[A-List] Another Species of Denial

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Bush administration will do anything except cut the consumption of fuel.

By George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (January 30 2007)


George Bush proposes to deal with climate change by means of smoke and mirrors.
So what's new? Only that it is no longer just a metaphor. After six years of
obfuscation and denial, the US government now insists that we find ways to block
some of the sunlight reaching the earth. This means launching either mirrors or
clouds of small particles into the atmosphere.

The demand appears in a recent US memo to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. It describes "modifying solar radiance" as "important insurance" against
the threat of climate change {1}. A more accurate description might be important
insurance against the need to cut emissions.

Every scheme that could give us a chance of preventing runaway climate change
should be considered on its merits. But the proposals for building a global
parasol don't have very many. A group of nuclear weapons scientists at the
Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, apparently bored of experimenting
with only one kind of mass death, have proposed launching into the atmosphere a
million tonnes of tiny aluminium balloons, filled with hydrogen, every year. 
One unfortunate side-effect would be to eliminate the ozone layer {2}.

Another proposal, developed by a scientist at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggests spraying billions of tonnes
of seawater into the air. Regrettably the production of small salt particles,
while generating obscuring mists, could also cause droughts in the countries
downwind {3}. Another scheme would inject sulphate particles into the
stratosphere {4}. It is perhaps less dangerous than the others, but still
carries a risk of causing changes in rainfall patterns. As for flipping a 
giant mirror into orbit, the necessary technologies are probably a century away.
All these fixes appear to be more expensive than cutting the amount of energy 
we consume. None of them reduces the concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, which threatens to acidify the oceans, with grave consequences for
the food chain {5}.

The demand that money and research be diverted into these quixotic solutions 
is another indication that Bush's avowed conversion to the cause of cutting
emissions is illusory. He is simply drumming up some new business for his chums.
In his State of the Union address last week, he spoke of "the serious challenge
of global climate change" and announced that he was raising the government's
mandatory target for alternative transport fuels fivefold {6}. This is wonderful
news for the grain barons of the red states, who will grow the maize and
rapeseed that will be turned into biofuel. It's a catastrophe for everyone else.

An analysis published last year by the Sarasin Bank found that until a 
new generation of vegetable fuels, made from straw or wood, is developed 
"the present limit for the environmentally and socially responsible use of
biofuels [is] roughly five percent of current petrol and diesel consumption in
the EU and US". {7} Bush now proposes to raise the proportion to 24% by 2017 {8}.
Already, though the rich world has replaced just a fraction of one per cent of
its transport fuels, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that
using crops to feed cars has raised world food prices, with serious consequences
for the poor {9}. Biofuels fall into the same category as atmospheric smoke and
mirrors - a means of avoiding difficult decisions.

But at least, or so we are told, the argument over whether or not manmade
climate change is happening is now over. On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change publishes the first instalment of its vast report, which
collates the findings of the world's climate scientists. Though conservative 
in its assumptions, it shows that if you persist in believing that there is no
cause for concern you must have buried your head till only your toes are showing.
If even George Bush now grudgingly acknowledges that there's a problem, surely
we've seen the last of the cranks and charalatans who had managed to grab so
much attention with their claims that global warming wasn't happening?

Some chance. A company called WAG TV is currently completing a ninety-minute
documentary for Channel 4 called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". Manmade
climate change, the channel tells us, is "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern
times. The truth is that Global Warming is a multi-billion dollar worldwide
industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by
scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit
politicians and the media. ... The fact is that carbon dioxide has no proven
link to global temperatures ... solar activity is far more likely to be the
culprit." {10}

So it's the same old conspiracy theory that we've been hearing from the denial
industry for the past ten years, and it carries as much scientific weight as the
contention that the Twin Towers were brought down by missiles. The programme's
thesis revolves around the deniers' favourite canard: that the "hockey-stick
graph" showing rising global temperatures is based on a statistical mistake made
in a paper by the scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes
{11}. What it will not be showing is that their results have now been repeated
several times by other scientists using different statistical methods {12}; that
the paper claiming to have exposed the mistake has been comprehensively debunked
{13} and that the lines of evidence used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes are just a
few among hundreds demonstrating that 20th century temperatures were anomalous.

The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover 
who is making it. In 1997, the director, Martin Durkin, produced a very similar
series for Channel 4 called "Against Nature", which also maintained that global
warming was a scam dreamt up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious
scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain
his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and to edit their answers to
change their meaning. Following complaints by his interviewees, the Independent
Television Commission found that "the views of the four complainants, as made
clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and that they
had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they
agreed to take part". {14} Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most
humiliating primetime apologies it has ever made. Are institutional memories
really so short?

So now the whole weary business of pointing out that the evidence against
manmade climate change is sparse and unable to withstand critical scrutiny while
the evidence in favour is overwhelming and repeatedly confirmed must begin all
over again. How often do scientists have to remind the media that a handful of
cherry-picked studies does not amount to the refutation of an entire discipline?

But with George Bush's defection, the band of quacks making these claims is
diminishing fast. Now the oil and coal companies which support such people have
changed their target. Instead of trying to persuade us that manmade global
warming is a myth, they are seeking to divert us into doing everything except
the one thing that has to happen - reducing our consumption of fuel. It is
another species of denial.

George Bush's purpose - to insulate these companies from the need to cut
production - is unchanged. He has simply found a new way of framing the argument.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. US Government, 14 September 2006. US Government Review of the Second Order
Draft of WGIII Contribution "Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change".
The leaked memo can be read at: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/01/26/USGReview_pp6_7.pdf

2. No author, 27th March 2004. A mirror to cool the world. New Scientist.

3. Michael Behar, June 2005. How Earth-Scale Engineering Can Save the Planet.
Popular Science.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/3afd8ca927d05010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd/4.html

4. PJ Crutzen, August 2006. Albedo Enhancement By Stratospheric Sulfur
Injections: A Contribution To Resolve A Policy Dilemma? Climatic Change. 
DOI: 10.1007/s10584-006-9101-y.

5. The Royal Society, June 2005. Ocean acidification due to increasing
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Policy document 12/05.
http://www.scar.org/articles/Ocean_Acidification(1).pdf

6. George W Bush. 23rd January 2007. State of the Union Address.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html

7. Bank Sarasin, July 2006. Sustainability Report: Biofuels - 
transporting us to a fossil-free future?, page 14.

8. The US Energy Information Administration gives US gasoline consumption for
October 2006 (the latest available date) at 287,857,000 barrels. If this month
is typical, annual consumption amounts to 3.45 billion barrels, or 145 billion
gallons. http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_m.htm

In the state of the union address, Bush proposed a mandatory annual target of 35
billion gallons.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, December 2006. Food Outlook 2.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/j8126e/j8126e01a.htm

10. Channel 4, viewed 29th January 2007. The Great Global Warming Swindle.
http://www.channel4sales.com/programming/m4/monthly

11. Email from Martin Durkin, WAG TV, to Michael Mann, January 2007.

12. See the references given here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=7

13. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/05/new-analysis-reproduces-graph-of-late-20th-century-temperature-rise/ ;

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/10/hockey-sticks-round-27/ ;

M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D.,
Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity
to Methodology, Predictor Network, Target Season and Target Domain, Journal of
Climate, 18, 2308-2329, 2005. ;

http://www.realclimate.org/images/WA_RC_Figure1.jpg ;

and Wahl and Ammann (in press).

14. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel Four to Apologise
to Four Interviewees in "Against Nature" Series. Press Release.


Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

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