[THS] !!!! Bill McKibben: Climate Change O.J. Simpson Moment

[Peter Webster]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175211/tomgram%3A_bill_mckibben%2C_climate_change%27s_o.j._simpson_moment/


Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Climate Change's O.J. Simpson Moment
Posted by Bill McKibben at 7:50am, February 25, 2010.

“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as
Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists
had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per
congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.”  By early
2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the
staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest
industry on the planet:  the energy business.  All this was not helped, of course, by
the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were
fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains.  These “scandals”
were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the
disappearing Arctic icepack.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward
climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate
change, in humanity's role in causing it, and in its import for the planet:  a 14-point
drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all
(to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of
the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or
“very” worried about the problem (to 50%).

What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to
stare us in the face -- from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage
to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of
course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no
one has yet banished winter from the planet).  What makes this sadder yet is that, if
the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours),
everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely.  If you want to put all of
this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest
piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New
Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling -- especially for an editor,
with those two “a”s in Eaarth -- and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and
it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier
weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find
ourselves.  It’s as if we’ve landed on Pandora without any of the charm.  (By the way,
don’t miss the latest TomCast, the site’s accompanying audio interview with Bill
McKibben on what to make of climate-science scandals.) Tom

    The Attack on Climate-Change Science
    Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century
    By Bill McKibben

    Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a
general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from
the Wall Street Journal.  It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the
reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues
convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president
Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White
House effect.”

    I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a
few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of
acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet.  Sarah Palin is currently
calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move
straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning "a well
organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to
produce a global warming outcome" on a nearly party-line vote.

    And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on
climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin.  If my reporting made
me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to
agree.

    Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might
not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to
rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports
confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two
decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural
systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice,
rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

    Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never
been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer
Americans believe humans are warming the planet.  At least partly as a result,
Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and
as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on
climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

    Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

    The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and
enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it.  The best
analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our
collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that
just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

    The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it
was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and
that was just the beginning.  So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz,
F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it
put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence,
those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported
blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial
slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

    If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack
gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden
inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing
arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him
“a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of
evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike
the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable
doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you
spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they
may be.

    Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming
beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like,
for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually
a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s
unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest
report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?  That pretty much
guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

    Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for
the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the
report indicated -- a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that
it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every
glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

    Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you
might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about
doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center
last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university
decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with
Freedom of Information Act requests.

    Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and
maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate
change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you
can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made -- that’s what
Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved
“scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his
opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down.  I’m now used to a daily diet
of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi
Moron Scumbag.”

    If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path.
Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington D.C.  It won’t even matter that such a
record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water
vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy
in what everyone swore was a warming world.

    For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot
website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts
poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know,
physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could
watch snow coming down; his former boss, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his
grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: "Al Gore’s
New Home." These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove
won’t fit, you must acquit.

    Why We Don’t Want to Believe in Climate Change

    The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil
and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think
tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to
disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network,
Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British
tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

    That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February
when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N.
Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What
made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the
Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since
he is some kind of British viscount.  He is also identified as a “former advisor to
Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her
term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

    "...screen the entire population regularly and
 quarantine all carriers of the
disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every
month... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should
be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

    He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic -- and now from
above the fold in the paper of record.

    Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main reason, for the
success of the climate deniers, though.  They’re not actually spending all that much
cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying
entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into
the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than
most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites.
They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the
widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our
control.

    Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for
instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities
who say that global warming is real and it is manmade.  On the other hand, I feel a
frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models
 [in
part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion
with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s
making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little
more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong -- Gore
has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause -- and
scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to
the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the
same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

    When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers
had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of
whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the
police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming,
we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon
dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

    Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a
chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds
expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a
columnist for the Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation -- a world -- to
fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’
credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

    “Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of
assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some
national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the
case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen.  There are new websites
and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking,
and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case
itself: if you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine tooth comb and come
up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential
accuracy.

    Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science
in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake
because science can be -- and, in fact, should be -- infinitely argued about. Science
is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so
disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.”
That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that
some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood
of dying.

    Why Data Isn’t Enough

    I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by
people who argue constantly. It’s fun.  One of the better skeptical takes on global
warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station
run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works
seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking
action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly
what we can now say with any certainty.  That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly
don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org
building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around
a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say
is safe, measured in parts per million.

    But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science
may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world.
And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are
valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are,
at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

    So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the
last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money.
Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon
dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do
this for free. It doesn't pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

    Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress -- cap-and-dividend, it’s called -- that
would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country
every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80% of
Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the
deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should
park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

    By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right -- and to figure it
out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the
bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from
energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think
Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for
running an oil company.

    Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too.
Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re
making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones
installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not
Chicago.

    Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by
automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their
political power to make sure that miner’s kids won’t get to build wind turbines
instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed -- just not at climate-change scientists.

    But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around.
They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us
at our best.

    There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and
one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around
the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently,
especially evangelical churches across the country.  People who take the Gospel
seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the
homeless.

    It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the
rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious
environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming
movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells
350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the
atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of
400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of
redemption.”

    There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be
in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to
insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks
through -- a sunset, an hour in the garden -- we’re suddenly vulnerable to the
realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the
Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: get someone out in the woods at an
impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and
music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When
we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most
beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to
their history, their identity, their hope.

    The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their
opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are
deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the
shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the
definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re
not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible
doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a
scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

    In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey,
even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying
action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while
there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to
remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our
deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to
operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much
about courage and hope as about data.

    Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including the forthcoming Eaarth:
Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, April 2010). He’s a scholar in
residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.  Catch the latest TomCast,
TomDispatch.com’s audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of the
climate-science scandals.

    Copyright 2010 Bill McKibben