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The Discovery of Global Warming January 2012
The Public and Climate Change (cont.— since 1980)
(Continued from previous page) By the end of the 1970s, scientific opinion had settled on warming as most likely, probably becoming evident around the year 2000 — which at that point lay in a remote and uncertain future. Some scientists nevertheless went directly to the public to demand action to avert the warming, and a few politicians took up the issue. During the hot summer of 1988, a few outspoken scientists, convinced by new evidence that rapid climate change might be imminent, made the public fully aware of the problem. Scientific discussions now became entangled with fierce political debates over the costs of regulating greenhouse gases. Corporations and conservatives spent large sums to sow uncertainty and denial of any danger from global warming. It was not until around 2005 that American media reported clearly that scientists had resolved the controversy, while films and ominous weather events gave citizens a better idea of what global warming might mean. The majority of Americans had moved gradually to a vague feeling that some kind of action should be taken. But the issue became increasingly politicized; on the right, doubt and denial increased. Stronger worries meanwhile grew among people in most other countries. (This essay deals mainly with the United States, but until the late 1990s opinions were generally similar in other industrialized nations. The response of American policy-makers is covered in an essay on Government: the View from Washington.)
| In previous page: Human and Planetary Forces (1800s-1930s), From Grandfathers' Tales to Nuclear Fears (1930s-1950s), Suspicions of a Human-Caused Greenhouse (1956-1969), Threats of Climate Disaster (Early 1970s) , Atmospheric Scientists and Industrial Policies (Latter 1970s). Subsections below: Breaking into Politics (1980-1988), The Summer of 1988 - Rising Controversy - Sporadic Battles - The Imagery of Global Warming - Deadlock (2000s)
"[Global warming] was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that made up the background of the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it, and expected governments to meet and take action... he himself had other things to think about." —Ian McEwan(75*)
Breaking into Politics (1980-1988) | - LINKS -
As the 1980s began, the question of global warming had become prominent enough to be included for the first time in some public opinion polls. A 1981 survey found that more than a third of American adults claimed they had heard or read about the greenhouse effect. That meant the news had spread beyond the small minority who regularly followed scientific issues. When pollsters explicitly asked people what they thought of "increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to changes in weather patterns," nearly two-thirds replied that the problem was "somewhat serious" or "very serious." |
Most of these people, however, would never have brought up the subject by themselves. Only a small fraction of Americans understood that the risk of global warming was mainly due to carbon dioxide gas from fossil fuels. Meanwhile a survey of Canadians found that people divided about equally among those who thought climate change was due to some kind of industrial pollution, those who blamed nuclear tests, and those who pointed to space exploration. (The last was no anomaly, for a good many Americans surveyed in the 1990s still imagined that nuclear power and the space program contributed to global warming.) Most people suspected the issue was something they ought to be concerned about, but among the world's many problems it did not loom large. Even those who worried most about pollution were seldom concerned with global affairs, directing their dismay at the oil spill or chemical wastes that endangered a particular locality.(75a*) |
Among climate scientists, concern continued to rise in the early and mid 1980s. Computer models of the climate were rapidly improving and winning the trust of experts. The modelers now said they were quite confident that a global warming of several degrees would come within the 21st century. To an ordinary citizen, a change of a few degrees might sound trivial. But the scientists understood that it was serious, and science journalists passed along their predictions of sea-level rise and other problems. (Later research confirmed the predictions. For example, a 2004 study calculated that a rise of 3°C sustained over centuries would suffice to melt the Greenland ice cap and put the world’s coastal cities deep under water.) "Gloomsday Predictions Have No Fault" was how Science magazine summarized the report of one authoritative review panel. The report was noticed even by the New York Times, although only deep on an inside page.(76) | Full discussion in <=Models (GCMs)
Studies of ancient ice, from deep holes drilled in Greenland and Antarctica, backed up the models. For they showed that over past glacial cycles, temperatures and the CO2 content of the atmosphere had gone up and down together in close synchrony. Meanwhile, British and American groups announced that the global warming trend, after pausing between 1940 and the mid-1970s, had resumed with a vengeance. On average the world was hotter in 1980, 1981, and 1983 than in any years as far back as good records went (to the mid-19th century). | <=CO2 greenhouse <=Modern temp's
When their scientific findings met with public indifference, more and more climate scientists around the world concluded that they should work to influence government policy. Along with the traditional scientists' goal of extracting more funds for their own field of study, most weather experts had come to feel that knowledge of climate change would be vitally important for our civilization. Some went further than urging governments to support research. Convinced that the world faced severe global warming within their children's lifetime, they felt called upon to pressure the world's governments to take active steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. | <=International
These concerns were reinforced and complicated by the ties that some scientists found with other environmentalist issues. An outstanding example was the distinguished biologist George Woodwell, who was a founder and board member of both the National Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund. Like many biologists and environmentalists, Woodwell decried the destruction of virgin tropical forests. He worried that changes in human use of land could be so socially disruptive "as to be equivalent to the drastic changes in the human condition that a warming of the climate might lead to."(78) The proliferating slash-and-burn peasants who cleared new fields were driving countless species toward extinction, arousing public sympathies for a battle to "save the rainforests." Activists who linked destruction of tropical species with greenhouse warming could make better headway on both issues. Magazine and television images of landscapes going up in smoke began to catch the public eye. Here at last was an immediate, visible connection of CO2 emission with ruined nature (even though the scientific connection to global warming was far from certain). Scientists associated with the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Resources Institute, and similar groups began to issue reports and lobby Congress about global warming.(79) | <=>Biosphere
The great majority of scientists remained politically inactive. They felt they were doing their job by pursuing research, building up the solid evidence that would tell governments what to do. "I really don't have that much talent to try to influence politicians," one climate scientist explained. "It's much better using my talent, staying as anonymous as possible here, and try to publish a paper... Because once you start getting in the political arena,... you lose credibility."(80) These scientists might answer a phone call from a reporter but they did not offer the confident and snappy answers that journalists wanted. If pressed to offer policy guidance, they preferred to work in government-sponsored study panels and answer questions posed by administrators. Surely official reports by government science agencies, national academies, and international conferences, by conveying information would force policy-makers to take appropriate action...? | <=>International
A few scientists felt the world would do too little to address climate change, and too late, unless they personally took the initiative to stir up the public directly. These scientists had to learn some tricks. A Senator might brush off an academic who came to speak with him or his staff, but the Senator paid attention if he saw the scientist on television. Scientists were generally uncomfortable talking with the media. Experience showed how journalists might grab a simple phrase, ignoring the details and qualifications that were inseparable from an accurate scientific account. A few scientists struggled to get a hearing by deliberately wielding public relations techniques, such as crafting approximately accurate but juicy "one-liner" statements that journalists could pick up. Colleagues who had a rigid sense of scientific precision were disgusted. One respected scientist publicly accused his colleagues of publishing "fiction" instead of sound science, speculating that "some of us feel compelled to emphasize the worst case in order to get the attention of the decision makers who control the funding."(81) |
There was indeed an ethical dilemma here, as Stephen Schneider pointed out when other scientists criticized his approaches to the public. It was not easy "to find the balance between being effective and being honest," he admitted. "But promoting concern over the negative connotations of the greenhouse effect in this media age usually means offering few caveats and uncertainties — at least if you want media coverage. Twenty-second spots on national television programs... do not afford time for hedged statements; and if one is going to influence the public, one simply has to get into the media."(82) |
To get a reasonably accurate story to the public, the essential people were professional science writers. There were only a few hundred of them scattered about the world, spending most of their time writing up medical news and other topics remote from geophysics. But many of them were thoughtful people who took their responsibilities seriously. They worked to maintain a symbiotic relationship with leading scientists, each side seeking respect and understanding even as they openly used the other for their purposes. |
When it came to deciding what scientific developments were news, American journalists tended to take their cues from the New York Times. The editors of the Times followed the advice of their veteran science writer, Walter Sullivan. A lanky and amiable reporter, Sullivan had frequented meetings of geophysicists ever since the International Geophysical Year of 1957, cultivating a set of trusted advisers in many fields. On the subject of climate, he began listening to scientists like Schneider and, in particular, James Hansen, conveniently located at a NASA institute in New York City. Hansen was energized by his group's computer studies, which showed that warming was likely. In 1981, Sullivan persuaded his editors to feature a story about climate change, based on a scientific article that Hansen had sent the reporter a few days ahead of its publication in Science magazine. For the first time the greenhouse effect made page one of the New York Times. Sullivan threatened the world with global warming of "almost unprecedented magnitude," disrupting agriculture and possibly causing a disastrous rise of sea level. The newspaper followed up with an editorial, declaring that while the greenhouse effect was "still too uncertain to warrant total alteration of energy policy," it was "no longer unimaginable" that a radical policy change might become necessary.(83) | <=Aerosols
This was just one example of a process that brought the perils of climate change into newspapers, magazines, and even occasionally television in the early 1980s. The stories usually rested upon statements by leading scientists including Schneider, Broecker, Nobel Prize winner Melvin Calvin and others. Politicians, ever alert to shifts in what the public was worrying about, took notice.(84) | =>Government
The fossil-fuel industries, and other business interests, also took notice. Public worries about greenhouse gases might lead to government regulations, following the example of restrictions on smog and spray-can chemicals. That threat caught the attention of political conservatives, who tended to lump together all claims about impending ecological dooms as left-wing propaganda. When environmentalist ideals had first stirred, around the time of Theodore Roosevelt, they had been scattered across the entire political spectrum. A traditional conservative, let us say a Republican bird-watcher, could be far more concerned about "conservation" than a Democratic steelworker (more recently, at the far end of the traditional Left, Communist nations were the planet's most egregious polluters). But during the 1960s, as the new Left rose to prominence, it became permanently associated with environmentalism. Perhaps that was inevitable. Many environmental problems, like smog, seemed impossible to solve without government intervention. Such interventions were anathema to the new Right that began to ascend in the 1970s. |
By the mid 1970s, conservative economic and ideological interests had joined forces to combat what they saw as mindless eco-radicalism. Establishing conservative think tanks and media outlets, they propagated sophisticated intellectual arguments and expert public-relations campaigns against government regulation for any purpose whatever. On global warming, it was naturally the fossil-fuel industries that took the lead. Backed up by some scientists, industry groups developed everything from elaborate studies to punchy advertisements, aiming to persuade the public that there was nothing to worry about. |
The message was easily accepted by many among the public, including some who felt deep sympathy for the natural world. Many still found it incredible that mere human industry could seriously interfere with the awesome planetary forces, seeing these as simply an "environment" that happened to contain and sustain living creatures. Others had finally abandoned that viewpoint, only to take up James Lovelock's radical "Gaia hypothesis." Named (in the spirit of the times) after the Greek Earth-goddess, this hypothesis held that the atmosphere was a "contrivance" maintained by the biosphere. There was real scientific content in the idea. But supporters, pushing ahead to assert that life on Earth necessarily and automatically maintains an atmosphere suitable for itself, gave a spuriously scientific gloss to the snug old confidence in the Balance of Nature. (However, some suspected that Gaia would defend "her" balance simply by allowing humanity to eliminate itself.) | <=Biosphere
The most comforting ideas came from a respected scientist, Sherwood Idso, who published arguments that greenhouse gas emissions would not warm the Earth or bring any other harm to climate. Better still, by fertilizing crops, the increase of CO2 would bring tremendous benefits. His book, Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe? came down entirely on the side of Friend. In his opinion, the increase of CO2 "is something to be encouraged and not suppressed."(85) Along the way Idso attacked the "scientific establishment" for rejecting his theories. His scientific and popular publications stirred vehement controversy. | <=Radiation math
As environmental and industrial groups and their scientific fellow-travelers hurled uncompromising claims back and forth across a widening political gulf, most scientists found it hard to get a hearing for more ambiguous views. "Our instincts are to fight scientifically fair and to openly admit uncertainty, even when unscientific weapons are deployed," a climate scientist later remarked. "This mismatch often leads to an amplified sense of 'scientific' controversy."(86) Journalists in search of a gripping story tended to present every scientific question as if it were a head-on battle between two equal and diametrically opposite sides. Yet most scientists saw themselves as just a bunch of people with various degrees of uncertainty, groping about in a fog. |
After Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, environmental issues of every kind became a useful tool for opponents of the Republican administration. Reagan and his supporters could be counted on to embarrass themselves with a see-no-evil approach to any industrial activity. The greenhouse effect question now became somewhat polarized along political lines. You could often guess whether someone thought global warming was likely to happen, if you knew what they thought about any sort of government environmental regulation. |
The fires of public interest were stoked by Congressional hearings (promoted especially by Albert Gore, who had taken an early interest in the topic). Still more newsworthy was a controversy that broke out in 1983 when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a report declaring that the future temperature rise could be catastrophic. As the New York Times noted in a front-page story, the EPA report was the first time a Federal agency had declared that global warming was "not a theoretical problem but a threat whose effects will be felt within a few years." Within decades, the Times suggested, the sea level might rise and food production could suffer. That frankly contradicted a soothing report that the National Academy of Sciences had issued just days earlier. According to this report, as Sullivan summarized it in a Times editorial, "the greenhouse effect is for real but we can live with it." | <=>Government
Reagan administration officials, pointing to the Academy's reassurances, criticized the EPA report as "alarmist." Here was a tale of battling perspectives, just what journalists needed to make a lively story. It even got onto national television. In the offices of NOAA, the federal agency responsible for climate science, a scientist recorded that "phones have been ringing all over the country." One historian has suggested that it was this controversy that first pushed climate change into full public view, "transforming the issue from one of scientific concern to one of political controversy." Certainly it was largely political skirmishing that prompted popular magazines and newspapers to report on the greenhouse effect repeatedly during the early 1980s.(86a) |
Far greater attention went to other atmospheric changes. Air pollution remained a problem in many cities, and now it was joined by dire warnings about "acid rain." During the 1970s, scientists had begun to report that rain carrying sulfates emitted by power plants and other industries was devastating fish and forests, and even the paint on houses, in certain vulnerable regions. Coal-burning industries quieted local protests by building their smokestacks hundreds of feet high, but that only spread the damage more widely. In the 1980s, the problem stirred extensive political controversy and even international recriminations. Images of moribund stands of trees and decaying statues, attacked by sulfuric acid derived from smokestacks thousands of miles upwind, bore witness that industrial emissions could be a problem for everyone, everywhere. Local environmental activism was no use when power plants half a continent away sickened your neighborhood lake.(87) Some environmentalists proclaimed that acid rain would eventually damage the entire planet. And this was not the worst global threat. | =>International =>Other gases
In 1980, scientists announced a new theory for what had killed off the dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago: an asteroid had struck the Earth and clouded the atmosphere for years, freezing plants and animals. The theory fascinated the public, perhaps less because it addressed dinosaurs than because it addressed extinction. That struck a resonance with deep-set fears of nuclear war, which had revived around the time Reagan took office. As one scientist remarked, the asteroid theory "commanded belief because it fit with what we are prepared to believe... Like everyone else... I carry within my consciousness the images of mushroom clouds." The idea of global extinction caused by a blast coming from the sky, he said, "feels right because it fits so neatly into the nightmares that project our own demise."(88) | <=World winter
On Hallowe'en 1983, a group of respected atmospheric scientists held a press conference to make a carefully orchestrated announcement about a different climate catastrophe. They had come to fear that soot from cities torched in a nuclear war might blacken the atmosphere as much as an asteroid strike. Years of cold and dark might jeopardize the survival of all humankind. Didn't that prove that launching a nuclear attack, even if the other side never fired back, would be literally suicidal? So maintained a group of well-known experts, including West Europeans and Russians as well as Americans, and most prominently Carl Sagan — a chief spokesperson for the group because his fame, much more as an astronomy popularizer than as an atmospheric scientist, could attract television cameras. The scientists' aim was frankly political. They meant to reinforce a public movement that was just then calling on the United States to reduce its inventory of bombs. Meanwhile the announcement added another layer to public imagination of calamitous global climate change. | <=World winter
Other scientists questioned the scientific reasoning, and the Reagan administration heaped scorn on its critics. Even before the scientific study was published, government scientists among the authors felt pressure to keep a low profile. The pressure backfired. Forbidden to include the words "nuclear war" in the title of their paper, one of them came up with an evocative phrase — "nuclear winter." Sagan and others battled their critics in sharp partisan debate. From the outset, a person's views on the climate scientists' predictions could usually be guessed from the person's views about nuclear disarmament. Newspapers, magazines, and even television gave the battle close attention. From this point on, computer calculations of the effects of dust and the fragility of the atmosphere were inescapably entangled in national politics.(89) | <=Aerosols
While these issues were being thrashed out to exhaustion, public interest in global warming flagged. Around 1984 the coverage of the issue, as measured by numbers of books and magazine and newspaper articles, dropped back.(90*) The spell of unusually bad weather in the early 1970s was fading from memory, and exclamations about an imminent catastrophe waned. Besides, the Clean Air Act plus the ban on ozone-destroying chemicals suggested to the public (as politicians intended) that the most urgent dangers were well in hand. Anyway the news media rarely sustain a high level of anxiety about any topic for more than a few years. Observers of the media have noted that there is a limited "news hole" that has to be filled with genuinely new topics. Editors dislike publishing article after article on the same subject in the absence of striking and novel events, for repetition quickly bores the public. |
The attention of the minority who continued to worry about planetary doom likewise turned to other problems. Such movements, including fears of nuclear war, tended to rise and fall in decade-long cycles. Back in the mid 1960s, when Cold War tensions had dwindled, many committed activists had turned from their grueling campaign against nuclear weapons to spend their energies on environmentalist causes. Now, with the Reagan administration trumpeting its anti-Soviet belligerence, many activists turned their attention from the environment back to the Cold War. The "nuclear winter" controversy was a milestone in the transition to agitation for a "nuclear freeze," a halt in production of nuclear weapons.(91) | =>Government
Fears of climate change decades in the future could not hold a candle to fears of imminent nuclear war, nor even to the mounting public concern about peaceful nuclear reactors with their risks of explosions and radioactive wastes. Climate change did include some of the factors that are effective in rousing public anxiety. People are not particularly afraid of risks that seem familiar and within their personal control, feeling only too little anxiety as they smoke or race a red light. Climate change offered less comfortable risks. Dread of the unknown was fostered by a feeling that great forces were at work, operating in a hidden fashion, mysterious even to scientists. Worse, the threat was something new, and growing, and far beyond anyone's personal control. However, nuclear energy had similar factors in at least equal strength, plus many more hooks digging into people's minds. Uncanny rays and poisons, menacing authority figures (mad scientist, belligerent general, cold-blooded corporate executive), images of Hiroshima, above all the actual existence of nuclear missiles that might at any moment descend on your home — when such things came back to mind, they easily displaced abstract worries about a few degrees of warming in the next century.(92) |
Although climate arguments faded from the news, they had left a residue in the public mind. The idea that nuclear war might bring global environmental disaster had been familiar for decades as a science-fiction scenario. From the start it had brought to mind far older tales — the Ice-Winter at the world's end in Nordic myth, intertwined with the Bible's apocalyptic rain of fire. Scientific calculations of "nuclear winter" and other devastation now made it hard to dismiss such visions as fantasy. We cannot observe the deep levels beyond logic where ideas connect in the minds that make up the public, but we can guess at what was happening there. Probably for many people the dread connected with nuclear war, a complex of images and attitudes covering the entire range from politics to paranoia, became loosely associated with feelings about climate change. The idea that humankind itself might trigger global atmospheric change — as if in punishment for our transgressions against the natural order — was looking more than ever like a sober possibility. |
This attitude was nailed down in 1985 when a British group announced their discovery of a "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. The discovery could have been made years earlier if scientists had been more on the lookout for ways that human production of a small amount of obscure chemicals could ravage the atmosphere. The apparent culprit was again CFCs, banned from American spray cans but still widely produced around the world for a variety of functions. Inevitably a new controversy began, for again industrial interest groups automatically denied that any of their products could be hazardous. Reagan administration officials reflexively backed the industries against hostile environmentalists. |
This time the denials were short-lived. Within two years experts were convinced. For the public, television showed colorful maps displaying the lack of ozone. A few scientists warned that the same chemicals that destroyed ozone could add to global warming, but that was mostly overlooked. The immediate threat was the ozone destruction, which would increase skin cancers and bring many other biological harms. But many members of the public got ozone depletion confused with global warming, as if the two problems were one. (Even at the peak of attention to ozone, climate change got many more stories in newspapers and television.)(92a) Ignorant of the science, the majority only sensed obscurely that atmospheric changes were looking more dangerous. | <=>Other gases
The public took a strong interest in the "ozone hole," forcing a political response. The outcome was an international agreement, forged in Montreal in 1987, to gradually halt production of ozone-destroying substances. If the agreement was enforced, and if it was extended as industry produced new chemicals, that would settle the ozone problem. It would do little to retard global warming, but the agreement proved that the world could take effective action against an atmospheric threat — if the threat was sufficiently convincing, immediate, and well publicized. | =>Government =>International
The Summer of 1988 TOP OF PAGE |
While the public was assimilating the lesson of the ozone hole — the fact that human activity could change the atmosphere both quickly and seriously — scientists were assimilating the latest research. A new breed of interdisciplinary studies was showing that even a few degrees of warming might have harsh consequences, both for fragile natural ecosystems and for certain agricultural systems and other human endeavors. Gradually experts were discovering that even a degree or two of warming might devastate many of the world's coral reefs, that tropical diseases would invade new territory, and so forth. Still more troubling, it seemed that the entire climate system could change more rapidly than most experts had suspected. A mere couple of decades might bring a shocking surprise. In particular, some scientists speculated that the circulation of water in the North Atlantic might shift abruptly, and bring not warmth but severe cooling to the region. | <=Simple models <=Impacts <=Rapid change
These research findings began to show up sporadically in articles addressed to the science-attentive public. Broecker in particular issued warnings, as when he wrote in Natural History magazine that we had been treating the greenhouse effect as a "cocktail hour curiosity," but now "we must view it as a threat to human beings and wildlife." The magazine's editors went even beyond that, putting a banner on the cover that read, "Europe beware: the big chill may be coming." Might global warming bring a change in ocean currents that would, paradoxically, make London as cold as Labrador? (Broecker was annoyed, for in fact he had given little sustained thought at that time to whether human activities might cause damaging changes in ocean currents.)(93) The notion that a climate catastrophe might descend swiftly was now on the world's public agenda. | <=The oceans
The idea was not widely heeded, even by the minority of people who read about such matters. The risk that global warming would bring, for instance, an oceanic change that could freeze Europe, was just one small item among many futuristic concerns. Far more was written about the potential threat of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants, the perils of genetically modified plants, the remote but exciting possibility of bombardment by a giant asteroid, and so forth. |
The most visibly outspoken climate expert was James Hansen. In 1986 and 1987, he created a minor stir among those alert to the issue when he testified before a Congressional committee. He insisted that global warming was no vague and distant possibility, but something that would become apparent within a decade or so. His group of climate modelers claimed that they could "confidently state that major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty." In particular, "the global warming predicted in the next 20 years will make the Earth warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years."(94*) | Jim Hansen CLICK FOR FULL IMAGE
News reporters gave only a little attention to Hansen's November 1987 Congressional testimony, and they did not quote Broecker’s January 1987 statement at all, as newspapers filled their columns with stories of a severe winter storm. A report a few months later that the 1980s were proving to be the hottest years ever recorded did make it into the New York Times (March 29) but only on an inside page. As the summer of 1988 began, global warming remained below the threshold of public attention. Roughly half the American public were not even aware of the problem. Those who had heard about warming mostly saw it as something that the next generation might need to worry about... or might not. | <=Modern temp's
A shift of views had been prepared, however, by the ozone hole, acid rain, and other atmospheric pollution stories, and by a decade of agitation on these and many other environmental issues, and by the slow turning of scientific opinion toward stronger concern about global warming. Only a match was needed to ignite the worries. This is often the case for matters of intellectual concern. No matter how much pressure builds up among concerned experts, some trigger is needed to produce an explosion of public attention. |
The trigger came that summer. Already by June, heat waves and drought had become a severe problem, drawing public attention to the climate. Many newspaper, magazine, and television stories showed threatened crops and speculated about possible causes. Hansen raised the stakes with deliberate intent. "I weighed the costs of being wrong versus the costs of not talking," he later recalled, and decided that he had to speak out. By arrangement with Senator Timothy Wirth, Hansen testified to a Congressional hearing on June 23. He had pointed out to Wirth's staff that the previous year's November hearings might have been more effective in hot weather. Wirth and his staff decided to hold their next session in the summer, although that was hardly a normal time for politicians who sought attention.(95) |
Their luck was good. Outside the room, the temperature that day reached a record high. Inside, Hansen said he could state "with 99% confidence" that a long-term warming trend was underway, and he strongly suspected that the greenhouse effect was to blame. By the early 2000s, he predicted (correctly), the average global temperature would be markedly higher. Relying not only on his computer work but also on elementary physical arguments, he warned that global warming was liable to bring more frequent storms and floods as well as life-threatening heat waves.(96*) | <=>Simple models <=Models (GCMs)
Talking with reporters afterward, Hansen said it was time to "stop waffling, and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here." Some news reports confused Hansen's assertions, reporting that he was virtually certain that the greenhouse effect was the cause of the current droughts.(97) The story was no longer a scientific abstraction about an atmospheric phenomenon: it was about a present danger to everyone from farmers to the owners of beach houses. | = Milestone =>Government
The timing was right, and the media leaped on the story. Hansen's statements, especially that severe warming was likely within the next 50 years, got on the front pages of newspapers and were featured in television news and radio talk shows.(98*) Many climate experts, innately repulsed by the inaccuracies and exaggerations of the public arena, felt Hansen had gone too far beyond what the scientific evidence justified. Some respected scientists publicly rebuked him.(99) The problem, however, lay not so much with his explicit statements as with his combative tone and the way the media reacted to it. |
The story grew as the summer of 1988 wore on. Reporters descended unexpectedly upon an international conference of scientists held in Toronto at the end of June. Their stories prominently reported how the world's leading climate scientists declared that atmospheric changes were already causing harm, and might cause much more; the scientists called for vigorous government action to restrict greenhouse gases. Meanwhile the heat waves and droughts continued, devastating wide regions of the United States. Old people died in cities, shops ran out of air conditioners, many communities imposed water rationing, there were fears of a new Dust Bowl, and the level of the Mississippi River fell so low that barge traffic was paralyzed. On top of that came "super hurricane" Gilbert and the worst forest fires of the century. Cover articles in news magazines, lead stories on television news programs, and countless newspaper columns offered dramatic images of sweltering cities, sun-blasted crops, and Yellowstone National Park aflame. | <=>International July '88 cover story
Reporters asked, were all these caused by the greenhouse effect? Simply from endless repetition of the question, many people became half convinced that human pollution was indeed to blame for it all. The images triggered the anxieties that had been gradually building up about our interference with weather. As one scholar who studied these events put it, "Whether regarded as a warning signal or a metaphor of a possible future, the weather unleashed a surge of fear that brought concentrated attention to the greenhouse effect."(100) |
News reports often failed to explain that scientists never claimed that a given spell of weather was an infallible reflection of global warming. Schneider, who also testified in Congressional hearings and was often quoted, suggested that "the association of local extreme heat and drought with global warming took on a growing credibility simply from its repeated assertion." He worried that the media exaggerations would bring the public to dismiss climate science as unreliable when the next cold, wet season arrived.(101) But Schneider, Hansen, and their fellows could only be pleased that the issue had at last gotten into the spotlight. "I've never seen an environmental issue mature so quickly," an environmental advocate remarked, "shifting from science to the policy realm almost overnight."(102) |
The number of articles on climate listed in the Readers' Guide, which had held steady since the mid 1970s, took a quantum leap upward. Between spring and fall of 1988 the number of articles listed abruptly tripled, and over following years remained at the new level. The number of American newspaper articles on global warming jumped tenfold in 1988 over what was published in 1987 (which was already well above the negligible number published a decade earlier) and continued to rise in following years.(103*) For the first time, global warming showed up repeatedly in the most widely read of all American media, the comic strips. In the second half of 1988 the problem got a mention in such highly popular, and normally scarcely topical, strips as "Kathy," "Calvin and Hobbes," "Little Orphan Annie" and even "Dick Tracy." Their creators could take it for granted that readers understood their clever remarks about warming. | Calvin
A killing heat wave in China, a ghastly flood in Bangladesh, and spectacular episodes of ocean pollution in Europe gave climate worries a global reach. The Toronto meeting, and many other avenues of communication among environmentalists and scientists, helped spread concern internationally. In Germany, to take one case, a subgroup of the German Physical Society had already prepared attitudes with a 1986 report carrying the dramatic title, "Warning of the Impending Climate Catastrophe." Although most scientists quickly backed away from the apocalyptic tone, from then on the phrase "Klimacatastrophe" permeated Germany's media and public consciousness. Attention mounted steadily through 1988 and into the early 1990s.(104) | =>International
In September 1988 a poll found that 58% of Americans recalled having heard or read about the greenhouse effect. It was a big jump from the 38% that had heard about it in 1981, and an extraordinarily high level of public awareness for any scientific phenomenon. Most of these citizens recognized that "greenhouse effect" meant the threat of global warming, and most thought they would live to experience climate changes.(105) In other polls, a majority of Americans said that they thought the greenhouse effect was "very serious" or "extremely serious," and that they personally worried "a fair amount" or even "a great deal" about global warming. Fewer than one-fifth said they worried "not at all" or had no opinion.(106*) | =>Government
Politicians could not overlook such strong public concern — nor could they overlook the heat in the capital city itself, where the summer of 1988 was the hottest on record.Congress saw a flurry of activity as some 32 bills dealing with climate were introduced.(107) Whether or not attention could be sustained at such a high level, global warming had finally won a prominent and enduring place on the public agenda. |
Just as there is a finite "news hole”" in the media, so psychologists report a "finite pool of worry" in individuals: if you are busy worrying about one thing, you have less energy to worry about another.(108)Nuclear war concerns were fading as the Soviet Union decayed, and people striving to reform the world could redirect their energies toward environmental issues. The environmental movement, which had found only occasional interest in global warming, now took it up as a main cause. Groups that had other reasons for preserving tropical forests, promoting energy conservation, slowing population growth, or reducing air pollution could make common cause as they offered their various ways to reduce emissions of CO2. Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and many other organizations made reduction one of their top priorities.(109) Adding their voices to the chorus were people who looked for arguments to weaken the prestige of large corporations, and people who wanted to scold the public for its wastefulness. For better or worse, global warming became identified more than ever as a "green" issue. In principle it could have been viewed instead as a technical problem of global engineering (how should we manage the planet's climate?). But pollution and weather disasters brought in high economic stakes and potent imagery. Global warming was no longer just a research question, but a subject of political maneuvering. |
In the long perspective, it was an extraordinary novelty that such a thing became a political question at all. Global warming was invisible, no more than a possibility, and not even a current possibility but something predicted to emerge only after decades had passed. The prediction was based on complex reasoning and data that only a scientist could understand. It was a remarkable advance for humanity that such a thing could be a subject of widespread and intense debate. |
Discourse had grown more sophisticated in many way. That may have been partly because of the steady accumulation of knowledge, and also because the public in wealthy countries had become better educated (a larger fraction of young people was now going to college than had gone to high school at the start of the century). Furthermore, stable times encouraged people to plan farther into the future than in earlier eras. So too, perhaps, did the unexpected addition of decades to the average lifespan. |
The discussion was also made possible by the new relationship that had grown between people and the atmosphere, indeed with all nature. Global warming, along with the ozone hole and acid rain and smog, had obscurely entangled the atmosphere in politics. The winds and clouds had taken on (as one observer later mused) "a vaguely sinister cast... It was perfect weather for postmodernists: inescapably self-referential."(110) In an influential New Yorker magazine article and book, nature writer Bill McKibben announced "The End of Nature." In 1900, nature had surrounded our towns and fields. People saw it partly as a nurturing setting for humanity, and partly as a savage "outside" to be tamed and civilized. By the 1970s, more and more people had come to see nature the other way around, as a preserve surrounded by civilization. Now the preserve itself had been overrun. |
It was not just that our pollution invisibly invaded the atmosphere. The feeling of contamination by radioactive fallout and acid rain was bad enough, yet those seemed like reversible additions, superimposed upon the old natural system. The greenhouse effect was different, McKibben declared, for "the meaning of the wind, the sun, the rain — of nature — has already changed." Now every cloud, every breeze, bore the imprint of human hands. The taint was not only around us but within us. People bowed to sadness and guilt as we realized that we had "taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures."(111) |
Rising Controversy TOP OF PAGE |
After the spate of global warming stories in the summer of 1988, media attention inevitably declined as more normal weather set in. As noted aabove, even for a potential danger, readers will become discouraged or simply bored when nothing immediate is done, and editors will look for something novel to fill their "news hole." Pinning the story on temporary weather crises did not help — the winter of 1989 was a particularly cold one. The climate change story also lacked an interesting enemy, a devil (other than ourselves) to blame for the world's woes.(112) But even if an issue is no longer in the forefront of everyone's mind, it can remain present. Although press coverage of global warming sank after its peak in the summer of 1988, it now fluctuated around a much higher average level than in the early 1980s.(113) |
The issue had entirely caught the attention of one vital section of the public — the scientific community. It is impossible to judge how far scientists altered their research plans because of aroused public interest. Scientists were far more aware than the general public of how the scientific findings of the past decade, the supercomputer calculations and ice core measurements and data on rising global temperatures, had raised the plausibility of greenhouse warming forecasts. At a minimum, the big step up in public interest suggested that anyone studying the topic would get a better hearing when requesting funds, recruiting students, and publishing. |
For whatever reason, climate research topics now became far more prominent in the scientific community itself. Prestigious general-science journals like Nature and Science, and popularizing magazines like the New Scientist, had published perhaps one or two significant climate articles per year in the early and mid 1980s. Now they began to publish one almost every week. The higher level was sustained over the following years. This was probably a main reason why the general press, whose science reporters took their cue from scientists and their journals, continued to carry numerous articles on climate change. |
In the specialized scientific journals themselves, citations to topics like "greenhouse gases" and "climate modeling" had held fairly steady at a low level through the mid 1980s, but after 1988 they rose spectacularly. References to the subject continued to rise ever higher through the 1990s. Citations to climate change in social-science journals began to soar at the same time.(114) Meanwhile scientific conferences proliferated, ranging from small workshops to highly publicized international events, so numerous that nobody could attend more than a fraction. | <=>after88 <=>International
Environmentalist organizations continued to make global warming a main focus, carrying on with sporadic lobbying and advertising efforts to argue for restrictions on emissions. The environmentalists were opposed, and greatly outspent, by industries that produced or relied on fossil fuels. Industry groups not only mounted a sustained and professional public relations effort, but also channeled considerable sums of money to individual scientists and small conservative organizations and publications that denied any need to act against global warming.(115) This effort followed the pattern of scientific criticism and advertising that industrial groups had used to attack warnings against ozone depletion and acid rain (not to mention automobile smog, tobacco smoke, etc.). Although those campaigns had been discredited after a decade or two, fair-minded people were ready to listen to the global warming skeptics. |
It was reasonable to argue that intrusive government regulation to reduce CO2 emissions would be premature, given the scientific uncertainties. Conservatives pointed out that if something did have to be done, the longer we waited, the better we might know how to do it. They also argued that a strong economy (which they presumed meant one with the least possible government regulation of industry) would offer the best insurance against future shocks. Activists replied that action to retard the damage should begin as soon as possible, if only to gain experience in how to restrict gases without harming the economy. They argued hardest for policy changes that they had long desired for other reasons, such as protecting tropical forests and removing government subsidies that promoted fossil fuel use. |
The topic was becoming more and more politicized. A study of American media found that in 1987 most items that mentioned the greenhouse effect had been feature stories about the science, whereas in 1988 the majority of the stories addressed the politics of the controversy. It was not that the number of science stories declined, but rather that as media coverage doubled and redoubled, the additional stories moved into social and political areas.(116) Another study similarly found that before 1988, some three-quarters of the articles on climate change in leading American newspapers described the problem and its causes, whereas by the early 1990s, more than half of the far more numerous articles focused on claims about proposed remedies or on moral judgments. Before 1988, the journalists had drawn chiefly on scientists for their information, but afterward they relied chiefly on sources who were identified with political positions or special interest groups.(117) Meanwhile the interest groups themselves, from environmentalists to automobile manufacturers, increasingly advertised their views on global warming. |
Both scientific and political arguments were thoroughly entangled with broader attitudes. Public support for environmental concerns in general seems to have waned after 1988. Along with the natural exhaustion of all movements once they have achieved some of their goals, the ignominious collapse of Soviet Communism greatly increased the confidence of those who opposed government intervention in economic affairs. Actually it was in the Soviet Union, more than anywhere, that unrestricted pollution had shown that the horrifying predictions of environmentalists could come true. People who sought to restrict greenhouse gases, however, could not shake loose from the association of restrictions with over-centralized command of the economy. |
Many believed that only good could come of whatever the triumphant free-market economy produced, including greenhouse gases. A few scientists sustained the old argument that the "enrichment" of the atmosphere by CO2 would be a positively good thing for agriculture and for civilization in general. Some thought global warming itself would be all for the better. Russians in particular, in their bleak winters, looked forward to a warmer climate. At the end of 1988, the senior Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko told an international conference of scientists that global warming would make tundra regions fertile — an argument received, an American scientist recalled, like "swearing in the church." (Budyko did agree however that whatever the effects of global warming in the 21st century, over the longer term it could well be dangerous.)(118*) | <=Biosphere
The main argument offered against regulating greenhouse gases was simply to deny that warming was likely to come at all. A few scientists insisted that the statistics of record-breaking heat since the 1970s were illusory. The most prominent of these skeptics was S. Fred Singer, who retired in 1989 from a distinguished career managing government programs in weather satellites and other technical enterprises, then founded an environmental policy group. He got financial support from conservative foundations and fossil fuel corporations. Among other objections, Singer argued that all the expert groups had somehow failed to properly account for the well-known effects of urbanization when they compiled global temperature statistics. (119) Other skeptics pointed to analysis of satellite data that failed to show warming (debate continued all through the 1990s, until errors in the satellite instrument record were ironed out). Some conceded that global temperatures had risen modestly, but held that the rise was just a chance fluctuation. After all, for centuries there had been gradual drops and rises of average temperature around the North Atlantic. Why couldn't the next decades experience a cooling? They entirely disbelieved the computer models that predicted warming from the greenhouse effect. All of these arguments had some validity, given the limits of scientific knowledge at the time. A citizen with a taste for science could pick up the ideas from occasional semi-popular articles. | <=Modern temp's
Especially well founded were the doubts about computer model predictions. Different models gave different predictions for just how a given locality would be affected by global warming (or at any rate by "global climate change," the more general phrase that cautious writers were adopting). Still, all the models agreed pretty well on the projected average warming.. The main trend turned out to faithfully confirm the predictions of of simpler models from earlier decades. Yet when critics (like the respected meteorologist Richard Lindzen) set a strict scientific standard, demanding solid proof that no crucial effect had been left out, the modelers had to admit that many uncertainties remained and they had much work to do. | <=Models (GCMs) <=Simple models
The science remained ambiguous enough to leave scientists, like everyone else, susceptible to influence from their deepest beliefs. The wish to personally preserve and improve the world, often a strong motivation for those who chose scientific careers, was not restricted to supporters of environmental regulations. Journalists remarked that the scientific critics of global warming were mostly strong political conservatives. Their intense skepticism about global warming could seem, as one journalist noticed, to grow less from research than from a "distaste for any centralized government action" and an almost "religious" faith that humanity could never be laid low.(120) Conservatives in return advised that the most strident official and scientific warnings about global warming seemed designed to promote government action, not only on behalf of the environment but on behalf of empowering bureaucracies and climate researchers themselves. Yet no scientists claimed that their chief concern was political. What would ultimately matter was whether global warming was truly a menace. |
The technical criticism most widely noted in the press came in several brief "reports" — not scientific papers in the usual sense — published between 1989 and 1992 by the conservative George C. Marshall Institute. The anonymously authored pamphlets came with the endorsement of Frederick Seitz, former head of the National Academy of Sciences, an ageing but still highly admired scientist whose expertise had been in solid-state physics (which had nothing to do with climate). The reports assembled a well-argued array of skeptical scientific thinking, backed up by vocal support from a few reputable meteorologists such as Singer. Claiming that proposed government regulation would be "extraordinarily costly to the U.S. economy," they insisted it would be unwise to act on the basis of the existing global warming theories. | <=Solar variation
The conservative political connections of the Marshall group (Seitz, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow) had been shown earlier. They had all lent their names in support of President Reagan's attempt to build giant lasers to shoot down nuclear missiles ("Star Wars") even as many other respected physicists attacked the scheme as technologically infeasible. The Marshall group's stance reflected a long-held belief in the supreme value of scientific and technological progress; ever since the nuclear debates of the 1960s, they had feared this progress was mortally threatened by environmentalists and the left in general. Seitz, Singer, and some of their colleagues had also joined the fight against regulation of tobacco smoke and similar causes. Their specialty was scientific arguments — which in the case of anti-missile lasers, tobacco smoke, and other issues usually turned out to be erroneous. It was so with the first and most important Marshall report. Its scientific argument insisted that recent global warming was due to solar activity. It predicted, wrongly, that as the activity declined in future decades, the planet would get markedly cooler.(121*) |
Opponents of regulation made sure that the technical uncertainties described in the Marshall Institute reports and elsewhere became widely known. In 1989 some of the biggest corporations in the petroleum, automotive, and other industries created a Global Climate Coalition, whose mission was to disparage every call for action against global warming. Operating out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers, over the following decade the organization would spend tens of millions of dollars. It supported lectures and publications by a few skeptical scientists, produced slick publications and videos and sent them wholesale to journalists, and advertised directly to the public every doubt about the reality of global warming.(122) | = Milestone
The criticism fitted well with the visceral distrust of environmentalism that right-wing political commentators were spreading. The Marshall reports strongly influenced President George H.W. Bush's administration. Enough of the public was likewise sufficiently impressed by the skeptical advertising and news reports, or at least sufficiently confused by them, so that the administration felt free to avoid taking serious steps against global warming. | =>Government
Scientists noticed something that the public largely overlooked: the most outspoken scientific critiques of global warming predictions did not appear in the standard peer-reviewed scientific publications. The critiques tended to appear in venues funded by industrial groups, or in conservative media like the Wall Street Journal. Most climate experts, while agreeing that future warming was not a proven fact, found the critics' counter-arguments dubious, and some publicly decried their reports as misleading.(123) Other experts, Hansen for one, exclaimed that "wait and see" was no way to deal with the "climate time-bomb." Going beyond calls to limit greenhouse gas emissions, he concluded that "governments must foster conditions leading to population stabilization."(124) On several points open conflict broke out between some scientists, with acrimonious and personalized exchanges.(125) |
To science journalists and their editors, the controversy was confusing, but excellent story material. The American media gave climate change substantial coverage through the late 1980s and early 1990s, notably in the New York Times, which still largely set the agenda for other American media. News magazines published many stories, although television gave only light coverage. Many reporters took a skeptical view of the administration's position. Outside a few deeply conservative media like the Wall Street Journal and right-wing talk radio programs, journalists tended to accept that greenhouse warming was underway. Following the usual tendency of the media to grab attention with dire predictions, a majority of the reports suggested that the consequences of global warming could be cataclysmic, with devastating droughts, ferocious storms, waves attacking drowned coastlines, the spread of deadly tropical diseases. The worst consequences were expected for certain vulnerable developing nations, but as usual the America media gave little attention to the rest of the world. Many stories optimistically suggested that technological progress would solve the problem. Journalists did not often emphasize that citizens might have to make hard choices between conflicting values. |
Seeking the excitement of conflict, as was their wont in covering almost any subject, some reporters wrote their stories as if the issue were a simple fight between climate scientists and the Republican administration. The ideological dimension was also stressed by conservative think tanks (the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, etc.) which increasingly sponsored pamphlets, press releases, public lectures and so forth, arguing that global warming was not really a problem at all. It was just "junk science," they claimed, a "scare tactic" worked up for selfish purposes by power-seeking bureaucrats and radical environmentalists. |
Many journalists responded by presenting the issue as if it were a quarrel between two diametrically opposed groups of scientists. Reporters often sought an artificial balance by matching "pro" with "anti" scientists, one against one. Publications that reported climate science news of ominous developments were hounded by angry letters to the editor demanding that the contrary view, denying global warming as a problem, should get equal time. A study of major U.S. newspapers found that up to 1994, climate scientists who were highly respected by their peers were cited considerably more frequently than the skeptics associated with conservative think tanks, but after 1995, as the conservatives grew more active, newspapers cited the two groups about equally. A similar shift was noted in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s: climate scientists lost control of the issue.(126) |
When scratch surveys sought the real opinions of climate scientists, most of them revealed mixed feelings. A modest majority believed that global warming was very probably underway. It was only a small minority who insisted there was no problem, while at least as many insisted that the threat was acute. Amid the publicized controversy, it was hard to recognize that there was in fact a consensus, shared by most experts — global warming was quite probable although not certain. Scientists agreed above all that it was impossible to be entirely sure. The media got that much right, for most reports in the early 1990s emphasized the lack of certainty. | <=International
Recognizing the need for a better representation of what scientists did and did not understand, climate scientists and government officials formed an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s committees managed to forge consensus views that almost every expert and official could accept, and published them as definitive reports. The first IPCC report, released in 1990, rehearsed the usual ambiguous warnings about the possibilities of global warming. This was nothing exciting or surprising, and the report got hardly any newspaper coverage.(127) |
Scientific opinion was shifting, but so gradually that it would take a special event to make that appear as "news."An opportunity came with the IPCC's second report, issued near the end of 1995. The somnolent public debate revived on the news that the panel had agreed that the world really was getting warmer, and that the warming was probably caused at least in part by humanity. Although many scientists had been saying that for years, this was the first formal declaration by the assembled experts of the world. It was page-one news in many countries, immediately recognized as a landmark in the debate. (Other warnings from the panel, such as the possibility of climate "surprises," were less noted.)(128*) | <=International
Better still for reporters, the report stirred up a nasty controversy, for a few critics cast doubt upon the personal integrity of some IPCC scientists. This marked a historic shift to ad hominem attacks. In earlier controversies, even the bitter wars over the dangers of tobacco smoke, debate had largely been confined to the scientific arguments, not the scientists themselves. The principal target of the 1996 attack was Ben Santer, a main author of the report. Accused of deliberate dishonesty in the way he summarized the scientific findings, Santer had to spend the better part of the following summer dealing with journalists and e-mails, not to mention death threats and disruption of his family life; the strain contributed to the breakup of his marriage. The accusations, orchestrated by people connected with right-wing organizations, were so dispiriting that Santer considered giving up science altogether.(129) | =>International
Even more newsworthy was the international Kyoto Climate Conference, scheduled for December 1997. Here was where governments would make real economic and political decisions on the use of fossil fuels. The administration of President Bill Clinton made a bid for public support for a treaty, holding a well-publicized conference of experts on climate change in October. Editors saw a story line of conflict developing as they anticipated the Conference. News reports were further stimulated by advertising campaigns and other intense public relations efforts, funded by environmental organizations on the one hand, by the Global Climate Coalition of industrial corporations on the other. Television stories dealing with global warming jumped from a mere dozen in July-September to well over 200 in October-December. Surveys conducted around the time of the meeting found about ten percent of the American public saying they followed the global warming news "very closely," a substantial fraction for such an issue (for more exciting stories, the fraction could be several times higher). Most of the news items asserted that global warming was underway, with barely a tenth including any expression of doubt. | =>Government <=>International
After the Conference, the wave of attention faded away as quickly as it had come, leaving almost no change in public opinion overall. However, a detailed survey found movement beneath the surface. Asked whether global warming was happening, the gap between strong Democrats (who mostly agreed with President Clinton that it was a problem) and strong Republicans (mostly skeptical) had widened. The main result of all the effort was only to further polarize the issue along a political dividing line.(130) |
Sporadic Battles TOP OF PAGE |
Many climate scientists were taking a more unequivocal or even activist stance. A much smaller number of skeptics opposed them. Some of these skeptics argued publicly that the 20th century's global warming (if it existed at all) had come only because the Sun had temporarily turned more active. During the 1990s they produced some fairly plausible data and theories on why global warming either was not happening, or was not caused by humans. Most other experts found these arguments weak. A historian of science who reviewed nearly 1000 abstracts of technical articles, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, found that "none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." (The media would cite this study repeatedly over the next decade, and the author was even invited to testify to a Congressional committee, a rare use indeed of historical expertise.) In the minds of nearly all climate experts, or at least those not connected financially to the energy industries, the case for human-caused ("anthropogenic") global warming was as well proven as anything in geophysics.(131) | <=Solar variation
The editors of Nature magazine remarked in 2000 that "The focus of the climate change debate is shifting from the question of 'will there be climate changes?' to 'what are the potential consequences of climate change?'" Even some of the few remaining skeptical scientists would admit, if pressed, that the greenhouse effect would make itself felt eventually. Some went on to claim that this would bring net benefits. Others retreated to the position that in any case it made no sense to regulate emissions, for the only reasonable policy, as one prominent critic insisted, was "to adapt to climate change."(132) |
As the international consensus of scientists became clear, some business leaders began to think that it was only prudent to plan for the contingency that restrictions would some day be imposed on greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, public opinion might turn against their business if it took the wrong stand on global warming. Executives in the insurance industry began to worry that climate change itself might hurt their profits, for in fact their payouts for storms, droughts and floods were increasing at a surprising rate. Pressed by environmentalist groups as well as by general public opinion, prominent corporations pulled out of the Global Climate Coalition. By 2000, many publicists were abandoning the claim that there was no global warming problem, and shifting to claims about the most business-friendly way to address it. More efficient use of fossil fuels, alternative energy sources (not forgetting nuclear), and changes in forestry and agriculture all held promise for improving profits while reducing emissions. Other corporations persisted in denial. The largest of all, ExxonMobil, continued to spend millions of dollars on false-front organizations that amplified any claim denying the scientific consensus.(132a*) | <=>International = Milestone <=International
In between episodes of debate, the issue occupied little of the public's attention. Television weather news, the only place where much of the public might get climate information on a regular basis, preferred to avoid the issue altogether. It was too complex, too highly politicized, and perhaps too depressing for what were basically entertainment programs. As one reporter put it, global warming was "not the kind of bad news people want to hear in a weather forecast." To be sure, weather news people saw themselves as trusted experts, as if they were scientists themselves. But many of them, extrapolating from their experience with the uncertainties of daily weather prediction, had little confidence in the forecasts of climate science (although it was in fact an entirely different kind of problem).(133) Most politicians likewise saw little to gain by stirring up the public. In the absence of manifest public concern, why devote time to such an issue — especially if it went against short-term business interests? Even Gore mentioned global warming only briefly during his run for the presidency in 2000. | =>Government
Science reporters would occasionally find a news hook for a story. The press took mild notice when experts announced that 1995 was the warmest year on record for the planet as a whole, and when 1997 broke that record, and when 1998 broke the record yet again. The impact was muted, however, since these figures were averages, and the warming happened to be most pronounced in remote ocean and arctic regions. Some smaller but important places — in particular the U.S. East Coast, with its key political and media centers — were not experiencing the warming that was becoming evident in many other regions. | <=Modern temp's
Reports of official studies by government or international panels each had their day in the limelight, but rarely more than a day. Stories made more of an impression if they dealt with something visible, as when ice floes the size of a small nation split off from the Antarctic ice shelves.(134) Other chances to mention global climate change came in stories about heat waves, floods, and coastal storms, especially when the events were more damaging than anything in recent memory. Citizens who attended more closely would see stories about shifts in the range of species, from birds and butterflies to insects pests and diseases. The concerns were largely parochial. Media in the United States would scarcely notice a record-breaking heat wave or flood that stirred up fears of global warming in Europe, and vice versa.(135) | Ice shelf collapse <=Sea rise & ice = Milestone <=Impacts
In fact, weather is so variable that any one of the widely reported incidents might have had nothing to do with global warming. Yet for symbolically conveying what scientists knew, the incidents could be truer than any dry array of data. For example, when tourists who visited the North Pole in August 2000 told reporters that they had found open water instead of ice, news stories claimed that this was the first time the Pole had been ice-free in millions of years. That was dead wrong — yet by many measures the Arctic Ocean icepack was in fact thinning rapidly. Similarly, a few years later, the announcement that the fabled snows of Kilimanjaro were vanishing turned the mountain into a renowned icon of global warming. A few critics argued that the main cause was a drought that brought less snow, but the general lesson was still correct — there was no doubt that nearly all of the world's mountain glaciers and icecaps were shrinking, and the only plausible explanation was global warming.(135a*) Or "climate change" — a phrase that was becoming more common than "global warming;" it included changes such as increases in floods, snowstorms, and other weather events that might be influenced by greenhouse gas emissions, but it also included normal, non-anthropogenic, climate changes.(136*) |
Most journalists continued to pursue their ideal of "unbiased" coverage by writing "balanced" stories that presented both sides of an issue. That put them in the odd situation of including, in a story that might describe years of research by teams with dozens of experts, a response by one of the few scientists who still denied the existence of human-caused global warming). Publicists for conservative and fossil-fuel organizations worked hard to give an impression that the denying scientists were a large and important minority. For example, Seitz and the Marshall Institute circulated a petition, accompanied by a warming-denying review formatted to look like an article printed in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and claimed to have gathered 15,000 signatures. The Academy took the unprecedented step of announcing that it was not associated with the activity of its former president, and inspection showed that very few of the signatures belonged to people who had any expertise in the science of climate change. |
But it is often enough to publicize an idea, however wrong, to leave many people convinced that there must be something to it. An analysis of news reports published between 1988 and 2004 in four influential American newspapers found that more than half of the articles gave roughly as much attention to the small band of denier scientists as they did to the view accepted by the IPCC and all the other rigorous scientific panels. (skepticism about the IPCC's findings and the IPCC itself was represented even better in editorial pages). On television during 1995-2004, more than two-thirds of the news reports "balanced" the opposing views as if they had equal support in the scientific community. The denying scientists quoted in reports frequently had financial ties to corporate lobbying groups, a fact the reporters often failed to mention. The veteran American environmental journalist Ross Gelbspan bitterly accused his colleagues of being duped, bought out, or intimidated by fossil-fuel interests.(136a*) |
If so, it was largely an American phenomenon. In most other industrialized nations, oil companies and their right-wing allies had less policy influence. And it was mainly in the United States that they worked hard to push their view of climate change upon the media. The deniers' views, however, were increasingly echoed in other English-speaking countries from Canada to Australia. Journalists elsewhere rarely quoted deniers, and for much of the world climate change never became an intensely polarized political issue. |
In the American media, after the Kyoto meeting more attention went to the political controversy than to the scientific evidence. In these policy discussions, three-quarters of the articles in the four leading U.S. newspapers "balanced" scientists' calls for strong action against the energy-industry's view that only voluntary action, if any, was needed. Gelbspan called this "stage-two" denial of the climate threat — people admitting that there might be a problem, but ignoring or rejecting effective solutions.(137) |
Public understanding nevertheless kept up with the main points of the evolving scientific consensus. Polls in the 1990s found that roughly half of Americans thought global warming was already here and many of the rest thought it was coming. Fewer than one in eight asserted that it would never happen. Many citizens now believed that the scientists who publicly cast doubt on global warming were unreliable, and had a vague idea of what the greenhouse effect meant. But most did not consider themselves well informed — quite rightly (for example, many well-educated adults still confused the ozone hole with global warming). An increasing numberof people suspected that they were personally seeing global warming in their daily lives, in the latest record-breaking drought or strangely balmy winter. Even Alaskans, quick to scoff at environmentalist positions, began to worry as the permafrost supporting their roads softened and dog-sled racers complained that it was getting too warm for their huskies.(138) | <=>Modern temp's
When the IPCC issued its third report in 2001, concluding that it was "likely" that greenhouse gases were bringing a sustained warming, it scarcely seemed like news. Brief stories in the chief media focused, needless to say, on the report's worst-case scenario — the threat that future temperature rise might be more dire than previous IPCC reports had suggested. Even that drew only modest attention.(139*) | <=International
Also widely overlooked were warnings, buried in the report, of a small but disturbing risk that climate might change abruptly. If the computer predictions were wrong, it might be that they were not too radical but too conservative, neglecting the risk that a severe temperature shift might take only a few years. New evidence of past climate shifts was persuading many experts that large changes could strike in the span of a decade or less. One plausible mechanism was a reorganization of the global system of ocean circulation. Journalists and a few scientists suggested that global warming could bring the Gulf Stream to a halt, paradoxically freezing Europe even as other places grew too hot. A close look at this specific scenario eventually showed it would violate elementary principles of oceanography. But the experts who studied the system of ocean currents and winds knew their understanding was incomplete, and they worried about possible instabilities. "The climate system is an angry beast," Broecker said whenever he got a public platform, "and we are poking at it with sticks."(140) | <=Chaos theory <=The oceans
A National Academy of Sciences panel reported in 2001 that "The new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system has been well established by research over the last decade." They added that "this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policy-makers."(141) Stories about the risk of sudden climate shifts did show up occasionally in newspapers and magazines, sometimes exaggerated into claims about a threatened collapse of civilization. People scarcely noticed, for the stories lay amid the usual journalistic noise — warnings of future disasters from falling asteroids, runaway genetic manipulation, and a hundred other conceivable threats. To most people, climate change still meant an evolution over slow decades if not centuries. Perhaps the scientists had gone a step beyond what ordinary people were prepared to believe. As a geologist remarked (on why people failed to prepare for great earthquakes), "To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need."(142) | <=>Rapid change
Political controversy raised a flurry of media attention in 2001-2002 after the new president, George W. Bush, made it clear that he would never impose the limits on CO2 that the previous administration and the rest of the world had agreed upon at the Kyoto meeting. Europeans loudly expressed dismay, and many American publications joined in the criticism. Editorials scolded the policy as a surrender to business interests. So it was, and yet Bush's approach was not far from what a majority of the American public and Congress wanted. To be sure, most people thought something should be done about global warming — but not if that would mean spending money or changing anything much.(143) |
The Imagery of Global Warming TOP OF PAGE |
The conservationist writer Bill McKibben lamented that global warming "hasn't registered in our gut." It wasn't just that the issue was a scientific one, although for many people that was enough to repel thought. Andy Revkin, a New York Times science reporter who led the pack in announcing global warming news, explained that "It's a century-scale story, and newspapers are dealing with a day or an hour kind of scale... to get them to think about something important that may happen three generations from now, in terms of its full flowering, is almost impossible." People whose interest normally focused on a local crime or scandal could scarcely grasp a phenomenon that operated on a planetary scale. If you did accept climate change as something that could affect your own community in your own lifetime, you might feel obliged to change your pattern of consumption, and perhaps some political opinions. For many people, this was enough to raise mental barriers to further consideration. One way to resolve the dissonance between personal predilections and scientific statements was to deny that we needed to do anything about climate change.(143a) |
Global warming was beginning to resemble nuclear war, which many people had met with simple denial. This potent psychological mechanism was well illustrated by a child who demanded that her father turn off a television documentary about climate change because it scared her. In any case most people, scarcely understanding the causes of climate change, could not name specific practical steps to forestall it. Citizens were more likely to scrupulously eschew spray cans, which in fact no longer used CFCs, than to improve the insulation of their homes, even though the lower fuel expense would repay their investment within a few years.(143b) |
A 1998 study using focus groups dug deeper, catching what had probably been the general feeling of Americans since 1988, and perhaps long before. Most felt confused, believing the scientific community had not reached a consensus. While the great majority of citizens said they thought global warming was underway, few felt really sure of that. Some people hoped that new technologies would somehow fix any problems. Others despaired of all technology, and vaguely foresaw a general apocalyptic environmental collapse. Few thought their own personal efforts could make any difference. A group of Swiss psychologists concluded from a similar focus group study that such arguments were "socio-psychological denial mechanisms" erected to bridge the gap ("dissonance") between the understanding that something fundamental had to be changed in their lives — indeed in our entire industrial economy — and the reluctance to make such a big leap. |
Many people in these focus groups were convinced that not only climate changes but all environmental harms were the fault of social decline — a rising tide of selfishness, gluttony and corruption. (In one week of unusual warmth during November 1989, I heard two people separately say that the Earth was paying us back for the harm we humans were doing to it.) People saw a generalized "pollution," the material and moral evils intertwined. Some, including prominent scientists, wondered if we had invited divine retribution. Most Americans believed they were personally powerless to halt the moral deterioration, and therefore saw the problem of global warming as insoluble. Anxious and baffled, "people literally don't like to think or talk about the subject," the authors of the study concluded. "Their concern translates into frustration rather than support for action."(143c) |
The world's image makers had failed to come up with vivid pictures of what climate change might truly mean. Nothing happened like the response to the risks of nuclear war and nuclear reactors in earlier decades, when hundreds of novels and movie and television productions, some by top-ranking authors or directors, had commanded the world's attention. Global warming did show up in several substantial science-fiction novels and the 2001 Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg movie "AI," which set its final scenes in a future drowned city. In most of these works, however, global warming was merely incidental background, only one of many evil consequences of a civilization fallen into decay.(144*) |
After 2002, some more-substantial works began to appear. Non-fiction reports by journalists drew increasing attention. Oryx and Crake (2003), by the leading novelist Margaret Atwood, portrayed a future world where global warming was one of several technological causes of ruin. In one scene the protagonist looked out over the wrecks of buildings half submerged in the ocean. Also widely noted was a huge and unsettling mural by the painter Alexis Rockman, "Manifest Destiny" (2004). It showed a scene much like Atwood’s, a future Brooklyn half submerged, given over to tropical wildlife and jungle. However, Atwood's novel featured global warming as only one of many harms of technology, less central than artificial manipulation of organisms (an issue that had long preoccupied Rockman too). Her story resembled hundreds of earlier tales of a Last Man in despair after the collapse of civilization, for example wandering amid the wreckage of a city after a nuclear war. Rockman acknowledged links to illustrations of bombed cities and to still earlier 19th-century paintings of elegiac vine-covered ruins. In such productions, global warming was only an example and manifestation of inexorable social evolution, another civilization laid low by its own pride and greed.(145*) | After global warming?
No panel of climate scientists ever suggested that global warming could destroy our entire civilization, but the idea was spreading in public consciousness, especially among groups already inclined to worry about environmental harms. Through the 1990s, as researchers dug up (sometimes literally) ever more data on past climates, archeologists came to suspect that certain ancient civilizations had collapsed during prolonged periods of drought — actually laid low by a climate change. Widely read articles and books prophesied that the same Biblical fate would befall us unless we awoke and changed our ways.(145a) | <=Rapid change
Abstract forebodings of doom became vivid scenes of cataclysm in "The Day After Tomorrow," a special-effects spectacular from a popular movie director. Along with a novel by a leading science fiction author that also appeared in the spring of 2004, it was the first fictional work centered on global warming to reach a wide public. Both included authorities denying any possibility of danger, a familiar plot element in science-fiction disaster fables. The new works continued in that mode, beginning with real scientific concerns about changes in ocean circulation and stretching to cataclysms beyond anything that scientists thought was possible, notably an instant ice age. While critics worried that such horrific phantasms would only push audiences toward despair and denial, surveys in the United States, Britain and Germany found that people who saw "The Day After Tomorrow" became a bit more more receptive to political action to forestall climate change. The movie, a great commercial success worldwide, was seen by roughly a tenth of all American adults and generated ten times as much media coverage as the IPCC’s 2001 report. Even that was not enough to measurably shift American public opinion as a whole.(145b*) | = Milestone <=The oceans <=Rapid change
Political cartoonists managed to come up with a few realistic and effective images in direct reference to immediate political choices. They might comment on a bill before Congress, for example, with a sketch of a withered desert landscape under a scorching sun. Television similarly showed parched crops or smog-shrouded cities. Calls for action against the threats of rising sea level and worsening storms got a visible face in television clips of advancing waves and hurricanes, and in political cartoons that showed buildings half underwater, whirling tornadoes, or both together. These were strong images, but limited by their familiarity. After all, drought, flood and storm images had long been associated with ordinary weather problems. A pair of communications experts explained, "in the absence of a symbol for the greenhouse effect, the media ... is limited in its interest and its impact." |
More-specific images appeared as actual climate changes began to show up. People who paid attention to the topic would see then-and-now photographs of receding mountain glaciers or images of northern houses sinking into the melting permafrost. On television and in magazines, picturesque Alaskan natives and Pacific islanders described their fears about changes they saw in the ocean. No report on climate seemed complete unless it showed a block of ice breaking from a glacier to plunge into the sea; the exotic image became a self-contained symbol of global warming. Starting around 2005 an even more popular icon emerged turning up frequently even in cartoons: the polar bear, said to be threatened with extinction. There were scattered reports of children frightened by images of global warming. "My son is convinced," a mother said, "that in his lifetime he will see the world thawed, warmed, and thoroughly cooked."(146) | Polar bear T-shirt
It is doubtful whether these images meant much to adults who were not already concerned about global warming. Not everyone worried about the fate of the polar bear, that fearsome predator, and the collapse of arctic glaciers seemed even more remote from daily concerns. As one critic complained when reviewing a show of artistic paintings on climate change, "a far more compelling case" was made by the plain graph of the rise of global temperature. Graphs, however, impressed only the more data-minded type of person. The outstanding writer Ian McEwan tried another approach in his 2010 novel Solar, a satire about a self-indulgent man who became concerned about global warming, even as he grew dangerously overweight and shut his eyes to his threatening skin cancer. McEwan argued that "we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more." But even he had to admit that "The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction." Nobody had produced a significant novel or movie that showed, in realistic human form, the travails that climate change might realistically bring upon us — the squalid ruin of the world's mountain meadows and coral reefs, the impoverishment caused by crop failures, the invasions of tropical diseases, the press of millions of refugees from inundated coastal regions.(146a) |
Deadlock (2000s) TOP OF PAGE |
In the early years of the new century, polls in the United States showed an outright decline in concern for global warming. Since the late 1980s, a large majority of Americans had told poll-takers that they personally worried about global warming, but the fraction who claimed they worried about it "a great deal" — roughly a third — declined in the early 2000s, and by 2004 a bare majority in the United State expressed any worry at all about global warming. This was in parallel with a dwindling concern about all environmental issues. West Europeans meanwhile grew more concerned, especially when a terrible heat wave assailed the continent in the summer of 2003, bringing huge crop losses, forest fires, and tens of thousands of excess deaths. Comparable calamities might have happened in earlier times, but the 2003 heat wave surpassed anything in the modern record and was probably made worse by greenhouse warming. (That also held for another record-breaking and disastrous heat wave that hit Russia in 2010.) The heat wave made a gripping story, although it still lacked the concentrated symbolic heft of a Hiroshima or Chernobyl. The divergence of West European from American opinion created diplomatic friction as President Bush rejected any steps to control emissions, or even negotiations about it. | = Milestone <=Solar variation
Despite the efforts of the deniers, some science reporters and their editors were beginning to recognize that the scientific debate over climate change was essentially over. They began to feel they should explain the situation straightforwardly, even at risk of angering part of their audience. Coverage of climate change in major U.S. newspapers, after declining in the mid 1990s, began to climb back. In 2004 the American public could read extensive cover-story articles in respected journals like Business Week and National Geographic, stoutly declaring that global climate change was truly a serious and immediate problem. Meanwhile several books and dozens of well-maintained Websites attempted to explain the situation. Far more widely noticed, however, was a best-selling thriller, State of Fear. The author, Michael Crichton, built his plot on the fantasy that fear of global warming was a deception propagated by evil conspirators and their dupes. As in his earlier novels, Crichton played upon a theme beloved of right-wing populists — the scientific establishment was arrogant, wrong-headed and untrustworthy, if not actively corrupt.(147*) |
This was in line with a proliferation of Websites and blogs that confidently denounced the scientific consensus on global warming. Some were posted not by paid lobbyists but by independent citizens — denial had taken on a life of its own — passing around plausible-sounding arguments supported by scraps of anomalous data. Meanwhile there was growing a lively industry publishing books with detailed warming-denial arguments, often supported by right-wing funds, with titles like Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate (by Singer) and The Skeptical Environmentalist (by an economist, Bjørn Lomborg). There are always anomalies at the research front, of course. But when scientists resolved a problem the denierss fastened on a newer one, while the old arguments stubbornly lived on among the Web's countless niches. The deniers had constructed what one neutral observer called an "alternative universe" where "basic findings of mainstream science are rejected or ignored."(147a) |
Some of the statements in blogs, books, radio talk shows, newsletters and other media began to resemble the typical American diatribe against wicked elites. "Nothing gets me as many crazed emails and comments as any reference to climate change," reported New York Times columnist and blogger Paul Krugman. An important part of the population just doesn't want to believe in the kind of world in which we have to limit our appetites on the say-so of fancy experts."(147b) Such arguments also began to show up in West Europe, Japan, and especially Russia, but Americans were the most prone to openly distrust scientists. Populist American politicians were often more scornful of intellectuals than were policy-makers in other advanced nations, and more responsive to pressure from oil and related corporations. Remarkably, the science-fiction novelist Crichton got an appreciative hearing as a "climate expert" on visits to Congress and the White House. Such antics widened the divide between the United States and most other nations, and helped maintain polarization over the issue at home. | <=>Government =>International
But outside Washington, important groups were shifting their stance. One turning point was a 2002 meeting in Oxford, England, where leaders of evangelical church organizations convened with scientists who shared their religious beliefs. Devout Christian scientists such as John Houghton, a lay preacher and co-chair of the IPCC's 2001 report, convinced some church leaders that they were called upon to protect God’s creation from greenhouse warming. In February 2006, a group of important American evangelical leaders issued a statement calling for government controls on emissions, backed up by television and radio advertisements.(148) |
Business leaders also began to speak out forcefully. Some European firms, notably oil giant BP under the farsighted John Browne, had already decided (as he put it in 1997), that "it falls to us to take precautionary action now." Starting around 2005, a growing number of leading American corporations like General Electric and Wal-Mart also pledged to limit their emissions. Business Week called 2006 "the year global warming went from controversial to conventional for much of the corporate world." Some executives "spoke of a personal awakening," the magazine reported. An environmental consultant agreed that "Suddenly CEOs were expressing genuine concern about the issue." He repeatedly heard variations on the story of a CEO’s daughter who came home from college and said, "Dad, we can’t be that stupid." (Polls did not find young people much more concerned about global warming than their elders, so these are probably cases where family dynamics brought views that were now mainstream to a resistant minority.) |
Executives who remained skeptical felt pressure from many directions. Promising to fight climate change would improve their corporate image, and it would also build morale among their own staff. More directly, some major corporations were hit with lawsuits for the damage their emissions were causing, and more of the same might be feared. Meanwhile powerful investors, from state pension funds to Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, began to weigh global warming risks before investing in a company. After all, business magazines like Fortune were warning of imminent "droughts and floods not seen since ancient times." Most important, legal restrictions on emissions seemed inevitable. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "The global-warming debate is shifting from science to economics... The biggest question going forward no longer is whether fossil-fuel emissions should be curbed. It is who will foot the bill for the cleanup." A wise corporation would take the lead in discussing just which business operations should be taxed or regulated. If you’re not at the table, the Journal remarked, you’re on the menu.(149) |
Political leaders sensed how the wind was blowing. Not only were corporations pressing them for decisions so they could make business plans, but calls for action on climate lifted public approval ratings. And it was getting harder to argue that action was unwise. The IPCC’s fourth assessment, which would be issued in early 2007 and widely reported in the media, would only report what many people already perceived from the media or their own experience — stresses from global warming were now apparent around the world. The scientists were confident that worse was all but certain to come. Meanwhile a team of British economists calculated that these impacts might be as harmful as a great depression or world war, but they could be staved off at modest cost. Even some staunch Republican leaders, like California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, pushed their states or cities to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. A surprising number of political units pledged they would meet the Kyoto goals. | <=International <=Impacts <=>Government
One important reason for the change was the disastrous summer of 2005, the worst Atlantic hurricane season on record, capped by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. Attention to climate change in the American press climbed to the highest level ever. "Are We Making Hurricanes Worse?" asked the October 3 cover of Time magazine. Probably so, the editors concluded. Scientists were in fact divided on that, and vigorously debated whether global warming had raised the risk to New Orleans at all. This was another case where an event that was not really a clear sign of global warming nevertheless taught an accurate lesson, for it was certain that rising sea levels would eventually lift storm surges over the existing levees. But what really mattered was the imagery. The half-submerged buildings of science fiction, the "environmental refugees" that experts had been foreboding for decades, now filled Americans’ television screens in real time. | <=Sea rise & ice
Meanwhile scientific reports on surprising changes in ocean currents and ice sheets spurred fears that that the world might soon pass what many had begun to call a "tipping point" — a point where calamitous climate change would become unavoidable.(150*) "Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us," declared a reporter in 2006. Another mused that "global warming has the feel of breaking news these days." Reporters admitted that they had leaned over backward too far in granting "equal time" to the remnant of denying scientists. As one reporter put it, "journalists increasingly have assessed the weight of the evidence and explained who was behind the opposing views." A study found that whereas in 2003-2004 many American media reports had diverged widely from the scientific consensus, in 2005-2006 most no longer insisted on an artificial "balance." The resolutely middle-of-the-road national newspaper USA Today headlined a 2005 article, "The Debate Is Over: Globe Is Warming." | <=Rapid change
In November 2005 alone, PBS public television stations, the Turner Broadcasting System, and even the right-wing Fox News Channel all ran specials stating plainly that global temperatures would rise, and a much larger audience saw movie idol Leonardo DiCaprio explain the problem on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The Weather Channel added reports on climate change as a "niche" market. In the spring of 2006, people could see a thorough analysis of the danger in two widely read books by top science journalists, a week-long series of reports on ABC television and radio, and a special issue of Time magazine ("Be worried," the cover advised. "Be very worried.")(151*) |
The greatest media attention of all went to a shoestring-budget documentary film. Since 1990, Gore had occasionally told the global warming story in a convincing illustrated lecture, and in the gloomy days after his defeat in the 2000 election, his wife persuaded him to take it up again. Honed before many hundreds of audiences, Gore’s presentation was converted into a film titled "An Inconvenient Truth." In the year following its May 2006 opening, it garnered the third highest box-office receipts of any documentary in history. Meanwhile an associated book reached the top of the best-seller list. Critics made much of a few points where Gore had been misleading (he showed a sea level rise without explaining it would take centuries, and used images of hurricanes without noting that their relationship to global warming was conjectural). But scientists generally gave the film high marks for explaining a complex subject with accuracy and grace. The film by itself could not do much to shift American public opinion as a whole. But it did strongly impress the sort of people who saw documentaries, including key policy-makers.(152*) |
Official statements were laboriously drafted and published by many leading scientific societies such as the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union, and by the world's chief academies of sciences from the United States to China — all endorsing the IPCC consensus. Poll-takers found that people around the world were rapidly becoming more aware of global warming and more concerned about it. In the United States, concern about global warming climbed back up to the level where it had stood in 1989. This was not simply a response to official pronouncements, Hurricane Katrina, and other matters in the media, but part of a general revival of concern about all environmental issues. In fact, when asked to name problems facing the nation, Americans would think of pollution of drinking water, the ozone hole, or the destruction of tropical forests ahead of global warming. This contrasted with Europe, where climate change generally ranked top among environmental worries. |
As often happens with such issues, after the wave of attention surged forward it receded: the number of media reports on global warming fell almost as fast during 2008 as it had risen during 2006. This was a general feature of ongoing stories such as those involving the environment: after a while other issues of the moment would arise and capture the attention of media and the public, in an "issue-attention cycle." Growing economic and political problems easily pushed aside environmental concerns.(152a) Meanwhile, not all the media had accepted the scientific consensus. The Wall Street Journal and some other conservative newspapers, Fox News (after its brief excursion), talk radio stars such as Rush Limbaugh, along with a variety of bloggers and others, continued to insist that climate science was all doubtful if not fraudulent. Their persistent work was having an effect. |
Polls of Americans in 2009 found that they had grown a bit less concerned about global warming. And the ranks of those who denied there was any problem had grown. Apparently Gore's prominent activism had not entirely helped his cause: the sometime Democratic party standard-bearer, despised by his political opponents, had inadvertently contributed to the polarization of views on the scientific question. Polarization and denial were also furthered when polemicists of every stripe leaped on any new scientific announcement that seemed to support their position. Good scientists took their time; they understood that when you stood at the frontier of what was known, no finding could be trusted until it had been verified and set alongside other findings. The news media, however, inevitably featured the latest results, which were often unreliable. Hurricanes were increasing!...oops, no they weren't! The oceans were warming! ...no, they were cooling! ...oops, they really were warming!). Small wonder if many citizens concluded that climate science was unreliable. Scientists themselves, and people who followed the science news with care, paid more attention to the slowly accumulating weight of evidence confirmed by years of study. | <=Modern temp's <=Modern temp's
This weight was moving steadily in the wrong direction: in the range of possibilities theIPCC had warned about, the worst was coming to pass. For example, the summer ice covering the Arctic Ocean was shrinking remarkably swiftly, by 2008 exposing seas that experts had expected would be ice-bound for decades more. But many citizens, unaware that practically every scientific institution and government agency now endorsed the IPCC consensus, saw the entire discussion of global warming as nothing more than partisan political posturing.(153) | <=International <=Sea rise & ice
This tendency was reinforced by global-warming deniers on the internet (now ahead of paper media as the main source of news for Americans, although not yet ahead of television). Millions of dollars continued to be spent on professional public relations denying any risk from global warming, aided by a variety of independent bloggers. The deniers, frank political partisans, increasingly made ad hominem assaults on supporters of the scientific consensus. Angry letters, even virulent hate mail, assailed journalists who wrote about global warming. The number of items on the internet that connected global warming with the words "hoax," "lie," or "alarmists" more than doubled just between January 2008 and January 2009.(153a*) |
The public controversy invaded the quiet lives of prominent climate scientists themselves. Experts who had published analyses of temperature records were bombarded with requests for their data sets, ranging from serious to frivolous to frank harassment (dozens of requests in a single day). Right-wing think tanks and Capitol Hill pelted them with skeptical missives or demands for detailed information, including lawsuits and calls for testimony under oath. Their email in-boxes were polluted by long and occasionally obscene harangues, demands for their resignation, even death threats. And worse was to come. | =>Climatologists
In late 2009 the number of media reports on climate temporarily spiked again, higher than ever before. One reason for this was a major international meeting in Copenhagen, where hopes for a comprehensive climate treaty flourished and then were crushed. The other reason for the spate of media attention was an event intended to influence the meeting: the anonymous release of more than a thousand emails, selected from many tens of thousands of emails stolen from a prestigious British climate-research institution. | <=International
Bloggers made much of quotes extracted out of context from a dozen or so of the emails. The other media quickly followed suit. Countless newspapers and radio and television programs repeatedly published excerpts which contained words like "trick," "hide," and "travesty." The naive climate scientists quickly lost the public-relations battle; the issue came to be called "climategate," implying that a serious scandal had been unearthed. Deniers boasted that they now had solid proof of dishonesty, fraud, a conspiracy to undermine the peer-review process, collusion to suppress data that contradicted the mainstream view of global warming, and much else. Major media reported these claims while rarely attempting to explain the emails' context of past controversies. For many citizens, it was enough that the stolen emails revealed a petty and even childish side in a few scientists — who had occasionally reacted in outrage and disgust against the personal attacks and incessant demands that deniers had leveled against them. |
The important question, to be sure, was whether there was any truth to the accusation that climate scientists had suppressed or falsified data? Investigations were launched by groups ranging from universities to the Associated Press to the British parliament. In the end they all reported that, while the scientists had sometimes failed to make their data appropriately available, the data sets and the results of their analysis were trustworthy. Hardly a surprise: this was science, after all, so the results of the British group had long since been double-checked and found correct by groups elsewhere, using independent measures. The confirmations of reliability, however, were not reported anywhere near as prominently nor as frequently as the deniers' claims of fraud. |
The "climategate" controversy was closely watched by at least a quarter of American adults. Public trust in climate scientists, which had already been weakening, declined further in the United States and elsewhere. Newspapers and television programs from the BBC to the New York Times reverted to artificially "balancing" statements from leading climate researchers by quoting deniers of every stripe. The main effect, however, was to sharpen the politicization of the issue. Most of the increase in denial of the dangers of global warming took place among citizens on the right-hand side of the political spectrum. As one result, by 2010 nearly all Republican politicians, even those who had once warned of the threat from global warming, either refused to take a stand on the issue or openly adopted the deniers' standpoint. Most Democrats, by contrast, continued to worry.(153b) | <=>Government
International polling found that almost everywhere in the world, a majority of the population had heard of global warming. Of these people, in most nations a quarter to half felt “a great deal” of concern about it, substantially higher than just a few years earlier. Educated people in most developing nations expressed more concern about climate change than their counterparts in the industrialized nations, and more commitment to action. |
The United States lagged behind most of the world. Fewer than a fifth of its citizens expressed strong concern, reverting to where the public had been a decade before. However, a large majority did express some concern. Many were unaware that the concern was so widely shared, and also unaware that most scientists saw global warming as a severe problem. Unlike people in most other countries, the majority of Americans did not think that they were currently personally affected by global warming. Still, a large majority of Americans thought it was a problem that would eventually affect them, and that the government should take action to address it even if it cost something. Almost everywhere else, citizens gave the issue higher priority for action. Around the world polls found resentment against the United States, which had put much more CO2 into the atmosphere than any other nation yet refused to take responsibility for it.(154) |
In all countries, even though majorities claimed to worry about global warming, most people still saw the problem as distant and abstract. Climate change felt remote not only in years but in geographical and emotional distance. To people in the developed world, global warming was not so much a problem for folks like themselves as for Pacific island natives and polar bears. One study concluded that most Americans still "lacked vivid, concrete, and personally-relevant affective images of climate change, which helped explain why climate change remains a relatively low priority...issue." |
Smaller groups (each perhaps 5-10% of the public) took stronger views. On one side stood people alarmed by what they saw as an imminent, even disastrous, threat to their own way of life and perhaps all creatures on the planet. On the other side stood people who dismissed it all as a myth, if not a deliberate hoax concocted by self-serving scientists, intellectuals and leftist activists. |
If you guessed that a member of the first group leaned politically to the left, and a member of the second group to the right, you would usually be correct — at least in the United States, for the issue remained more politically polarized there than in most other nations. A 2010 Gallup poll found that 70% of Democrats, but only 29% of Republicans, believed that effects of global warming were already happening (in 2001 the figures had been 60% and 49%). Political independents stood in between. The divide extended into the Republican party itself, where it was mostly more conservative people who stuck to a strong denial position. |
The political divide lay along a line that more generally separated people according to their feelings about authority, individual responsibility, risk-taking and related personal issues. People of an egalitarian bent tended to worry about climate change, along with other environmental dangers; those of an individualistic bent did not. Global warming in particular could become a surrogate for deeply felt disagreements over the value and future of the entire industrial economic system. But viewpoints also depended on national political circumstances and history (in the United Kingdom, Conservatives in the tradition of Margaret Thatcher had criticized the Labor government for doing too little about global warming). Each side found confident endorsement of its views in its favorite media, where exaggerated pronouncements served to attract and retain an audience by conforming to that audience's prejudices. (155) |
Some observers worried that the major media had swung too far, promoting a language of crisis and looming catastrophe that fitted poorly with the gradual nature of the actual problem. But only a small minority of citizens seemed paralyzed by what they saw as a catastrophe beyond human control. Indeed, only a minority saw global warming as a serious and immediate challenge at all. Many who expressed concern were satisfied with small symbolic steps, if any. To launch actions on a scale large enough to arrest the tremendous and increasing flux of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, bold leadership was necessary. Some farsighted individuals in business, government and other influential fields did recognize that they had a responsibility to offer such leadership, and an opportunity. However, a determined fraction of the public remained unconvinced about global warming, while most of the rest gave the problem a lower priority than more immediate issues. Only mild initiatives were politically feasible in the leading nations. It hardly seemed to matter that an overwhelming majority of scientists insisted that half measures would not suffice, in face of what they increasingly regarded as one of the most severe long-term risks that world civilization had ever faced. |
What can people do about global warming, and what should we do? See my Personal Note and Links. |
RELATED: Home Impacts of Global Warming Government: The View from Washington, DC The Modern Temperature Trend Rapid Climate Change Supplements: Wintry Doom Ice Sheets & Rising Seas
NOTES (cont.)
75. McEwan (2010), pp. 15-16. BACK 75a. 38% had heard, half ignorant: Opinion Research Corporation poll, May 1981, USORC.81MAY.R22. 5% Not at all serious, 16% Not too serious, 28% Somewhat serious, 37% Very serious, 24% Don't know: Opinion Research Corporation poll, April 1980, USORC.80APR1.R3M. Data furnished by Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Storrs, CT. Canadian survey (10% nuclear, 12% people/pollution/urbanization, 14% space exploration): Harrison (1982), p. 731. For 1990s surveys and a valuable general discussion see Thompson and Rayner (1998), pp. 270-73. BACK 76. Wade (1979); New York Times, Nov. 5, 1979, p. IV:16. These refer to National Academy of Sciences (1979); the conclusion was reinforced by National Research Council (1982). Greenland: Gregory et al. (2004). BACK 77. Note omitted. 78. Woodwell (1978), p. 34, see p. 43. BACK 79. Ingram and Mintzer (1990). BACK 80. Manabe, interview by Weart, Dec. 1989. BACK 81. Rasool et al. (1983); the stimulus was Hansen et al. (1981) or perhaps the related newspaper reports. BACK 82. Schneider (1988), p. 114; see also Schneider (1989), ch. 7; Nelkin (1987). BACK 83. Sullivan, "Study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels," Aug. 22, 1981, p. 1, and editorial, Aug. 29, 1981, p. 22, reporting on Hansen et al. (1981). The Washington Post also carried an editorial. Hansen, interview by Weart, Nov. 2000, AIP. BACK 84. Among other sources for this section, I draw on a talk given by J. Jensen in April 1991. BACK 85. Idso (1982); popularized as unproven but possible by a science journalist, Gribbin (1982), ch. 9; "encouraged" Idso (1984), p. 22; see also Idso (1989). BACK 86. Mahlman (1998), p. 97. BACK 86a. Philip Shabecoff, "E.P.A. Report Says Earth Will Heat Up Beginning in 1990's," New York Times, Oct. 18, 1983, p. 1. Walter Sullivan, "How to Live in a Greenhouse" (editorial), ibid., Oct. 23, 1983, p. IV:18. "Alarmist:" presidential adviser Keyworth, quoted New York Times, Oct. 21, 1983, p. 1. Phones: Elliott (1977-89), Oct. 24, 1983 entry. Oreskes (2008b), p. 113. BACK 87. McKibben (1989), p. 37. BACK 88. Levenson (1989), p. 32. BACK 89. Badash (2001) (Turco's term "nuclear winter" on p. 87); also Poundstone (1999), pp. 292-319; Schneider (1988). BACK 90. Magazines and newspaper article counts: Ingram et al. (1990). Books: my counts from the Library of Congress catalog, under "climate" call number QC981, which includes both popular and technical works.1975-77: 73 books. 1979-81: 97. 1983-1985: 71. BACK 91. Weart (1988), pp. 262-69, 299-302, 323-327, 375-87. BACK 92. Ungar (1995), includes discussion and references on dread factors and waves of public concern; Weart (1988), passim. For a direct climate-nuclear perceptions comparison see Palfreman (2006). BACK 92a. Ungar (2000), p. 304. BACK 93. Another example: James Gleick, "Instability of climate defies computer analysis," New York Times, March 20, 1988. Broecker (1987), quote p. 82; on annoyance Broecker (1991), p. 88. BACK 94. The 1986 hearings, held by Republican Senator John Chafee, "transformed the priority of the greenhouse issue, making it more important in policy decisions" according to Pomerance (1989), pp. 262-63; quotes: Hansen et al. (1987), prepared for testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, 9 Nov. 1987. BACK 95. Pool (1990), quote p. 672. Also Hansen, interview by Weart, Nov. 2000. BACK 96. Hansen (1988); Hansen et al. (1988) gives the scientific basis, predicting global temperatures in the 1990s would be indisputably above 1950s levels. In 2000 Pat Michaels claimed that time had shown Hansen"s 1988 prediction of temperature increase was exaggerated by 450%, a claim later picked up by novelist Michael Crichton and others. In fact Hansen had presented three scenarios, including a worst-case one (no volcanic eruptions to hold down temperature, accelerated emissions, etc.) and two more likely ones. Michaels et al. spoke only of the worst-case scenario and did not mention Hansen’s predictions of what was likely, which have turned out to be correct. BACK 97. Philip Shabecoff, "Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate," New York Times, June 24, 1988, p. 1. See Hansen, interview by Weart, Nov. 2000, AIP, and Stevens (1999), pp. 131-33; Weiner (1990), pp. 87-97. BACK 98. E.g., Howard Koppel's "Nightline" ABC-TV. The following day (24 June) I heard worries voiced by a number of callers to a radio talk show (Jim Althoff, WKING). Hansen was mentioned or quoted more than twice as often as anyone else on the issue during 1985-1991 according to Lichter (1992). BACK 99. Criticism by scientists: Kerr (1989); Kerr (1989); Bolin (2007), p. 49. BACK 100. Ungar (1992), p. 491 and passim. BACK 101. Schneider (1988), p. 113. BACK 102. Michael Oppenheimer quoted in New York Times 8/23/88 as quoted in Stevens (1999), p. 133. BACK Calvin & Hobbes strip. Calvin continues: "They say the pollutants we dump in the air are trapping in the sun's heat and it's going to melt the polar ice caps! Sure, you'll be gone when it happens, but I won't! Nice planet you're leaving me!" Mom: "This from the kid who wants to be chauffeured any place more than a block away." Calvin: "Hey, nobody told me about the ice caps, all right?" From Bill Waterson, Yukon Ho! (1989), copyright © 1988 Bill Waterson. BACK 103. My counts of Readers' Guide. Annual number of articles about global climate change printed in major U.S. newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) was zero in 1979-1980, rising to roughly two per newspaper per year through 1987, then from 1987 to 1988 jumped to some twenty per newspaper. Ingram and Mintzer (1990), p. 4; see also Trumbo (1996), p. 276; Wilkins (1993), pp. 75-76 (newspaper stories rose from 73 in 1987 to 574 in 1990); between 1986 and 1990 there was a fivefold jump in climate change articles in three German news publications, O'Riordan and Jäger (1996), p. 27; see Beuermann and Jäger (1996), p. 192; Ungar (1995), pp. 446-47. BACK 104. Weingart et al. (2000). BACK 105. 1988: Kane, Parson poll for Parents Magazine, USKANE.88PM7.RO98 and R11, data furnished by Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Storrs, CT. By 1989, another poll found that 79% of the public had heard of the greenhouse effect: survey of public by Research Strategy/Management Inc., 'Global Warming and Energy Priorities,' Union of Concerned Scientists, 11/89, as reported in W. Kempton, "Global Environmental Change," 6/91. BACK 106. Sept. 1988 poll of voters by Market Opinion Research found 53% considered the greenhouse effect "Extremely serious" or "Very serious" and another 25% "Somewhat serious." USMOR.ATS9.R11. May 1989 Gallup poll, worries on various issues: 35% Great deal about global warming, 28% Fair amount, 18% Only a little, 12% Not at all, 7% No opinion. USGALLUP.051589.R3J. Data furnished by Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Storrs, CT. BACK 107. The seven days of temperatures 100°F or higher exceeded anything seen before or in the following decade. Doe (1999). Congress: Ingram and Mintzer (1990), p. 4. N.b. The lower Congressional activity count cited in my "government" essay is based on Balco's simple computer word search. BACK 108. Weber (2006); the classic work is Linville and Fisher (1991). See also Hansen et al. (2004). BACK 109. Sarewitz and Pielke (2000), pp. 57-58. BACK 110. Burdick (2001). BACK 111. McKibben (1989), quotes p. 48, 86. BACK 112. Ungar (1992), pp. 493-94. BACK 113. Trumbo (1996). BACK 114. Chambers and Brain (2002). The authors point out that this may partly reflect a greater likelihood of putting terms like "climate change" in the titles of papers that dealt with narrow problems. BACK 115. Gelbspan (1997), esp. ch. 2. BACK 116. Wilkins and Patterson (1991), pp. 169-70. BACK 117. Trumbo (1996), pp. 278-29; see also Wilkins (1993), p. 78. BACK 118. McGourty (1988). Budyko spoke even more strongly about the benefits in my 1990 interview with him, AIP, and I have heard other informed Russians say global warming would be a good thing for their country. BACK 119. On Singer see, e.g., Lancaster (1994); Stevens (1999), ch. 14; Singer (1998); Oreskes and Conway (2010). See his Science and Environmental Policy Project site. BACK 120. "distaste:" Royte (2001). BACK 121. See this site's solar essay. Seitz et al. (1989); Seitz (1990); Seitz (1992), p. 28; on this and similar criticism see Stevens (1999), ch. 14, and Hertsgaard (2006). On Seitz, Singer, et al. see Oreskes and Conway (2010); Lahsen (2008). BACK 122. Union of Concerned Scientists (2007); Edwards (2010), pp. 407-08. See also information on the Coalition compiled by the Center for Media & Democracy, Madison, WI, in particular here, and Greenpeace (2010). For sponsors of "denial" propaganda in general see Monbiot (2007), ch. 2. BACK 123. E.g., Roberts (1989). BACK 124. Hansen and Lacis (1990). BACK 125. See, e.g., Lancaster (1994) and references therein. BACK 126. Lichter (1992); Wilkins (1993); also Anderson (1992). Think tanks and newspaper counts: McCright and Dunlap (2003), see also McCright and Dunlap (2000). U.K.: Carvalho and Burgess (2005). Here and below I also use my own observations of popular media, publicity by private groups, and scientific publications and meetings. BACK 127. The New York Times put the news on p. 6 (May 26, a Saturday). BACK 128. "Unlikely to be entirely due to natural causes" was the phrase quoted from a preliminary draft, by William K. Stevens in the New York Times, Sept. 10, 1995, p. 1, see also Nov. 18, p. 1. The less dramatic final negotiated statement ("the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human impact") was more widely noted than the scientific report, which said, "the observed warming trend is unlikely to be completely natural in origin," IPCC (1996), p. 5. BACK 129. The attack began with an op-ed by Seitz in the Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996. See Edwards and Schneider (2001); Masood (1996); Stevens (1999), ch. 13; Bolin (2007), pp. 128-130; Pearce (2010), ch. 9; Lahsen (1999). BACK 130. 9% closely followed the U.S.global warming policy debate in November and 11% the Kyoto conference in December, according to Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, "Public Attentiveness to News Stories: 1986–2006" (accessed 5/07); Krosnick et al. (2000), TV counts p. 241, doubts in 15 percent of newspaper stories and 8 percent of television, p. 242, politicization p. 253; Mahlman (1998), pp. 101-103. See Dunlap and McCright (2008). BACK 131. Study of papers: Oreskes (2004). U.S.Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Dec. 6, 2006. BACK 132. Admission: e.g.,Singer (1998), p. 71. The admission that warming will come is implicit in the book, but he said it explicitly in a throwaway remark in a physics dept. colloquium I attended at the University of Maryland, College Park, 24 Nov. 2000. Prominent critic: Michaels and Balling (2000). Nature (2000). BACK 132a. Union of Concerned Scientists (2007), p. 2. Greenpeace International posted documentation at http://www.exxonsecrets.org/. Shortly after publication of the UCS study, ExxonMobil, now under a new CEO, announced it had cut its ties with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a linchpin of the publicity and lobbying, and in 2008 the corporation cut off other institutions including the Marshall Institute and the Institute for Energy Research. However, ExxonMobil continued to generously fund right-wing organizations that included doubts about global warming in their portfolio. BACK 133. "Not the kind:" Seabrook (2000), p. 53. According to one weather report producer, angry responses from viewers who doubted the risk from global warming made him "hesitant to do more on the air. We hate to run things that turn off viewers." Linda Baker, "Just Say It's Sunny," Salon.com (viewed April 4, 2004; no longer online). Weathercasters: Wilson (2009), Homans (2010). BACK 134. For details of the episodic coverage, see Boykoff (2011), pp. 110-117. Ice: e.g., New York Times, March 2, 1995, p. 16. BACK 135. Ungar (1995), p. 453. BACK 135a. John Noble Wilford, "Ages-old icecap at North Pole is now liquid, scientists find," New York Times, Aug 19, 2000, p. 1. Lonnie Thompson's report from Kilimanjaro made the front page of the New York Times: Andrew Revkin, "Glacier Loss Seen as Clear Sign of Human Role in Global Warming," Feb. 19, 2005. Thompson later produced evidence that Kilimanjaro's icecap was indeed melting in an unprecedented way, Thompson et al. (2009). Glacier National Park, rapidly losing its characteristic feature, served as another, indisputably accurate icon. In a world survey, "For the period from 1900 to 1980, 142 of the 144 glaciers retreated:" Oerlemans (2005). BACK. 136. See Boykoff (2011), pp. 8-9. The Google book archive shows very little use of the terms "global warming" and "climate change" in books until the mid 1980s ("climatic change" does appear, pretty steadily, through the entire 20th century). Starting around 1986 there is a steady climb of both terms, continuing into the 21st century, with "climate change" more common than "global warming" increasingly from 1995 onward. "While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge," etc. Memorandum to Republican image-makers ca. 2002 by strategist Frank Luntz, p. 142, online at luntzspeak.com. BACK 136a. The Marshall/Seitz petition was signed by many who were not scientists at all. See e.g., Bolin (2007), p. 155; William K. Stevens, "Science Academy Disputes Attack on Global Warming,"New York Times, April 22, 1998. Newspapers covered: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, in Boykoff and Boykoff (2004). Editorial pages: Wilkins (1993), p. 79. TV news covered: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, in Boykoff (2008). Gelbspan (2004), p. 83, see chap. 4. I do not mean to use the term "denier" pejoratively — it has been accepted by some of the group as a self-description — but simply to designate those who deny any likelihood of future danger from anthropogenic global warming. BACK 137. Newspapers covered: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boykoff and Boykoff (2004), p. 134. See also Mooney (2005), pp. 252-253. Gelbspan (2004), p. 83. Paul D. Thacker, "Climate skeptics in Europe? Mostly missing in action," SEJournal Summer 2006, online as Society of Environmental Journalists: SEJournal excerpts (accessed 7/18/06). According to a survey of major newspapers in New Zealand, Finland and the US ca. 2000, "The U.S.'s media states that global warming is controversial and theoretical, yet the other two countries portray the story that is commonly found in the international scientific journals." Dispensa et al. (2003), p. 74. BACK 138. E.g., Bostrom et al. (1994); Read et al. (1994); Kempton (1991), and see Gallup and other references cited below. I heard some of these stories on visits to Alaska. "Greenhouse-effect skeptics become believers," Juneau Empire Online, March 18, 2001. Also, e.g., See also, e.g., Charles Wohlforth's blog entry here. BACK 139. One news magazine gave a cover story, Shute (2001), but others (like the New York Times) put it in back pages. The impact was blunted partly because some conclusions had been leaked piecemeal in advance. BACK 140. This particular version (one of many) of the quote is from the Desert Research Institute Newsletter, Spring 1999. The earliest I've noticed was, "far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth's climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges," Broecker (1995). BACK 141. National Academy of Sciences (2002), p. 1 (draft published in 2001). BACK 142. Eldridge Moores in McPhee (1998), p. 605. For the media in this period see Boykoff and Boykoff (2007). BACK 143. Scolded: e.g., Time (2001), including polls. BACK 143a. McKibben (2005). Much work on “cognitive dissonance” theory provides evidence for this mental mechanism. "Century-scale," Andrew Revkin on "Living on Earth," National Public Radio, Sept. 10, 2004. BACK 143b. Poll of voters by Mellman Group for World Wildlife Fund, 9/97, see panda.org (N.b. by the time you see this, these sites may be offline and you may need to contact the organization or an internet archive to get the text.) Gallup polls of general public 11/97, 4/99, 4/01, 3/02, etc. (I saw these on Gallup’s Website but they are now available only for a price. You can get some recent information by using a search engine to locate news reports.) For analysis, see Kempton (1991); Bostrom et al. (1994) (spray cans); Read et al. (1994); non-U.S. polls: O'Riordan and Jäger (1996), using a 1995 report by W. Rudig; also Bord et al. (1998); see also Stamm et al. (2000) and other articles in the same issue. There are many other polls from this period, see pollingreport.com and, e.g., americans-world.org. Child’s denial: White (2005); on nuclear denial cf. Weart (1988), esp. pp. 149-51. BACK 143c. Immerwahr (1999); summary in Showstock (1999); here I also draw upon Thompson and Rayner (1998), pp. 270-73; on pollution, see Weart (1988), pp. 188-190; an early and widely read statement of global warming concern connected with a call for "a simpler life" was McKibben (1989). Swiss: Stoll-Kleeman et al. (2001). For similar results from an excellent and deep Norwegian study see Norgaard (2011). See also Lynas (2000), pp. 288-89, and for much more on denial and apathy, American Psychological Association (2010), online here. BACK 144. On the "lack of ready-made metaphors in the popular culture:" Ungar (2000), p. 305; Bill McKibben, "Imagine That," Grist.org, April 21, 2005. For nuclear productions see Weart (1988). Examples of science fiction based on devastating climate change are Ready (1998), well-meaning but scarcely noticed; Turner (1989), a story of civilization collapsing under the pressures of war and economic forces as well as global warming (noted fairly widely for its literary quality); and, by two of the field's major authors, Silverberg (1994) (little noted), emphasizing the greed, stupidity and ambitions that were bringing vast destruction through ozone as well as global warming, and Sterling (1995), where colossal storms mingle with stormy political conspiracy. The future climate change in Ballard (1962) was spectacular but not specifically anthropogenic. The Hugo-award-winning Robinson (1994) included disastrous global warming but only in the background. Glass (2009), a thriller based on global warming, had sales far below the warming-denial thriller Crichton (2004). Global warming was one of the background problems related to overpopulation in the pioneering environmentalist film Soylent Green (1973). The polar ice caps melted to set the scene for a highly touted and financially disappointing action movie, "Waterworld" (1995, directed by Kevin Reynolds). .BACK 145. Atwood (2003), start of ch. 5. For Rockman see, e.g., Stevens (2004), Weart (2005). [Disclosure: by an odd coincidence, my daughter Kimi was one of Rockman's assistants while this painting was made.] Rockman has since done several other paintings in this genre. Yannick Monget painted Paris and other cities ruined by climate change, see Grousson (2006) and Monget (2007). I review the "last man" and "ruined cities" themes in Weart (1988), pp. 19-20, 220-221. The masterpiece of the genre is Max Ernst's superb "Europa nach dem Regen" ("Europe after the Rains," 1942), which uses the titular climate change as a metaphor for the destructive forces of war and politics. BACK 145a. E.g., Diamond (2004) (paperback reprint Penguin, 2005); Kolbert (2005). BACK 145b. Robinson (2004) is the first volume of a planned trilogy; the second volume, Robinson (2005), featured a sudden freeze in Washington, DC. "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004) was directed by Roland Emmerich, his third summer "blockbuster" movie in which New York City is wrecked (respectively by aliens and Godzilla). Its receipts put it among the top 100 all-time U.S.movies. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker movie critic, wrote (June 7, 2004, p. 103), "The very silliness of 'The Day After Tomorrow' means that global warming will become, in the minds of moviegoers, little more than another nonspecific fear about which they must uncomprehendingly fret." U.S.response: Leiserowitz (2004). Germans surveyed, unlike Americans, grew more skeptical about climate change after seeing the movie, perhaps because it violated what they already understood fairly well, but they became more concerned about the risk of abrupt climate change. Reusswig et al. (2004) Contrariwise, British film viewers became slightly more concerned about climate change but reduced their belief that climate change would bring extreme events, perhaps because they now identified that as fantasy, Lowe et al. (2006). BACK 146. "In the absence," Wilkins and Patterson (1991), p. 176. See, e.g., Weber (2006) for an introduction to the important literature on how people judge or misjudge risks. Viewers of Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" movie were especially impressed by an animation of an exhausted polar bear who could not find an ice floe to rest on. It was reported that bears were in fact drowning, Simonite (2005). Children: Allegra Goodman, "The Dark Dreams of Global Warming," Boston Globe, Sept. 8, 2008; similarly, John Stossel, "Man vs. Nature: Challenging Conventional Views About Global Warming," ABC News, Oct. 19, 2007; Anne Applebaum, "The Apocalypse Is Not Upon Us," slate.com, Dec. 14, 2009. BACK 146a. "More compelling," referring to "the Hadley Centre's horrifying J-curve," Richard Hamblyn, "Message in the Wilderness," Times Literary Supplement no. 5389, July 14, 2006, p. 18. McEwan (2010). Understand ourselves: interview in Ryan Roberts, ed., Conversations with Ian McEwan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), online here. Non-fiction: interview with Nicholas Wroe, "Ian McEwan: 'It's Good to Get Your Hands Dirty a Bit'," The Guardian, March 6, 2010. BACK 147. Newspaper coverage: Boykoff and Boykoff (2004), figs. 2, 4, see also Boykoff and Boykoff (2007). Carey (2004); Appenzeller (2004) (a giant 74 pages). Nat’l Geographic editor Bill Allen wrote in his editorial that "some readers will even terminate their memberships," but he couldn’t look himself in the mirror if he didn’t print the article. He later told a reporter that some readers did indeed cancel. An especially well-received book was Speth (2004). For other books and Websites see my links page. At year-end Crichton (2004) was no. 3 on the New York Times Book Review best-seller list and no. 2 worldwide in sales on Amazon.com. For an analysis of Crichton’s errors see realclimate.org. Earlier Crichton books criticizing scientists included The Andromeda Strain (1969) and Jurassic Park (1991). BACK 147a. Singer (2001); Lomborg (2001). For Lomborg and his errors see this note in the essay on Impacts. "Alternate:" Ruddiman (2005), p. 187, see ch. 18. BACK 147b. Paul Krugman, "Climate Rage," Dec. 8, 2009, online here. BACK 148. Evangelical appeal: christiansandclimate.org; Kintisch (2006); Haag (2006). BACK 149. "It falls to us...," Browne, speech at Stanford University, May 19, 1997, at stanford.edu and other Websites. Jim Carlot, "J.P. Morgan Adopts ‘Green’ Lending Policies," Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2005, p. B1; Aston and Helm (2005); Michael Barbaro and Felicity Barringer, "Wal-Mart to Seek Savings in Energy," New York Times, Oct. 25, 2005, p. C1; Linden (2006), p. 136; "the year global warming," Business Week (2006); and other articles in these and other business media. For David Crane, an energy CEO who read up on climate change and "realized it was a moral issue," see Whitford (2007), p. 76 "Dad," Adler (2007), p. 48; see also Amanda Griscom Little, "The Greening of Fox," Salon.com, May 17, 2007. Some polls show more concern among young people, some less, some little age difference; e.g., HSBC Climate Confidence Index 2007 (London: HSBC, July 2007), 20 pp., online at hsbc.com; Pew Center, "A Deeper Partisan Divide Over Global Warming," 5/8/08, on the Pew website; Jeffrey Ball, "New Consensus: In Climate Controversy, Industry Cedes Ground," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 23, 2007 (p. 1). BACK 150. The term "tipping point," popularized in 2000 in a book of that title by Malcolm Gladwell, was popularized for climate by, i.a., Lindsay and Zhang (2005) and Kluger (2006), see also Kluger (2005); New York Times, Sept. 28, 2005; Juliet Eilperin, "Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change," Washington Post (page one lead), Jan. 29, 2006 — the same day the New York Times led with a story of administration attempts to silence James Hansen's warnings (see essay on "Government"). Gabrielle Walker reported in 2006 that "In 2004, 45 newspaper articles mentioned a 'tipping point' in connection with climate change; in the first five months of this year, 234 such articles were published." (Nature 441, p. 802). BACK 151. "Unexpectedly" and Time cover, Kluger (2006), p. 35, part of special report, pp. 34-42; "Breaking news," Andrew Revkin "Meltdown," New York Times (Week in Review) April 23, 2006; "journalists... assessed," Carey (2007), p. 92. Study: Boykoff (2011), pp. 133-37. USA Today, June 13, 2005 by Dan Vergano, as cited by Boykoff (2009), p. 431, q.v.; "Global Warming: The Signs and the Science," PBS (South Carolina ETV and Stonehaven Productions), Nov. 2, 2005; "Earth to America!" starring many well-known figures, Turner Broadcasting Sytem (TBS), Nov. 20, 2005; "The Heat Is On," Fox News Channel, Nov. 13, 2005 (see following note); "Global Warming 101" with Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey Show, Oct. 28, 2005. Books: Among Amazon.com's 200 top-selling books in March 2006 were Flannery (2006) and Kolbert (2006), the latter previously published in the New Yorker [Kolbert (2005)]; some commentators hoped one or the other would serve like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which spurred action against pesticides and environmental pollution in general. Also, for example, Vanity Fair "Green Issue," no. 549 (May 2006); ABC reports on "Good Morning America," "Nightline," "World News Tonight," ABC news radio, etc., week of March 16, 2006. BACK 152. "An Inconvenient Truth," dir. Davis Guggenheim, Participant Productions, 2006, and illustrated book, Gore (2006). Origins: Pooley (2007), p. 37. Publicity included many radio and television interviews and magazine cover stories. I saw the talk in the early 1990s, where Sen. Gore illustrated the soaring of CO2 in the atmosphere by standing on a chair. The book spent four weeks at the top of the New York Times Book Review bestseller list and was on the list for 38 weeks. After the film was widely seen, U.S.public opinion turned modestly in Gore’s direction, but perhaps only as part of a general shift toward environmentalism: Saad (2007). There is anecdotal evidence from several sources on the influence of Gore’s presentation on elites. For example, the first Fox News documentary (see preceding note) "was approved after environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reportedly ‘dragged’ Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to a lecture by former Vice President Al Gore, ‘kicking and screaming’." Randy Hall and Marc Morano, CNS News, Nov. 9, 2005, . Florida Governor Charlie Crist, pushing emissions reduction in 2007, "said the movie influenced his views deeply," Joe Follick, Gainesville Sun, July 4, 2007. BACK 152a. Downs (1972). See Boykoff (2009); Boykoff (2011), pp. 20-23. BACK 153. Media studies by Robert Brulle and by Maxwell Boykoff & Mara Mansfield, reported here and discussed by Andrew Revkin, New York Times blog, Dec. 4, 2008, online here; Gallup, Pew Research Center and Rasmussen Reports polls, summarized and discussed by Revkin Jan. 2, 2009, online here and March 11, 2009, online here. Sea ice: e.g., Andrew C. Revkin, "Analysts See 'Simply Incredible' Shrinking of Floating Ice in the Arctic," New York Times, Aug. 10, 2007. BACK 153a. Professional PR: see Hoggan (2009), esp. chs. 10,14. Google searches by Kevin Grandia, “A Troubling Trend in Global Warming Denial on the Internet,” DeSmogBlog.com (Jan. 15, 2009). Searches I conducted Jan. 1, 2012 gave much higher numbers (e.g., 2.63 million blog hits for "global warming" + hoax). BACK 153b. Leiserowitz et al. (2010a). For context, starting-points are Pearce (2010) and the detailed discussions and comments Nov. 2009-Nov. 2010 on the blog realclimate.org. BACK 154. U.S. polls at Gallup.com, details available only for a fee, but summaries of these and similar results from many other polls are easily found on the internet, see pollingreport.com. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, global attitudes survey, spring 2006; HSBC Climate Confidence Index 2007 (London: HSBC, July 2007), 20 pp., online at hsbc.com. Results are often inconsistent among polls; it is important to make comparisons only within polls asking exactly comparable sequences of questions and among comparable populations (for example, surveys in the developing world usually reached only the more affluent). For recent polls see Leiserowitz et al. (2010b) and other work by Leiserowitz's group, and Council on Foreign Relations, "Public Opinion on Global Issues" (2011), online here. BACK 155. Leiserowitz (2005), and especially Leiserowitz (2006), "lacked vivid" p. 55. Also Lorenzoni and Pidgeon (2006); Ereaut and Segnit (2006); Saad (2007). Gallup: see preceding note. For 2001-2010 political divide see McCright and Dunlap (2011) and Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, e.g., Jan. 2007 poll and Nov. 2011 poll. There is growing evidence that "hierarchically arranged groups... tend to perceive industrial and technological risks as opportunities and thus less risky, whereas more egalitarian groups tend to perceive them as threats to their social structure." Weber (2006), p. 111. This may extend to individual personalities with respect to their concerns about authority vs. fairness, etc. See Haidt (2007); Kahan (2010). Surrogate: see McCright (2011). BACK copyright © 2003-2012 Spencer Weart & American Institute of Physics

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