Vanity Fair article on global warming now online
Vanity Fair devoted its recent issue to global warming. Thanks to Guerilla News Network, the lead article While Washington Slept [subtitle: The Queen of England is afraid. International C.E.O.'s are nervous. And the scientific establishment is loud and clear.] is now available online. While ending on a fairly positive note regarding the ability of American capitalism to confront this mammoth problem, the article is an excellent summary of the issues, and of the massive organized campaign of global warming denial that has helped condemn us all to having to live with major global warming, if the world starts to act very soon. Of course, if the world doesn’t start to act, many of us, even in the United States, won’t live.
Here are a few excerpts:
Since roughly half the world’s 6.5 billion people live near coastlines, a three-foot sea-level rise would be even more punishing overseas. Amsterdam, Venice, Cairo, Shanghai, Manila, and Calcutta are some of the cities most threatened. In many places the people and governments are too poor to erect adequate barriers—think of low-lying Bangladesh, where an estimated 18 million people are at risk—so experts fear that they will migrate to neighboring lands, raising the prospect of armed conflict. A Pentagon-commissioned study warned in 2003 that climate change could bring mega-droughts, mass starvation, and even nuclear war as countries such as China, India, and Pakistan battle over scarce food and water.
The worst scenarios of global warming might still be avoided, scientists say, if humanity reduces its greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically, and very soon. The I.P.C.C. has estimated that emissions must fall to 60 percent below 1990 levels before 2050, over a period when global population is expected to increase by 37 percent and per-capita energy consumption will surely rise as billions of people in Asia, Africa, and South America strive to ascend from poverty.
Yet even if such a reduction were achieved, a significant rise in sea levels may be unavoidable. “It’s getting harder and harder to say we’ll avoid a three-foot sea-level rise, though it won’t necessarily happen in this century,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton….
The upshot is that it has become too late to prevent climate change; we can only adapt to it. This unhappy fact is not well understood by the general public; advocates downplay it, perhaps for fear of fostering a paralyzing despair. But there is no getting around it: because humanity waited so long to take decisive action, we are now stuck with a certain amount of global warming and the climate changes it will bring—rising seas, fiercer heat, deeper droughts, stronger storms. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is already helping to kill 150,000 people a year, mainly in Africa and Asia. That number is bound to rise as global warming intensifies in the years ahead.
The goal is to stop global warming before it crosses tipping points and attains unstoppable momentum from “positive feedbacks.” For example, should the Greenland ice sheet melt, white ice—which reflects sunlight back into space—would be replaced by dark water, which absorbs sunlight and drives further warming.
Positive feedbacks can trigger the kind of abrupt, irreversible climate changes that scientists call “nonlinear.” Once again, Hurricane Katrina provides a sobering preview of what that means. “Hurricanes are the mother of all nonlinear events, because small changes in initial conditions can lead to enormous changes in outcomes,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the former chief environmental adviser to the German government. “A few percent increase in a hurricane’s wind speed can double its destructiveness under certain circumstances.”
Although scientists apply the neutral term “climate change” to all of these phenomena, “climate chaos” better conveys the abrupt, interconnected, wide-ranging consequences that lie in store. “It’s a very appropriate term for the layperson,” says Schellnhuber, a physicist who specializes in chaos theory. “I keep telling politicians that I’m not so concerned about a gradual climate change that may force farmers in Great Britain to plant different crops. I’m worried about triggering positive feedbacks that, in the worst case, could kick off some type of runaway greenhouse dynamics.”
Perhaps most importantly, the article lays out the similarities between the global warming deniers an the health risks of smoking deniers. They use the same tactics, and are even sometimes the same people. Perhaps the arch-villain is Frederick Seitz, a scientist, and former president of the National Academy of Sciences, who made hundreds of thousands conducting “research” for the tobacco companies in order to cast doubt upon the role of tobacco in causing lung cancer. In the 1990’s Seitz branched out and started shilling for the energy companies, denying that anthopogenic [human-caused] global warming was a serious problem. The goals wasn’t to convince, but to sow confusion and doubt: “If even the scientists can’t agree, then obviously we don’t need to worry about it.”
ExxonMobil—long the most recalcitrant corporation on global warming—is still spending millions of dollars a year funding an array of organizations that downplay the problem, including the George C. Marshall Institute, where Seitz is chairman emeritus. John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, calls the denial campaign “one of the great crimes of our era.” Passacantando is “quite confident” that class-action lawsuits will eventually be filed against corporations who denied global warming’s dangers. Five years ago, he told executives from one company, “You’re going to wish you were the tobacco companies once this stuff hits and people realize you were the ones who blocked [action].”
The public discussion about climate change in the U.S. is years behind that in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the deniers are a big reason why. “In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers are deeply skeptical of climate-change science and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” says Fiona Harvey, the environment correspondent for the Financial Times. “In Britain, the equivalent body, the Confederation of British Industry, is absolutely behind the science and agrees on the need to cut emissions. The only differences are over how to do that….”
And the media do their share to sow confusion and doubt:
Charles Alexander, the former environmental editor at Time, complains that, while coverage has improved recently, media executives continue to regard climate change as just another environmental issue, rather than as the overriding challenge of the 21st century.
“Americans are hearing more about reducing greenhouse emissions from BP ads than from news stories in Time, The New York Times, or any other U.S. media outlet,” Alexander says. “This will go down as the greatest act of mass denial in history.”In 2002, Alexander went to see Andrew Heyward, then the president of CBS News, after running into him at a Harvard reunion. “I talked to him about climate change and other global environmental threats, and made the case that they were more dangerous than terrorism and CBS should be doing much more coverage of them,” Alexander recalls. “He didn’t dispute any of my factual points, but he did say the reason CBS didn’t do more of that coverage was that ‘people don’t want to hear all that gloom and doom’—in other words, the environment wasn’t a ratings winner. He seemed to think CBS News’s job was to tell people what they wanted to hear, not what they need to know, and I think that attitude is increasingly true for the news business in general.”
The damage they’ve done is immeasurable and will be paid by hundreds of millions of people, or more, as it is now likely too late to avoid major consequences from global warming, even if the world started to act right now. Read the full article, and start pressuring everyone to act now. If we don’t, we might as well kiss our children goodnight.
3 comments May 13th, 2006