10 The Nation.
November 10,1997
Too Hot to Handle
T
he theory of global warming offkred as good a
test of the scientific method as there’s ever been.
When NASA’s James Hansen became, in 1988, th_e
first reputable scientist to state firmly that we were
wanning the planet, he was quickly challenged by
his peers. They devoted millions of graduate-student
hours to studying cloud formation, aerosol effects, the
physics of ocean boundaries, the carbon absorption of
temperate forests and a thousand other mechanisms
of the planet, looking for fatal flaws in his and others’
computer models. It worked, in other words, the way
it’s supposed to; science only functions if its practitioners try to
tear down one another’s ideas, testing them for every weakness.
Nearly a decade later, most ofthat probing is over, and the basic
science of 1988 stands intact,no longer a theory but a fact. In1995
the IntergovemmentalPanel on Climate Change, a vast gathering
of climatologists,endorsed the notion that people were heating
up the earth, and that the future held dramatic and dangerous
increases in temperatuse. Though research continues, scientists
aren’t generally ideologues; almost all have changed their minds.
They gave policy-makers reasonably precise warnings about how
hot things will get, b d what the effects of the heat will be. The di-
alectic method that we call science was vindicated.
, But not, I think, the journalistic method. Its ability to deal
with fundamental and complicated questions has never been
more in question.
After the initial burst of scare stories, articles about green-
house science were dominated by the doubters-each counter-
theory was worth a story. While the greenhouse effect was still
up in the air, that made sense. But even after the, I.P.C.C. an-
nounced the vast consensus on the issue, the handful of skeptics
were still treated as equal players, their views flavoring every
story. Three or four skeptical scientists continue to be faithfully
called and quoted, even after authors like Ross Gelbspan and
groups like Ozone Action have made it clear that with rare ex-
ceptions their “research” is subsidized by corporate interests.
And this science, which is on a par with the work of the
Tobacco Institute, continues to influence the political debate.
According to regular tallies conducted by Greenwire, an online,
by-subscriptionenvironmentalnews digest, columns doubtingthe
reality of global warming continue to dominate Op-Ed pages.
It’s not that the truth has been hidden-it’s that journalism’s
dialectic method,‘unlikescience’s,risists reaching a conclusion.
The point ofjournalismlies in the debate, which is OK. if you are
covering something that’s finally a judgment call: welfare reform,
say, or capital punishment. We don’t want news reporters to tell
us whether capital punishment is sight or wrong, merely to give us
the data and stories that we can feed through our own consciences,
life histories and world views to help us form conclusions.
But if your beat is chemistry, that endless open-mindedness
can be delusional. Either more carbon dioxide will heat the planet
or it won’t. The best reporters try to escape from the clutches of
this pseudo-objectivity, but the ethic is strong. The New York
Times, for instance, this year quoted Thomas Karl,
a federal researcher who has demonstrated that
global warming has already led to remarkable in-
creases in severe storms, and referred to him as
someone who “has not been known as a doomsayer
on the question of global wasming.” This was a
sign from the reporter that even the cautious were
being convinced; from Paul on, converts have
been granted special credibility. (Even if it’s not
pasticularly fair to scientistslike Hansen, who were
right from the start and took their lumps. But
perhaps every war has its prematuse anti-fascists.) And yet just
a few weeks ago, before the issue came to a head, another Times
reporter wrote a credulous story on the heating effects of sun-
&pots,a subject climatologists long ago knew about and factored
into their calculations.
The net effect of all the reporting on the issue is to leave the
average reader feeling much less sure than the average scientist
about what’s happening in the atmosphere. Polls show that most
Americans believe in the greenhouse effect, but also that they
wouldn’t pay a nickel gas tax to help offset it-that is, they really
believe that global warming is far 0% or not likely to be too bad,
or still something of an open question. That it’s apossibility, like
the crash-landingof a killer asteroid. People do not understand the
scientific fact that our consumption of fossil fuels creates vast
amounts of carbon dioxide, which by trapping solar heat is chang-
ing the most fundamentalsystems on earth. In a matter of decades,
unless we change huge parts of our economies, we will live on a
very different planet from the one we currently inhabit-there’s
the biggest story of our lifetimesby a wide margin, and yet polls
show it finishes with the also-rans on any list of issues that people
care deeply about. And without a firm grasp on the physical
reality, people are especiallysusceptibleto the folksy commercials
produced by the worst polluters and now filling the airwaves.
So President Clinton feels little pressure to take a strong posi-
tion on global wasming as he enters the internationalnegotiations
to be held in December in Kyoto. There’s enough general concern
that he can propose sornethipzg, say the halfhearted measures he
floated recently, and look like a hero when Jesse Helms tries to
slap it down. But there’s not enough fear floating around out there
to make him propose anyhng drastic and risk the wrath of organ-
ized business, organized labor or unorganized stock investors.
All the C.E.O.s, economists and unionists looked remarkably
sanguine after a recent White House session; the only grimaces
were on the faces of the small knots of climate scientists who
could see that the President, for all his empathy, was tacitly en-
dorsing a set of feeble policies that would allow carbon levels
in the atmosphere to double, precisely the scenario that these
’ scientists have been warning against for a decade. The President,
in other words, nimbly lowered the bar he must jump over, and
he did it with hardly a peep from anyone. ‘ a
Bill McKibben is the author of The End ofNatuse (BantamDoubleday).
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