Hot Air:
Global Warming and Business as Usual
Z Magazine (Boston)
February, 1997, pp. 31-36
This version shortened from the original, elipsis noted
To a casual observer, the reality, or otherwise, of a threat to humankind would appear to be determined by inexact but essentially rational calculations based on evidence, hard facts, and best guesses all wrapped up in a framework of concern for the general well-being of people and planet. Not so. In fact, the perceived seriousness of a threat is largely determined by the extent to which it is a help or a hindrance to goals set by centers of political and economic power. This can be demonstrated by refer-ence to two modern threats, and to the political and corporate, including corporate media, response to them.
In June 1996 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an official body of more than 2,000 scientists set up by the world's governments, reported that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible influence on global climate." Tim Radford of the London Guardian writes that: "Man-made global warming is now detectable, and average temperatures could be 4C higher by 2100—with sea levels rising half a metre a century for hundreds of years to come."
The climate is currently heating up faster than at any time in the last l0,000 years. At time of writing, every climate model in the world predicts rates of global warming between 10 and 100 times faster than anything living systems have faced since human beings began to walk the earth.
These models are based on indications that human activity has increased atmospheric greenhouse gasses by 90 parts per million (PPM). Gasses found trapped deep in Antarctic ice indicate that increases in greenhouse gasses of 100 PPM, 15,000 years ago, were sufficient to raise global temperatures by three degrees. Given that greenhouse gasses are projected to rise a further 140 PPM by the year 205O, even in the event of an immediate 50 percent cut in current emmission rates, it is easy to see why climatologists are predicting trouble ahead.
The ten hottest years in human history have all been recorded since the beginning of the 1980s. And yet warming currently taking place is the product of a less energy-intensive age. Scientists believe that global warming has an inbuilt time lag. Today's temperatures are the result of gasses released during the 1960s, before the age of the fully globalized economy.
It is impossible to predict the effects of global warming with any accuracy but they seem sure to be dramatic and quite possibly catastrophic, including massive disruption of agriculture, industry, and the food chains with unknown consequences; more storms of increased severity; more droughts and floods, including the flooding of low-lying islands and deltas. By way of only one example, it is thought that 100 million people now living in Southern Africa may be made environmental refugees by global warming as croplands face permanent drought.
Evidence of global warming is coming in thick and fast the world over. In September 1993, Norwegian scientists reported that data collected since 1983 revealed that the polar ice cap is melting 10 percent faster than it can be replaced. Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) reported (September 1994) "the greening of Antarctica" as the ice recedes and summers lengthen. The BAS study reported a "rapid increase" in the continent's only two flowering plants at sites 600 miles apart, with one flowering grass 25 times more common than it was 30 years ago. BAS scientist Dr. Lewis Smith said "This is part of the global warming situation...a sign of regional warming, which is part of what is happening to the climate globally." According to BAS, Antarctic summer temperatures now persist 50 percent longer than they did during the 1970s.
The European Sub-Polar Ocean Programme has found that the Ogden Feature, a tongue of ice which acts as a natural pump driving currents in the North Atlantic, has failed for the past three years in succession. This has never happened before. Dr. Peter Wadhams of the Scott Polar Research Institute reports that "Global warming is the culprit. It has reduced the area of ice in the Greenland Sea and cut off the process." (Independent on Sunday) The consequences are uncertain but it is thought that the failure of the Ogden Feature may weaken the Gulf Stream which keeps northern Europe much warmer than other regions at the same latitude; violent switches in the climate may be triggered as a result.
Paul Brown of The Guardian reports (July 6, 1996) that ice which has held the Swiss Alps together for l0,000 years is now melting at the rate of 30 meters per year in some places: "Scientists who advise politicians believe that countries like Switzerland are suffering irreversible damage," Brown writes, with villages threatened by the prospect of "tidal waves" of "melt-water descending on their homes" bearing "an avalanche of rocks" and "the collapse of cliffs that flank their valleys."
Alongside what we know, scientists also regularly warn us that there is plenty that remains unknown. During the early 1990s, the aim of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study was to evaluate how much atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed into the oceans and how much is released from them. Previously, only general patterns were known. For example, warm, tropical waters tend to release carbon dioxide, while cold, high-latitude waters tend to absorb and store carbon dioxide. For this reason, oceanographers fear that in a warming world warmer seas may strongly amplify warming by releasing stored carbon dioxide. The problem is that the Ocean Flux study found astonishing variations in the carbon dioxide content of the North Atlantic over even short distances.
"The variations observed," concluded the authors of a paper in Nature, "suggests that estimates of the oceanic storage or release of carbon dioxide calcuated from existing data will be subject to significant error. "
Similarly, summarizing their results in a paper in Science magazine (August 23, 1991), 17 climate modelling teams from around the world found that, depending on the behaviour of clouds above melting snowy areas, the role of snow in global warming varied from strongly-positive to weakly-negative.
More recently, Martin Perry of Oxford University has said that "Unexpected changes cannot be ruled out. There are potential surprises out there, both in time and in place. This ignorance is a risk in itself. We don't know when these unexpected impacts could occur, or where." Nobel prize-winner Paul Crutzen suggests, ominously, that global climate change will bring "unpleasant surprises."
The threat of global warming, then, is real. The response to it, as yet, however, is not. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the world's governments signed a treaty agreeing to combat global warming. Industrialised nations promised to "aim" (the crucial word) to level off their emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000.
The United States signed this treaty in the full knowledge that its carbon dioxide emissions were projected to rise by 13 percent by the year 2000, with its multinationals providing the lion's share of $1,000 billion investment in the search for oil over 10 years. George Bush once said he would use the "White House effect to counter the greenhouse effect: and then, when elected, adopted the "wait and see strategy" favored by big business, despite the fact that, as the Ocean Flux and other studies have shown, the environmental systems under investigation are of such complexity that certainty is impossible and waiting never ends.
Four years later, we know that almost no Western countries will meet the modest targets set at the Earth Summit. The International Energy Agency estimates that by the year 2000 global greenhouse gasses will be 17 percent higher than in 1990; by 2010 they will have risen by 49 percent. Similarly, the World Energy Council reports that combined emissions of Western countries have actually increased by 4 percent between 1990 and 1995. Only Britain and Germany are on track: Britain, because it happened to change from coal to gas for political reasons (the destruction of the coal industry was not motivated by a desire to protect the environment); Germany, because it shut down the inefficient industries of the east. Genuine action to combat global warming has been minimal. Indicatively, the British Energy Conservation Trust set up to take action has received only a tenth of its planned funding. Energy minister, Tim Eggar, cites accidental pollution cuts as justfication for opposing other measures. Eileen Clausen, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Environmental Issues admitted the obvious truth that governments were "in disarray" over climate change. There was "no clear policy direction," and "little thought" had been given to implementing and enforcing any policies adopted.
If the world has done little to date in the face of all this, what are the prospects for change? Will the world continue to play Russian Roulette with the climate? An idea of the sort of economic and political forces arrayed against change can be gained by considering the response of those same forces to an earlier "threat "
[ . . . ]
When Goblins Walk The Earth
In considering the failure of the West to respond to the very real threat of global warming, we need to remember that Western governments, academics and media joined whole-heartedly in promoting the Soviet "threat."
By contrast, the media has responded with indifference, scepticism, and a kind of wilful amnesia to warnings relating to global warming.
A prime example was the media response to an October 1990 UN conference at which an international panel of scientists reached virtual unanimity on the conclusion that global warming had occurred over the past century and that the risk of furlher warming is serious, ranging from significant to near-catastrophic. Not a single member of the panel agreed with sceptical views expressed in the U.S. press, gaining such headlines as "U.S. Data Fail To Show Warming Trend" (New York Times) and "The Global Warming Panic: A Classic Case of Over-Reaction" (cover of Forbes, Science, March 8, 1990).
In contrast to the "menace of international communism," the facts of this issue represent a serious threat to corporate goals. Stephen Schneider, head of Interdisciplinary Climate Systems at the U. S. National Centre For Atmospheric Research, has estimated that conversion to a post-greenhouse economy would cost government and corporations "hundreds of billions of dollars every year for many decades, both at home and in financial and technical assistance to developing nations." Consequently, like inconvenient human rights atrocities and costly facts more generally, the global warming issue, and certainly the idea of a need for immediate and drastic action, tends not to be promoted by the corporate media. Instead, as Sherwood Rowland, whose laboratory first discovered the ozone-depleting properties of CFCs, has said: "It is quite common on the scientific side of industry to believe that there aren't any real environmental problems, that there are just public relations problems." (Tom Athanasiou, "U.S. Politics and Global Warming," Open magazine Pamphlet Series.)
No surprise, then, that sardonic ridicule is the order of the day. At the British dissident extreme, Pat Coyne argued in the New Statesman (June 14, 1994) that revision of the informed consensus that global warming was a genuine threat was "in the air" on he basis that predictive computer models are "necessiarily simplifications," which may therefore "be drastically modified"; and on the basis of inconcluive speculations about "regular and irregular" fluctuations in the Gulf Stream and interglacial temperaures 180,000 years ago which may, or may not, imply impeded or enhanced global warming. Coyne's conclusion was that, in chilly Britain, a bit of global warming "seems more than enticing...the sooner the better." This, recall, representing the dissident extreme of mainstream journalism.
Some ten days after the IPCC's report confirming "a discernible influence on global climate," on June 6, Taki of the Sunday Times had this to say: "The latest apocalypse, global warming, is just that. Lots of hot air. In the 1960s and 1970s the doom-sayers had been warning of an impending ice age. Their anti-capitalist agenda back then was that human activity was putting so much dust in the atmosphere that it was cooling the planet."
A couple of weeks later an editorial in the Daily Telegraph (August 4, 1996) under the banner "Hot Air" argued that: "to many scientists, the likelihood of man-made global warming is about as credible as stories of goblins and fairies."
Note that the Daily Telegraph's views are in flat contradiction to the scientific consensus. The Department of the Environment was unlucky, the newspaper quipped: "its predictions of a much warmer Britain appeared on an unseasonably cold dav after a bitter spring. It made the prophecy seem doubly improbable." The it's-chilly-so-global-warming-is-ajoke quip is a wearisome perennial of media reporting. The poor British summer of 1993 convinced the Times that "global warming was revealed as an empty promise." (Roy Greenslade, The Observer) More recently, the Sunday Times derided those warning of the threat of climate change for "trying to alarm a sceptical and shivering nation."
The Daily Telegraph reports, accurately, that "The public can all too easily be misled by institutions with vested interests."
True enough. Speaking at the climate convention in Geneva, Bert Bolin, chair of the IPCC, urged journalists not to listen to individual scientists whose theories had not been tested, and whose motives appeared dubious. According to Bolin, ever since his group of scientists concluded that humans were were discernibly altering the climate, a campaign has been waged against their findings. Paul Brown of the Guardian reports that "Dozens of stories lending credibility to dubious science have been fed to newspapers in the last few weeks in the lead-up to the Second Conference of the Parties." One group in particular, the Global Climate Coalition, representing Shell, BP, Exxon, Ford, and other noted "environmentalists," is still spending millions of pounds to persuade governments to do nothing on grounds that "It fears climate change is bad for business."
The Global Climate Coalition "claims the scientists are going over the top and says there is as yet no proven need to do anything." The group, Brown notes, has the support of most of the U.S. Congress. A World Health organization panel denounced the group for behaving exactly like the tobacco industry 30 years earlier when the damaging effects were becoming clear. Elsewhere, Professor Anthony McMichael, co-author of the effects of global warming, warns that industrial lobbyists "are involved in types of distortion of evidence, delaying tactics and drowning out by making more noise." (The Guardian, July 7, 1996)
Among the tireless efforts made by the Global Climate Coalition has been the production of a document signed by 100 of the biggest U.S. companies asking for no action to be taken on climate change. The Coalition was also involved in feverishly handing out cuttings from papers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal at the door of the IPCC conference in a desperate bid to spread their propaganda.
Of course, there never will be any proven need to respond to global warming, for those defending short-term profits at any cost. The bottom line of the Global Climate Coalition's efforts is at one with the Telegraph: "it might be an idea if the weather was one of the few subjects in which politicians did not interfere. "
Writing in The Guardian (July 6, 1996), novelist John Mortimer joined in the general media assault on the notion that global warming is to be taken seriously. Echoing the New Statesman, the Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times, and everyone else, Mortimer, it seems, "can't wait for global warming to bring England a Mediterranean climate," if only he "had enough faith in weather forecasters to believe it will happen." This is the cue for much ribald humour about the British climate, British work habits, lazy Mediterranean's and so on.
Unfortunately, it matters little that Mortimer's comments are flatly false and absurd, the fact is that articles of this kind—however benign and humorous their intention—serve the corporations well by making the threat of global warming seem a joke, the preserve of paranoid depressives.
To his credit, Roy Greenslade of The Observer (July 21, 1996) did manage to comment on the failure of the press to cover the global warming story. Referring to British Environment Secretary John Gummer's declaration at the United Nations conference in Geneva that "Global climate change needs global action now. The alarm bells ought to be ringing in every capital of the world," Greenslade writes "I thought... this is sure to be big news in the morning. I imagined the front-page stories, the feature articles and the leaders." It was not to be; although Greenslade urges that we award credit where credit's due. namely, "The Daily Telegraph alone placed the story on page one."
Elsewhere, the story was met with indifference and hostility:."Every right-wing paper has attempted to debunk global warming," Greenslade reports. As for the reason for the media's failure to cover either the IPCC report or Gummer's speech: "There were probably two opposing reasons...Those papers which greeted the conference by accepting its central thesis assumed they had done enough. Papers which cannot stomach the scientific evidence for global warming ignored it. This latter attitude leaves readers seriously uninformed about a serious issue."
Why some papers cannot "stomach the scientific evidence for global warming" is left to the readers' imagination. Such an analysis—at the very extreme of mainstream media coverage—should be sufficient to reduce any sane person to tears. Before the world drowns in melt water, it seems sure that we will already have long since drowned in banality and halftruths.
David Edwards is the author of Burning All Illusions (South End Press).
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