By Clive Hamilton.
Is it strange that Sarah Palin, who once thought Africa was a country, now quotes verbatim from emails stolen from Britain's Climatic Research Unit or that Lord Monckton, a leading English climate denier, addresses a Tea Party rally in America?
Climate denial has outgrown the early lobbyist strategies of oil corporations and conservative think tanks. Since 1997, Republican rhetoric characteristically linked global warming to left-wing beliefs. But recently, tactics to discredit the opponents of climate change have expanded into efforts to intimidate them into silence as climate denial pitches itself to a right-wing, populist audience.
One symptom of this shift is the ongoing campaign of cyber-bullying directed at climate scientists themselves. Any climate scientist in the news now receives a torrent of aggressive and abusive emails. As Stanford's prominent climatologist Stephen Schneider says: "It's ugly death threat stuff; 'You belong in jail,' 'You should be executed.' [This] never happened... a year ago. [But] now it's off the charts."
The climate change deniers efforts to intimidate is not confined to verbal threats. Schneider reports that climatologist Ben Santer found a shredded animal on his doorstep late one night after someone rang his doorbell.
Targeting individuals at their residences is a strong indication that the intimidation campaign is determined and well-orchestrated. Internet sites like Climate Depot focus the efforts of an emerging army of aggressive bloggers. This reflects climate denial's jump from the world of think tanks into wider populist politics where the "global warming conspiracy" segues into a cauldron of right-wing grievances. Climate Depot is managed by a conservative activist -- Mark Marano -- famous for demanding that climate scientists be "publicly flogged." The site supplies a steady stream of anti-warming tirades from other conservative icons including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter.
But the vilification of climate scientists and others engaged in the climate debate is not confined to the blogosphere or to Fox News. Its most influential sources are mainstream organs like the Wall Street Journal and London's Daily Mail. Clearly, Rupert Murdoch's 2007 conversion from global warming skeptic to convinced believer has had very little impact on the editorial content of his newspapers which continue to conduct a global campaign to discredit climate change.
In February, the campaign against climate science took a sinister turn when Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe (R) demanded criminal investigations against 17 climate scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A document prepared by Inhofe's staff claims these scientists are guilty either of manipulating IPCC data or of obstructing its release.
Political accusations of criminality against leading scientists smacks of McCarthyism, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Inhofe's colleague, Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin (McCarthy's home state), wrote to the IPCC demanding these scientists be blacklisted from all further work with the IPCC.
The populist shift has emboldened the organized arm of climate change denial. Last February, the South Dakota legislature passed a resolution calling for "balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools." In South Dakota, the type of resolution that has urged the teaching of creationism alongside evolution will now balance climate change science alongside the teaching of "a variety of climatological, meteorological [and] astrological" factors that affect the climate.
The bold new tactics of climate denialists now include an extensive campaign of black operations; break-ins into climate scientists' offices, incidents of industrial espionage directed against green groups, and attempts like that against Britain's CRU to infiltrate the computer system at the Canada's University of Victoria by people posing as technicians.
It seems very clear now that populist anger is encouraged by a network of conservative think tanks funded, in part, by Big Carbon. These links, which have been heavily documented, are close enough to provoke the Royal Society to take the unprecedented step of writing to Exxon Mobil asking the company to desist from funding anti-science groups.
The various arms of these climate change denial efforts are united by their loathing of environmentalism. Environmentalism is variously seen to be the enemy of individual freedom, an ideology of smug elites, an attack on the consumerist basis of capitalism, or the vanguard of world government.
For deniers, accepting climate science would mean admitting that unrestrained capitalism has jeopardized humanity's future. But this painful admission would mean more than that environmentalists were right all along, it would initiate a demand for comprehensive and urgent government intervention. This would be intolerable. It's easier to reject climate science and conduct business as usual even though it means humanity's future is "harsh, brutish and short."
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics, Australian National University and author of Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change.
This important new book is now available from www.earthscan.co.uk/requiem. American readers can pre-order the book for its June release here.
I want people to see how excessive and personal it is. Frankly, I expected much worse.
There is so little time left to act intelligently. But before we can begin to save our species by wiping the carbon out of our atmosphere, we have to overcome the stupidity and misplaced anger of a multitude of such bitter, ignorant, right-wing fools.
Yesterday, the Guardian published a letter from 255 senior scientists who understand clearly the 'political assault' but such little people that now targets climate research:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/06/climate-science-open-letter-nas
I am not a scientist, but I do what I can, informing myself and writing about these issues in the hope that my children and grandchildren will have long, full lives. It is a naive hope. I see our continent's habitability degrading around me. It's especially tragic in North America which was a living, unspoiled Eden less than 200 years ago.
There's no alternative, so I'll keep writing and talking until the end of my harsh, brutish and short life.
As I write this BP is telling the world that the island of oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico is not its fault and they should not have to pay to clean it up. We have removed personal responsibility and personal action from the world and left our future in the hands of faceless, unconscionable corporations. They are leaderless, inhuman machines that will kill us all to make money unless we act to stop it.
The time to act is running out.
_________________
"These links, which have been heavily documented, are close enough to provoke the Royal Society to take the unprecedented step of writing to Exxon Mobil asking the company to desist from funding anti-science groups.'
Nice.
Here's a 5 year moving average (satellite/surface data combo, heat island effects corrected), data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.pdf
showing temperature rising fast from ~1975 by ~0.6 degs. C, while CO2 also rose from 330 to 379 ppm, ~1.7ppm/year, accelerating to +2ppm/year.
www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
Combining the graphs yields ~0.6 degs. C increase per 50ppm rise in CO2.
Given human obstinacy, there's little reason to think the current rise rate will drop to less than 1.7ppm/year in 30 - 40 years. If so, we pass 450 ppm by 2050, for an increase of 1.4 degs C (2.5 degs F) since 1975. Or 530ppm with 3.0 degs C (5.0 degs F) of increase by 2100.
This strictly linear calculation neglects the bulk of positive feedbacks from methane (21 times stronger a greenhouse gas than CO2) from thawing arctic peat bogs and sea floor clathrates, lowered arctic albedo from melted polar ice caps, increased water vapor (still the dominant greenhouse gas) due to air warmed initially by CO2. All tend to accelerate the rise rate.
For a better estimate, try Hansen's full-blown model, which suggests +5 degs C by AD 2100 with an eventual 9 meter sea level rise.
If Earth absorbs all our CO2 emissions, then NO. But if it doesn't, then very likely YES, since CO2 is a greenhouse gas that also initiates other positive temperature feedbacks. So...
Earth's radius = ~6,370,000 meters.
Scale Height of the atmosphere (height if it were all at sea level pressure) ~8 km.
Air Density at sea level: ~1.29 kg per cubic meter
So, mass of atmosphere (4PI r squared x height) is: 4PI x 6,370,000m2 x 8,000m x 1.29 kg/m3 = ~5.26 quadrillion metric tons.
How much of that is CO2?
At a current 388 ppmv, it's (388/1,000,000) x 5.26 quadrillion tons = ~2.04 trillion tons.
So, 1 ppm of CO2 is 2.04T/388 = 5.26 billion tons. But by volume 1 ppmv of CO2 is 44/29 (relative molecular weights CO2 vs. air) x 5.26 = 8 billion tons.
So, humans are adding 35/8 = ~4.4ppmv of CO2 annually, while it's rising 2.2ppmv.
This says the Earth is absorbing only half our CO2 emissions. Thus, global temperature is rising.
The above is consistent with more detailed carbon inventories,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_fraction
But check it yourself. No outside authority needed, just a calculator and web access
These people are funding research into the idea of pumping chemicals into the atmosphere as a "cost effective" way to counter the very climate change they deny is happening!
How can people live with such hypocrisy?
If Earth absorbs all our CO2 emissions, then NO. But if it doesn't, then very likely YES, since CO2 is a greenhouse gas that also initiates other positive temperature feedbacks. So...
Earth's radius = ~6,370,000 meters.
Scale Height of the atmosphere (height if it were all at sea level pressure) ~8 km.
Air Density at sea level: ~1.29 kg per cubic meter
So, mass of atmosphere (4PI r squared x height) is: 4PI x 6,370,000m2 x 8,000m x 1.29 kg/m3 = ~5.26 quadrillion metric tons.
How much of that is CO2?
At a current 388 ppmv, it's (388/1,000,000) x 5.26 quadrillion tons = ~2.04 trillion tons.
So, 1 ppm of CO2 is 2.04T/388 = 5.26 billion tons. But by volume 1 ppmv of CO2 is 44/29 (relative molecular weights CO2 vs. air) x 5.26 = 8 billion tons.
So, humans are adding 35/8 = ~4.4ppmv of CO2 annually, while it's rising 2.2ppmv.
This says the Earth is absorbing only half our CO2 emissions. Thus, global temperature is rising.
The above is consistent with more detailed carbon inventories,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_fraction
But check it yourself. No outside authority needed, just a calculator and web access
I.e., Plants preferentially take up less C13. Since fossil fuels come from dead plants, they and plants both have about 2% lower C13/C12 ratios than the atmosphere. So, when fossil fuels get burned, it also lowers the atmospheric C13/C12 ratio - not by much, but by enough to measure it accurately.
Trees take up atmospheric carbon. Thus, the C13/C12 ratios in tree rings can track changing atmospheric ratios. The bottom line is today's atmosphere has the lowest C13/C12 ratio within the past 10,000 years. This not only indicates that fossil fuel burning is altering the atmospheric CO2 composition, but that the rapid decline in that ratio started around 1850, when humans really began burning a lot of fossil fuels.
Thus, regardless what data or logical sequence you look at, it's consistent with anthropogenic CO2 significantly raising atmospheric CO2 levels.
If we criminalize anything, it should be selling stolen property. IE: Exxon should be investigated for selling oil on the international market when that oil was stolen during a homeland invasion.
Additionally, buying gasoline is receiving stolen property. A felony offense.
I want to press charges.