You may conclude from all this that reputable newspapers and magazines are today acting in a confused and confusing manner because a great number of people have worked very hard and spent a great deal of money in an effort to establish and spread that confusion. You will also see that their efforts have been disastrously successful. We have lost two decades— two critical decades—during which we could have taken action on climate change but didn’t, because we were relying on bad advice. We were listening to lifeguards whose primary agenda had nothing to do with protecting our safety.
It’s possible that when you see the full extent of the sometimes strategic, sometimes accidental campaign of confusion, you will drift into irritation, even into anger. You may want to blame the bad advisors—the freelance lifeguards whose real goal was often something other than swimmer safety. You may, especially, lose faith in mainstream media as a reliable source of credible information. After all, we rely on them for their judgment as well as for the accuracy of what they present in their newspapers and broadcasts, and on so many occasions they have let us down.
Finally, you might begin to lose hope. You might come to question our ability to have a credible public conversation about science and to arrive at a reasonable set of policies to address climate change. You might be tempted to throw up your hands in despair.
That would be the worst possible result. Just by picking up this book, you have made the first, critical step toward being part of the solution. The information that follows will at least help to inoculate you against the public relations spin, the confusion and misinformation that has led us through two decades of inaction. At best, it will inspire you to learn more about climate change and more about the practical, affordable, and essential things that we all need to do to conquer the problem.
Our species has proved itself capable of great stupidity and palpable evil. Human history is too full of pogroms and holocausts, of wars, genocides, and societal collapses. Equally, however, we have proved ourselves intelligent and adaptable. When we stepped back from the brink of global nuclear annihilation, we showed that when the conversation is open and accurate, we can make good, even altruistic decisions. It’s time for such a decision now. It’s time for good people to inform themselves, to help lead and guide their families, their friends, and their neighbors back from a path that threatens the habitability of planet Earth to one that will be sensible and sustainable. We don’t have to jump off the cliff, and if someone tells you that we do, the message of this book is this: check his credentials. You may be surprised (and disappointed) by what you find.
[ two ] THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH Who says climate change is a scientific certainty?
No one, really. Certainties are rare in science. Even the reappearance of the sun over the horizon tomorrow morning can be reduced to a question of probability. On the question of climate change, scientists say they are more than 90 percent sure that it’s happening and that humans are responsible, but you just never know.
Scientists embrace that kind of skepticism. It is through doubting the certainties of the world (the flatness of the Earth, the usefulness of bloodletting) that scientists advance human knowledge. But no serious scientist will stand up and denounce a widely accepted scientific theory without making a verifiable argument to the contrary. Scientists—real scientists—bind themselves to a strict discipline, setting out their theories and experiments carefully, subjecting them to review by other credible scholars who are knowledgeable in their field, and publishing them in reputable journals, such as Science and Nature.
The people who approach the science of climate change with that kind of integrity have agreed on its underlying components for years. The greenhouse effect, by which gases such as carbon dioxide absorb heat, setting up a warming blanket around the world, was first postulated by the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier in 1824. Fourier understood that solar energy heated the Earth, which then reflected that heat back into space in the form of infrared radiation. In effect, the sun’s heat bounced off the Earth’s surface. But Earth’s atmosphere seemed to be blocking or slowing the release of that infrared energy, warming the planet. In the 1850s the Irish physicist John Tyndall figured out a way to actually test and measure the capacity of various gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, and ozone, to absorb and transmit radiant energy. By 1858 he had effectively proved Fourier’s theory.
At the end of the century—the 19th century—the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius advanced the theory even further. Arrhenius, who is considered the founder of physical chemistry, was the first person to predict that humans might actually increase the temperature of the Earth by burning fossil fuels and, in the process, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels themselves represent millions of years of stored carbon. Every living thing on Earth is composed of carbon in one form or another. Plants inhale carbon dioxide, which comprises one molecule of carbon and two of oxygen, then convert the carbon to carbohydrates and release the oxygen back into the atmosphere. Animals eat the plants. Over hundreds of millions of years these plants and animals have fallen dead into swamps or drifted lifeless to the bottom of the ocean, there to be covered up by layers and layers of other carboniferous matter. Under the right conditions—heat and pressure—those massive carbon piles have been converted to coal, oil, or natural gas. And over the last two centuries humans have been digging up those fossil fuels and setting fire to them, reintroducing the carbon to oxygen and releasing the resulting carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. When Arrhenius considered the effect of this trend, he tried to calculate the effect of that increased carbon dioxide. He estimated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase Earth’s temperature by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a stunning bit of science for the time, given that the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a doubling of carbon dioxide will increase the global average temperature by between 3.6 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also unnerving, in that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen since 1850 by more than one-third, from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 385 ppm, and we are on track to hit Arrhenius’s feared doubling by sometime near the middle of this century.
The next scientist to ring the climate change alarm was the American oceanographer Roger Revelle, the man who explained the greenhouse effect to former U.S. vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore when both men were at Harvard in the late 1960s. In 1957 Revelle published a paper with the chemist Hans Suess in which they predicted a global warming. At the time Revelle suggested that such warming might even be a good thing, but he and Suess prescribed caution in their paper, saying that humans were conducting “a great geophysical experiment” with almost no conception of the consequences.
Befitting a society in which scientific understanding guides important social decisions, concern about this issue began to crop up in the political sphere as early as the 1960s. Then-president Lyndon Johnson said in a special message to Congress