[CC] The Cost of Climate Denial (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim]

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Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2009 20:09:35 -0500
From: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: The Cost of Climate Denial

Climate Change Deniers Cost the Earth
Hardliners around the English-speaking world who
ignore the evidence for global warming will pay a
heavy political price
by Joss Garman
The Independent/UK
December 6, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joss-garman-climate-change-deniers-cost-the-earth-1835058.html

A generation of young conservative politicians and
journalists across the English-speaking world have put
down a historic bet that could decimate their movement.

>From the Senate chamber in Canberra, Australia, to the
editorial offices of The Spectator in London, an entire
class of right-wing leaders has hitched its wagon to an
outlandish conspiracy theory without seemingly
appreciating the profound implications their move will
have not just for the planet, but also for the viability
of their political project.

The conspiracy theory in question, which has been given
unparalleled publicity ahead of the Copenhagen summit,
goes like this: several thousand leading scientists,
seeking to secure research funding, have corrupted
global temperature data to stay in the pay of
governments bent upon extorting higher taxes through the
dissemination of scare stories about so-called global
warming. Climate change is a hoax propagated by greedy
academics and greens, better described as "the new
reds".

Clearly this theory is undiluted lunacy, but its
adoption by great swathes of the right is the most
significant strategic blunder by a political movement in
my lifetime. The great debates of the last century - be
they over a woman's right to choose or whether the US
should have fought on in Vietnam - have never, and
likely will never, be entirely resolved. And even if
they were, the public was never likely to exact a
catastrophic and permanent political price from the
losing side.

But with climate change things are very different,
presenting a grave danger to the electoral success of
right-wing politics this century. Because man-made
climate change is not some abstract political theory but
a scientific prediction that will be proven beyond doubt
in the years ahead in the form of climate impacts.

The new decade will likely see record global
temperatures, severe - possibly terminal - depletion of
Arctic summer sea ice, huge loss of mass from glaciers,
and wildfire epidemics. Taken collectively, these
climate signals will be among the most important events
in human history. In the decade following, any remaining
climate deniers will surely lose their tenuous hold on
the levers of influence because the public will witness
first hand profound changes to our world. We'll want
somebody to blame - we always do.

Just as George Bush was defined by Iraq and Margaret
Thatcher by privatization, the conservative movement
outside of the Cameron clique is rapidly becoming
defined by climate denial. For example, all the top 10
Tory bloggers in the UK are deniers. By the end of the
next decade, this could be politically toxic.

For Tony Abbott, the new leader of the opposition
Liberal party in Australia who assumed his role last
week on a platform of climate skepticism - "absolute
crap," he said of the science - the reckoning may come
too late. But younger Australian politicians and
journalists will, in years to come, be seeking the
support of a public which will want to know why they
willfully misreported the consensus scientific view
while we still stood a realistic chance of preventing
climate breakdown. The same will be true of Sarah Palin
and young Republican members of the US Congress who
proclaim climate change to be a swindle designed to
destroy the American way of life.

I find it extraordinary that the Conservatives Andrew
Tyrie and Daniel Hannan, James Delingpole of The Daily
Telegraph and Fraser Nelson of The Spectator have
gambled their reputations on a conspiracy theory
supported by the flimsiest of evidence.

Earlier this year they hitched their wagons to Ian
Plimer, an Australian academic whose central thesis
involves the assertion that volcanoes emit more CO2 than
humans. It was Plimer's work that formed the core of the
Daily Express front page last week, headlined "The Big
Climate Change Fraud". This will appear in exhibitions
in years to come alongside the Daily Mail headline of
the Thirties - "Hurrah for the Blackshirts".

His volcano claim is an assertion that can be tested
beyond doubt by the application of empirical data. And,
of course, Plimer is wrong. Very wrong. In fact, humans
emit 130 times more CO2 than volcanoes. NASA's Gavin
Schmidt, a world-leading climate scientist, dissected
the Plimer hypothesis in excruciating detail and found
it to be based, among other things, on a "basic logical
fallacy".

The most common deniers' meme is centred on the claim
that we have just experienced a decade of global
cooling, a willful misinterpretation of data. In fact,
the eight warmest years in recorded history are,
according to the Hadley Center, 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002,
2004, 2006 and 2007. In other words, this is the hottest
decade in the 150-year global temperature record.

The deniers have also claimed that the extent of the
Arctic sea ice increased dramatically in winter 2008.
Yes, it did. It increases in size every winter - because
it's winter. But the long-term trend is one of alarming
decline, such that scientists at the US Naval
Postgraduate School now fear summer sea ice may
disappear in the next decade, a century earlier than had
been expected.

Armed with nothing more substantial than their cod
science, the deniers have been emboldened these past
weeks by the Climate Research Unit email hacking. But
the welter of misinformation written about the CRU leak
reminds me of the CNBC financial analyst Jim Cramer. On
11 March 2008 Cramer stared into the camera and shouted
- yes, shouted - "No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine. Do
not take your money out. Bear Stearns is not in
trouble." Days later Bear Stearns went into liquidation
in the first great financial failure of the crash.
Cramer's credibility was shredded beyond repair. But the
right is now populated by the Cramers of climate change.
They're shouting, too - that the climate is not in
trouble. But they're wrong, and their credibility will
not long survive.

One of the defining moments of last year's financial
meltdown was Alan Greenspan's questioning before a US
House committee. The committee chairman pressed him,
"You found that your view of the world, your ideology,
was not right - it was not working?" Greenspan answered,
"Absolutely, precisely. You know, that's precisely the
reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40
years or more with very considerable evidence that it
was working exceptionally well."

The collapse of the banking system, we know, will be
nothing compared with the collapse of the climate
system. And being hauled before committees will be the
least of the deniers' worries as an entire generation of
conservatives are forced to answer for their role in the
great climate crash.

Joss Garman is a Greenpeace activist and co-founder of
Plane Stupid

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