Also, during times of great change, all kinds of issues get conflated. This spring, while Wisconsin considered a rather modest bill to cut carbon emissions, a reader wrote the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Liberals will shove this nonsense down our throats like they did with the health care debacle. They are stealing our liberty with lie after lie." And the most unpredictable voices enter the arena. In January, Osama bin Laden issued an audiotape dedicated to climate change, describing it as "not an ideological luxury, but a reality" and calling on the industrialized nations to do something about it.
The Media's Role
The news media certainly bear blame for doing a lousy job of putting things in context. For years, whenever a climate scientist was quoted, editors insisted on a side-by-side quote from someone attacking him, creating the false impression of a "debate" -- the kind of conflict that journalists are sometimes too prone to thrive on. When the scientific consensus became too crushing, covering climate change became boring.
Then, with the buried treasure of hacked e-mails, things suddenly became interesting again, and newspapers endlessly reported the innuendos of deniers. When the smoke cleared, it was apparent that scientists had needlessly withheld data and said mean things about one another and their detractors -- but had done nothing at all that changed the scientific picture. That was not splashed on page one, though.
In January, when the story about the Himalayan glacier snafu broke, conservative pundits gleefully declared the IPCC's house of cards had collapsed; glaciers weren't melting and climate change was a fraud. The New York Times and many others dutifully picked up the story, but failed to mention prominently, if at all, that there is no house of cards. Glaciers around the world are melting rapidly. They may not all be completely gone by 2035 -- but so what?
Scientists understand that there is uncertainty; projections of sea level rise for the year 2100, for example, range from less than an inch to as much as six feet. But average readers feel jerked around; they just want to hear the answer. The papers need to explain: scientists know the seas are rising; they don't know exactly how much; one study is only one study, and there will be many more to come before we arrive at a reliable number.
A recent issue of the Economist outlines other uncertainties. For instance, we don't know to what degree trees and plants might grow better in the presence of more CO2 and thus dampen warming. No one has really sorted out how natural clouds and man-made pollution might also confound the effects of CO2. We don't know if there is a "tipping point" of temperature beyond which polar ice sheets might disintegrate, rather than melt steadily, as they are now. And we do not know to what extent, if any, specific droughts, floods, snowstorms, and hurricanes are products of a changing climate rather than random events. There is room for real debate, and skepticism, on many questions. Too often, skeptics get a bad name and are confused with actual deniers. Skeptics are the ones who remind us that we may know something, but we don't know everything.
Many scientists compare planetary climate with a giant oil tanker, and the same may be said of public opinion. When some factor, natural or man-made, is applied to change its course, it takes a long time for it to slow down, start turning, and then gather steam on a new heading. This is the most powerful argument for doing something about climate before we reach the illusory mark of 100% scientific certainty -- and the most frustrating thing about living in the real world.
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Here's another perspective: Follow the Money
Kevin Krajick is a journalist specializing in science and the environment. His work has been published in the New Yorker, National Geographic, and many other magazines.
From NRDC's OnEarth Magazine, Summer 2010.
