could write about the environment every week, no editor would stop me, but the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever one does or says, it is going to happen. How is it possible to persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit — not stop — the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?
US historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Eril Conway quoted a researcher, who, when was asked in the 1970s what his country’s leaders said when he warned them that carbon dioxide levels would double in 50 years, replied: “They tell me to come back in 49 years.”
Most of the rest of us think like the Washington politicians of former US president Jimmy Carter’s era, and most of us have no right to sneer at Dorothy Martin and her cult either. We cannot admit it, but like them, we need a miracle to save us from the floods.
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