By Peter Montagu
A new study concludes that this has been the warmest century in 600 years, and that the hottest years during this century have been 1990, 1995 and 1997 (New York Times, April 28; Nature, April 23). This is further evidence that global warming is upon us, and that humans are contributing to it by burning coal and oil.
"Our conclusion was that the warming of the past few decades appears to be closely tied to emission of greenhouse gases by humans and not any of the natural factors", say Michael E. Mann, principal author of the new study.
The global temperature varies because of natural changes in sunlight reaching the Earth, dust from volcanoes and changing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide [CO2], but also methane and a few others) allow sunlight to strike the Earth but don't allow heat to escape back into space as readily, thus trapping heat near the surface.
Scientists have recognised the existence of this "greenhouse effect" for about 100 years, and they know that, sooner or later, increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must warm the planet.
Thus scientists don't debate whether greenhouse gases will cause global warming. They debate when it will be noticeable, how great the warming will be and what its consequences might be.
During the past 100 years, humans burning coal and oil have increased the atmosphere's concentration of CO2 by 25%, and the concentration is still rising.
Temperature measurements go back only about 150 years, so temperatures earlier than that must be inferred from tree rings, corals and fossils in the oceans, deposits left by glaciers, the chemical composition of ancient ice at the poles and fossilised pollen found in lake sediments.
The new study, published in the British journal Nature, uses many of these techniques to reconstruct the Earth's temperature back to the year 1400.
The study bolsters the consensus reached in 1996 by an overwhelming majority of the world's climatologists, that (a) global warming is probably noticeable now; and (b) human activities are probably contributing to the rise in the planet's average temperature. That consensus conclusion was published in the second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
PR plan
For their part, the coal and oil corporations are not taking this scientific consensus lying down. They are fighting back with a multimillion-dollar public relations plan that was recently leaked to the New York Times.
The energy corporations plan "to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry's views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians, and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases ..." The plan is being spearheaded by Joe Walker, a public relations representative of the American Petroleum Institute.
The scientific talent for the public relations campaign is being recruited by Frederick Seitz, who is a physicist, not a climatologist, but who has an impressive scientific resume as former president of the American Physical Society, former president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and president emeritus of Rockefeller University.
Dr Seitz is also one of the last remaining scientists who insist that humans have not altered the stratospheric ozone layer, despite an overwhelming body of evidence to the contrary. He is currently associated with two libertarian think-tanks.
Seitz injected himself into the climate debate by attacking the IPCC just days after publication of the IPCC's consensus conclusion.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal on June 12, 1996, Seitz called the IPCC report a "major deception on global warming". He accused IPCC scientists of the most "disturbing corruption of the peer-review process" that he had ever witnessed. And he accused one particular scientist, Benjamin Santer, of having made "unauthorised changes" to the IPCC report for political purposes.
It turned out that Seitz had not attended any of the IPCC meetings, and had not contacted Santer to find out whether the changes to the IPCC document were "authorised" or not. It also turned out that all of Seitz's charges were wrong.
Seitz and his associates at the George C. Marshall Institute are now preparing to release a petition that they reportedly sent to "virtually every scientist in every field" in the US.
There are 10 million people with undergraduate degrees in science in the US, and half a million with science PhDs. Of these, 15,000 science graduates and 6000 with PhD degrees have reportedly signed the petition, which rejects the Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases and argues that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the planet.
The mass mailing to scientists included a copy of an article formatted to look as if it had been published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was not.
The article, which had been neither peer-reviewed nor published, argued that the release of more carbon dioxide "will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people".
The Union of Concerned Scientists has branded the exercise "a deliberate attempt to deceive the scientific community with misinformation on the subject of climate change".
According to the New York Times, the energy corporations plan to spend US$5 million over the next two years to "maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media, and other key audiences".
This latest plan to "educate" about global warming will be paid for by Exxon, Chevron and other supporters of the American Petroleum Institute.
Previous similar attempts in recent years have been funded by Exxon, Shell Oil, Unocal, ARCO, the British Coal Corporation, the German Coal Mining Association and Cyprus Minerals, a mining company that is the single biggest funder of the so-called Wise Use anti-environmental movement in the US.
Who knows? With enough money, it may be possible to convince Congress and the media that global warming is not happening, despite the evidence, which is considerable:
- average global air temperatures have risen this century;
- the oceans have warmed this century;
- the level of the oceans has been rising this century because water expands as it warms;
- many glaciers have shrunk this century in response to warming;
- plants are moving upward on mountainsides as temperatures rise;
- rainfall — particularly torrential rainfall — has been increasing this century as global warming has put more water vapour into the air;
- floods are increasing because of more rainfall;
- in England, where climatic records reach back several hundred years, spring has been arriving earlier in recent decades;
- the IPCC and the World Health Organisation say that global warming is expanding the range of mosquitoes that carry malaria, yellow fever and dengue fever;
- computer models predict that global warming will be accompanied by more storms and more intense storms, and, in fact, this has been happening. The US insurance industry in 1996 stopped insuring certain storm-prone areas on the eastern seaboard and along the Gulf of Mexico coast.
If the world scientific consensus is correct, this will continue until our use of coal and oil is cut by 60% or 70% and the atmosphere can stabilise again. At present there is no possibility of achieving such drastic cuts because the oil and coal companies are too powerful.
[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly. Like Green Left Weekly, Rachel's is a non-profit publication which distributes information without charge on the internet and depends on the generosity of readers to survive. If you are able to help keep this valuable resource in existence, send your contribution to Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, Maryland 21403-7036, USA. In the United States, donations to ERF are tax deductible.]