Journalist Bill Blakemore has another great piece on ABC’s website:

‘The Great Big Book of Horrible Things’: WWII and Climate Change

What our great failure in the 1930s may teach about facing the rapid assault of manmade global warming  (Or “Hell is the truth seen too late.”)

Dresden (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It is the continuation of an essay he wrote about last week, which I blogged about here: “ ‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the Climate Threat.”

Blakemore cites the great quote from 18th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “Hell is truth seen too late.” Since I wrote a book on climate a few years back, Hell and High Water, that quote seems particularly apt to me for climate.

Blakemore’s piece starts by looking at The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White, noting:

The world’s climate scientists are in effect telling us that one part of the truth we must now try to see is humanity’s ability — or lack of it — for collective prevention of enormous manmade disaster, atrocity.

The record is worrisome.

He then examines humanity’s problematic track record of not preventing catastrophes even when many powerful people were aware of what was happening or about to happen, including the great atrocities of World War II. And no, there is no direct analogy being made (see “Climate Science Disinformers Are Nothing Like Holocaust Deniers“).

Blakemore cites a presentation by Harvard historian and social anthropologist Timothy Weiskel — a colleague of mine 20 years ago at the Rockefeller Foundation. Weiskel in turn cites John F. Kennedy’s 1940s book, Why England Slept (a title JFK ‘borrowed’ from Churchill’s 1938 book, though JFK’s book was originally his senior thesis at Harvard titled, Appeasement in Munich):

“To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanly Baldwin, is to overlook the obvious.  As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible.  But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group…”

Blakemore notes, “But this time, say today’s climate scientists, the rapidly approaching climate catastrophe threatens to kill far more people than all of White’s 100 Deadliest atrocities combined.”

There is little question that if we continue to listen to the disinformers and the do-little crowd, we are very likely headed toward global warming in excess of 10°F, as the International Energy Agency and many others have made clear. That will destroy a livable climate (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Indeed, that is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

Blakemore points out that a great many scientists are worried that this would lead to a staggering amount of misery and starvation:
Read more

Journalist Bill Blakemore has a great piece on ABC’s website:

‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate).

He offers advice to journalists in covering climate change — and advice to the rest of us in a world captured by denial.

The piece helps dispel the myth that climate scientists have long been overhyping climate impacts — when everyone who actually follows climate science and talks to any significant number of climate scientists knows that the reverse is true. As Blakemore writes:

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization”….

A few years ago, this reporter heard a prominent climate and environment scientist speaking at a large but off-the-record conference of experts and policy makers from around the world who had gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School….

He told us that he and most other climate scientists often simply didn’t want to speak openly about what they were learning about how disruptive and frightening the changes of manmade global warming were clearly going to be for “fear of paralyzing the public.”

That speaker now has an influential job in the Obama administration.

Climate scientists have been consistently downplaying and underestimating the risks for three main reasons. First, their models tended to ignore the  myriad amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks that we now know are kicking in (such as the defrosting tundra).

Second, they never imagined that the nations of the world would completely ignore their warnings, that we would knowingly choose catastrophe. So until recently they hardly ever seriously considered or modeled the do-nothing scenario, which is a tripling (820 ppm) or quadrupling (1100 ppm) of preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide over the next hundred years or so. In the last 2 or 3 years, however, the literature in this area has exploded and the picture it paints is not pretty (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Third, as Blakemore (and others) have noted, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are generally reticent and cautious in stating results — all the more so in this case out of the mistaken fear that an accurate diagnosis would somehow make action less likely. Yes, it’d be like a doctor telling a two-pack-a-day patient with early-stage emphysema that their cough is really not that big a deal, but would they please quit smoking anyway. We live in a world, however, where anyone who tries to explain what the science suggests is likely to happen if we keep doing nothing is attacked as an alarmist by conservatives, disinformers, and their enablers in the media.

Back in 2005, the physicist Mark Bowen wrote about glaciologist Lonnie Thompson: “Scientists have an annoying habit of backing off when they’re asked to make a plain statement, and climatologists tend to be worse than most.”

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the climate situation has become so dire that even the most reticent climatologists are starting to speak more bluntly. By the end of 2010, Thompson was writing:

Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.

Blakemore points out some other climate scientists who are starting to speak out:

Read more

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

by Brad Johnson

When the Discovery Channel aired “On Thin Ice,” its Frozen Planet episode documenting changes in the Arctic, it conveniently left out human causes. The show’s producer told the New York Times she didn’t want people saying “don’t watch this show because it has a slant on climate change” – illustrating everything wrong with the conversation around climate change in America. This afternoon, I and other members of Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Discovery offices with 10,000 signatures demanding the organization correct this unscientific self-censorship:

We are deeply disappointed by your decision not to explain the science, and human causes, of global warming in the “On Thin Ice” episode of the Frozen Planet series. As the world’s leader in environmental programming, your decision sends a dangerous message to media companies around the world — that it is better to censor yourself than risk criticism by global warming deniers. We call on you to immediately acknowledge this error and to conduct a review of all Discovery programming decisions to ensure no such self-censorship happens again.

As I and other members of Forecast the Facts, scientists Steve Scolnik and Clarence Maloney, entered the Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, we were greeted by a security officer in the vestibule. Corporate Security Manager David Sterner told us that no-one in communications, production, or viewer relations was or would be available to accept the petition, nor were we welcome even into the main lobby. However, he did personally guarantee that the 10,000 signatures and the letter addressed to Discovery chairman John Hendricks would be delivered on our behalf.

It is an essential fact that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the melting poles. As Bill McKibben noted, “On Thin Ice” is no different than a documentary on the ravages of lung cancer that censored mention of cigarettes. The pursuit of profit is not a valid excuse for the censorship of science. Neither is the fear of reprisal from well funded polluters.

Faced with a gross failure of leadership on climate pollution by those in power, average citizens are mobilizing to demand honesty and action. But they’re not the only ones. Today also marks the start of the inaugural science policy conference of the American Geophysical Union, a response by the leading organization of earth scientists to the increasing disconnect between the facts of science and the decisions made by politicians and corporations. The central topic of today’s sessions? The rapidly changing Arctic.

Brad Johnson is campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

The New York Times keeps running opinion pieces and analyses that misstate the positions of the major environmental groups and even leading scientists.

A classic example is the Dot Earth post from Friday headlined, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Message of ‘Green Traditionalists’.” I will show that this critique is pure bunk. Indeed, this critique isn’t merely untrue, it is the exact opposite of the truth.

Amazingly, we will even see that the critique contains an utterly false attack on “a bunch of scientists” who just published a major report. But people just don’t click on links, I guess.

The New York Times post begins by stating that Keith Kloor “has an essay posted on Discover, titled ‘The Limits to Environmentalism,’ that is well worth reading.” The NY Times then reposts this introduction with a link to the rest:

If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.

Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.

For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined for ecological collapse, unless global population and consumption rates are restrained. No, I’m not talking about the UK’s just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I’m talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement. [Read the rest.]

No and no.

This analysis, which would have been relevant 20 years ago, is simply the opposite of the truth today.

Indeed, anyone who follows the history of the environmental movement knows that the most serious complaint offered against it these days is that it has become too corporatist and too focused on the techno-fix. I’m not saying I agree with that critique 100%, but it has far more truth to it than this critique.

If you look at the major environmental groups — the ones with the power and money that this analysis purports to be about — they all work closely with industrial corporations, generally take lots of industry money, and they aggressively supported a climate bill that was absurdly pro-technology and pro-industry, that was business friendly and market oriented.

The climate bill was entirely about pushing any low carbon technology into the marketplace — including nuclear power. The bill had staggeringly generous subsidies for pretty much every industry, including many billions for the coal industry to help it develop technology to save its ass.

And the broken-record New York Times simply seems unable to acknowledge that the tens of millions of dollars spent to promote the climate bill was done by focusing on the pro-technology message and utterly downplaying the threat of climate change. The primary focus of the messaging was on clean energy jobs, along with energy security and the threat of international competition — industrial competition.

While the NY Times is oblivious to this, it did not escape the attention of the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who wrote about it in his 2010 article, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked in this post “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate” (excerpted at the end).

To see what message they are pushing, please visit the front page of the websites of The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council — and of the enviro groups with the really big revenues — the World Wildlife Fund, and National Wildlife Federation, National Audobon Society, the Nature Conservancy. Apocalypse not!

UPDATE: Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, author of two books and some 20 refereed articles on the U.S. environmental movement – whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications” — emailed me after reading my post:

This opinion piece by Mr. Kloor and Mr. Revkin is, generously speaking, highly problematic. It ignores a vast amount of scholarship on the environmental movement. It seems very difficult to me to understand how Mr. Revkin can maintain his argument that his opinion blog is “science based”and run something like this. There is apparently a double standard in operation, where the physical sciences are taken into account, but the social sciences are not. I would expect more fidelity to the empirical research on this topic from the NY Times. Perhaps a good start on becoming conversant with this material might be the books of two previous NY Times environmental reporters –Mark Dowie’s Losing Ground and Philip Shabecoff’s A Fierce Green Fire.

As an aside, the notion that being anti-nuclear is somehow a litmus test for proving environmental groups are “Green Traditionalists” stuck in the 1970s is particularly absurd.  The Economist just published a 14-page report, “Nuclear energy: The dream that failed, A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety.” Is there a more pro-corporation, pro-technology mainstream global publication than The Economist?

And then we come to the utter misrepresentation of the “just-published Royal Society report,” People and the Planet. Reading the NY Times, you’d get the impression that this is somehow a doom and gloom report about how “the earth is destined for ecological collapse” if we don’t reverse course. And you’d also believe that a “bunch of scientists” have written a jeremiad that “recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth.”

Not. And not.

Anyone who knows the Royal Society – the UK’s national academy of science, founded in 1660 — knows that like most big scientific bodies, it tends to be pretty staid and conservative. The Royal Society’s motto is apt:  Nullius in verba — Latin for “On the words of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it.”  It is “an expression of its enduring commitment to empirical evidence as the basis of knowledge about the natural world.”

So when someone attacks the Royal Society scientists, it’s a pretty good idea not to take their word for it. And in fact the report is pretty darn mild given the dire nature of our situation. More important, it most certainly does not recommend developed countries put a brake on economic growth.

If you go to the link the New York Times provided, here’s what the Royal Society has to say about our situation:

Read more