For the past few years, I have been playing a little game with myself on the issue of global warming. I would read whatever I could about it, from any source at all, and then try to find out if the writer was funded, in any way, directly or indirectly, by the oil industry.
This was an easy task, for the most part. Virtually every scientist who denied global warming was employed by Exxon, Mobil, or another oil or coal company, or a foundation or Institute funded by them.
Conservatives will tell you that the people who believe in global warming, like Al Gore, are funded by the “climate-change industry”. I leave it to you decide if a voluntary group of concerned citizens is more “self-interested” and more likely to lie about the subject than Exxon and Mobil and the coal companies. It’s a clever approach, though, I give you that. A little earlier in history, they might have tried to convince you that Mother Theresa was running an “industry” of vagrant nuns looking for a handout and that poverty in India doesn’t really exist. It’s all just a scam to provide for Mother Theresa’s lavish memorials.
For the past year or so, I thought the game was over. Seemed to me that a tight consensus had grown up in the field, that global warming was real, that it was caused by humans, and that it was going to cause some severe environmental problems. Not so. Or so. I don’t know. But one has to be amazed at the capacity for humans of all political and social stripes to delude themselves into believing that any particular piece of knowledge is a “slam-dunk”.
In an article in Discover Magazine, a scientist not employed by the oil industry, named John Christy, of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asserts that all the scientists who say the globe is warming are wrong. I wish I could give you a number of how many exactly are wrong, and how many are for and how many are against, and how many don’t know but wish everyone else would make up their minds….
Wouldn’t it be nice if facts could be decided by a majority.
Anyway, they are wrong and he is right, because he looked at temperatures in a different way, and got data from different sources, and his data shows that, in fact, there is a bit of cooling going on– not warming. And the Arctic is actually freezing, so forget all those images you saw on TV and in National Geographic. It’s all the result of sun spots, and a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark has proven it.
Okay– that last part is my deductive conclusion based on Mr. Christy’s reasoning. If we are not warming, I’m not sure why the ice is melting. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it just a fluke, an inversion of some kind. Who knows?
We have always known that hot summers are not the result, directly, of global warming. Weather in any particular location on any particular day is not cut and dried and linear. We know there will be oddities and anomalies, so Christy should stop pretending that people noticed the hot weather and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the entire globe was heating up.
Christy thinks that Africa could be saved from dire poverty if only every hut had an electric light bulb and microwave. And there was a Walmart in the neighborhood. Okay– I’m making up the Walmart part. But surely Christy is making up the microwave part. He believes America is a grand force for good in the world– we export “freedom”, you see.
Not sure why the people in Darfur haven’t lined up to buy it yet.
Conservatives have been very clever at leveraging dissent:
If 1000 scientists say that global warming is real and 1 scientist says it’s not, they announce that there is no consensus and Public Television is now obliged to present “both sides” of the issue.
I believe this ratio could also be used to justify presenting “both sides” on the issue of witchcraft. After all, a fair number of people really believe in witches.
Please— please Mr. Christy, give us all one tiny little insignificant little break and don’t take a job with the coal or gas or oil companies. Be the only light, the soul beacon of potential unconflicted evidence on the subject of global warming– at least from the skeptic side.
(Sorry Mr. Christy: I don’t regard foundations that raise money from people concerned about climate change to be as “interested” as the oil industry, even as the oil industry keeps trying to convince us that those greedy environmentalists will stop at nothing to continue to have an excuse to protest….)
Christy, by the way, is a Baptist. So, just because he is not employed directly by the oil industry, does not mean he doesn’t belong to a group that has an axe to grind: Baptists in the Southern U.S. are overwhelming politically and socially conservative. Climate change is a liberal, European issue.
Christy’s social and religious background are not helpful in determining whether he is telling the truth or not. As a Christian, you might hope that he would tell what he believes to be the truth, but that he also might express some distaste for some of the character assassination and oil industry lobbying that is going on behind the scenes.
No such luck. Did he say he was a Christian?
We do know that the Republicans– who hate the idea of reducing carbon emissions– have carefully cultivated the support of Evangelical Christians since the 1970’s. Unfortunately, the fact that Christy is a Christian makes it more likely that he is more loyal to the Republican Party than he is to independent research.
It is more likely that he is just a partisan hack and a liar.
Does that seem crude and judgmental? I don’t ask that Christy agree with 99% of the climate scientists that the earth warming and it is due to human activity and carbon emissions. I just ask that he show that he has principles, and, if he has principles, that he disagrees with Exxon’s blatant advocacy of fake science in order to protect their fossil fuel business investments.
Details From Discover Magazine
Christy’s Testimony to Congress on the Impact of CO2 Emissions that might come from More Coal-fired Plants
Just in– apparently Christy now acknowledges that climate change is real. His earlier data was flawed. Okay. That is a bit of a shock. I thought I’d found that hold-out independent scientist…. but no. BUT…. Christy believes that global warming will be a good thing for the planet. You can’t keep a good man down! Tune in again in five years…
Christy further undermines his own credibility by attacking “extremists”. If Christy is acting like a scientist, he wants you to know that his information is accurate and unbiased. But Christy is not being asked for his emotional judgment of a dissenting movement in politics. He has no expertise on what “extremism” is. He should only have addressed any particular facts and figures presented by any group– including those who are tools of the oil industry.
Author Michael Crichton has chimed in with his own propaganda on behalf of the skeptics. He has also testified to congress and given several public speeches on the global warming “scam”. Once again, it is odd that a skeptic seems more interested in political attacks on the climate change lobby than on disputing the facts. Most of us feel a speaker or writer is most credible when he is the least emotionally involved, and when it is clear that he isn’t just out to try to humiliate or insult or marginalize people he just doesn’t seem to like very much. It would have done wonders for Crichton’s credibility if he would acknowledge that the science is being “corrupted” by oil companies as well as by scientists who crave peer approval and don’t think for themselves.
Think about it– if you have a fire department with 12 members and they are sitting in the fire hall waiting around and a garbled message suddenly came through on the telephone and half the men thought it said there was a fire at city hall and the other half said they heard no such thing. What would anyone with common sense do? They’d drive the fire truck out to city hall with a crew to find out for sure. But the climate change skeptics, including Crichton and Christie, are trying to take away the keys to prevent the other six firemen from going anywhere. When that fails, they slash the tires. They accuse the other six firemen of being in the pocket of the Fire Prevention Industry.
The only explanation that could account for this behavior? The six skeptics are allied with the people who have set fire to city hall.
Mr. Crichton and company would be far more believable if they would merely take the trouble to point out that the skeptic “industry” is far more lavishly funded and “interested” than Al Gore and the majority of climatologists. If they really believe that the fact that many people make a living advocating reductions in carbon emissions invalidates their “science”, they would be quick to admit that the “science” of the skeptics is even more compromised. (At least the believers have an overtly beneficial purpose: to save mankind from immense suffering and economic hardship.) Then they might get back to the point: what are the facts? How can we find out more about what is really going on?
Crichton talks about the “religion” of environmentalism. All fair and good– there’s some truth to that. But it is absolutely ridiculous of him to ignore the “religion” of economic growth and capitalism which, like environmentalism, bears an irrational, unscientific adherence to a set of values and assumptions that colour it’s “scientific” conclusions about a global warming. The motive of the skeptic “industry” is increased consumption, bigger profits for corporations, and more pollution.
