How we lost our focus on Global Warming or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Venus

A brief introduction - one of my favorite posters on this site and a friend of mine is Medina64. He has demonstrated his knowledge and passion on many topics but clearly has an wealth of knowledge on Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming - AGW. I thought it would be informative and beneficial to get him to share his thoughts with all of us. Thanks M64!

OK, here is my response to COD’s call for AGW guest blogs. I’m not going to talk about the technical aspects of AGW - IPCC, RealClimate, Tamino, and, of course, Jim Hansen (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ ) do that infinitely better than I could.  Instead, I want to talk about how we lost our focus on AGW. 

First, some context.  The IPCC has said that we should limit CO2 to no more than 450 ppm and this was the generally accepted thought until about 5 or 6 years ago when Hansen and his colleagues began investigating in detail the effects of allowing CO2 to reach that level. Part of the impetus behind this was that the last time we had that much CO2 in the atmosphere was about 50 million years ago, when it was much warmer and there were no polar ice caps. The results of these investigations are summarized here, http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126 , and in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren”. The conclusions are, broadly, that at 450 ppm we risk crossing a tipping point from which we will not be able to retreat and which will have severe consequences for both human civilization and the biosphere in general - we have all evolved to live in much different conditions that will exist at 450 ppm. Furthermore, if we continue to burn coal, oil, gas, and tap into the Athabascan tar sands, consequently pushing CO2 concentration well above 450 ppm, there is a significant, non-zero, probability that the Earth could become like Venus, essentially wiping out all life on the planet. For reference, we are currently at 392 ppm and are going up at 3 ppm/yr.  Therefore, for people with young kids or grandchildren, it is very likely that those kids will be confronted with the changes associated with CO2 at or above 450 ppm. That thought was the main impetus for Hansen to write his first and only book.

With that context, how did we get to this point? When Hansen gave his now famous talk before Congress in 1988 it seemed like we were going to get our shit together and face this problem (note, LBJ mentioned the need to do something about AGW in a message to Congress in 1965). The story of why change was stalled is told in http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ .  Essentially there were a handful of very good scientists: Fred Seitz – physicist and former president of the National Academy of Science, Fred Singer – physicist and a leader in the development of the first weather satellites, William Nierenberg – physicist and onetime head of the Scripps Institute, and Robert Jastrow – physicist and one time head of Goddard Institute of Space Studies. All had worked on Cold War projects and Seitz, Nierenberg, and Jastrow had worked on the atomic bomb during WW II.  For various reasons, these guys were pissed off – a lot of it had to do with the opposition that occurred to Star Wars, some of it was personal friction with other scientists, and some of it was the feeling that the country was being taken over by people who didn’t understand Communism or the importance of the Cold War. They then recruited others with similar feelings. The fight began with denying that cigarette smoking causes cancer (to this day, leading climate denier and brilliant scientist Richard Lindzen says that it has not been proven that cigarettes cause cancer), then moved on to denying that coal burning causes acid rain, that CFCs were causing holes in the ozone layer, that second hand cigarette smoke causes cancer, that global warming is real, and are now involved in attacking Rachel Carson and saying that DDT is not a problem. 

Denial started out for reasons of ego, pride, and being pissed at others but as time went on, and the big money began to flow, and there was an economic incentive to do it also. Early in cigarette/cancer fight, the strategy adopted was to attack the science and scientists behind the claims, even though the tobacco companies themselves had proven in the early 60’s that cigarettes cause cancer. This strategy was refined as time went on and applied to all subsequent fights. OK, at this point, those who have kept reading are probably wondering how I keep my tin hat on when the wind is blowing and when am I going to start talking about the New World Order. In response, I ask you to go to http://www.legacy.library.ucsf.edu/ which is the Legacy Tobacco Document Library (LTDL) which was formed to house and maintain internal documents obtained during the lawsuits that occurred against the seven major tobacco companies.  Do some or all of the following searches:

• Global warming – Why the fuck are there hundreds of docs in the LTDL concerned with AGW?  Turns out the tobacco industry was also a large funder of AGW denial.
• The names of the above scientists – look at some of what they authored and proposed.
• “A Challenge to Scientific Judgment” – written in 94, note one of the coauthors is Sallie Baliunas, a noted AGW denier who has had to eat her words on several occasions. In this doc we learn that asbestos is fine for brakes, acid rain is not a problem, we need to loosen pesticide regulations, PCBs aren’t a problem, AGW is BS, and there is no problem with the ozone layer.
• “Bad Science A Resource Book” – this was a pamphlet put together by the tobacco companies that essentially laid out templates for attacking the science behind second hand smoke/cancer.  The templates require little change to refer to AGW. 

All right, I’m almost done. What is the issue here? A core group of scientists (with no expertise in many of the fields they were publicly attacking those who did) created a denial methodology based on attacking legitimate science and scientists in order to achieve their goals. In my opinion, one of the unintended consequences of this has been to diminish scientific credibility in the public’s eye. That is not good.  But I also think it shows how we as humans behave, we are not rational, we operate on motives that, after a while, are probably not clear even to us, and if we repeat incorrect shit over and over we begin to believe it ourselves.  This has been true throughout history (http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/phtoad/v64/i10/p39_s1?bypassSSO=1 ), Einstein got death threats over relativity and cancelled talks because of them, in the mid 18^th century a guy made his living debating astronomers all over England claiming the earth was flat – and winning in the public eye, or for today’s equivalent go to http://www.galileowaswrong.com/galileowaswrong/ . In the past, science has eventually won out – with AGW it is not clear who will win, nature is a tough competitor. Carl Sagan famously said that probably the reason we have not received any alien broadcasts after years of searching is that once a species is advanced enough to do that it is advanced enough to destroy itself, and probably does.