The Holocaust happened, right? We know it did, even though a few purported experts are in denial. Same goes for smoking. Despite the cadre of persistent doubters, there’s widespread understanding: You’re not doing your lungs a favour by inhaling fumes from a burning mix of tobacco and chemicals. So what’s the problem with global warming? It’s the biggest crisis we face, science has determined that human activity is its main cause, yet plenty of civilized people refuse to take it seriously. They point to the scientific fringes as if the basics of global warming are actually debatable. As if willful ignorance is an excuse for criminal inaction.
America’s president George W. Bush is a major culprit. His administration has censored legitimate studies on the effects of emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while repeatedly saying there’s not enough “sound science” to persuade the country to change its ways. (The US is the undisputed carbon dioxide champ, producing about 20 percent of the world’s emissions.) “Three Feet of Water,” an article in the May issue of Vanity Fair, explains how political resistance is built on evidence carefully chosen from the scientific community. That’s a loosely defined community: Novelist Michael Crichton, MD, testified before a senate hearing on the environment.
The most reputed scientists behind global warming denial are Richard Lindzen, meteorology prof at MIT, and Frederick Seitz, who was president of the National Academy of Sciences in the ’60s. Seitz was also a consultant for cigarette maker RJ Reynolds. As Mark Hertsgaard writes in the Vanity Fair article, Seitz “made his case vocally,” writing a piece for “the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, signing a letter to the Clinton administration accusing it of misrepresenting the science, and authoring a paper which said that global warming and ozone depletion were exaggerated threats devised by environmentalists and unscrupulous scientists pushing a political agenda. In that same paper, Seitz asserted that secondhand smoke posed no real health risks, an opinion he repeats in our interview. ‘I just can’t believe it’s that bad,’ he says.”
Canada used to take pride in environmental leadership. This week, among the events leading to April 22’s Earth Day, a gala dinner is celebrating Brian Mulroney as Canada’s greenest PM ever. During Mulroney’s term in office—1984 to 1993—an immediate concern was acid rain, a pollution caused largely by emissions from coal-burning power plants. Scientists figured out that sulfur dioxide would rise into the atmosphere, then return to earth with precipitation. America spewed more sulfur dioxide than Canada, but the air drifting over the border made acid rain a serious Canadian woe. To do anything about it, Mulroney needed America’s help.
Meanwhile, president Ronald Reagan claimed the air pollution theory was unproven, and couldn’t justify the crippling expense of making industry use “scrubber” technology; Reagan blamed rising acidity on ducks shitting in the lakes. But Mulroney somehow opened American eyes. Eventually an acid rain treaty came into effect, leading to pollution regulations without the doomsday scenarios of economic collapse.
That was then. Today, the American way is drifting into Canada, threatening to influence our global warming policy. Earlier in April, prime minister Stephen Harper admitted that his government plans to kill several projects run by Environment Canada—the programs, which aim in various way to counter global warming, will not have their funding renewed. Harper is also openly critical of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon dioxide emissions, saying he prefers a “made in Canada” approach. (So long as it’s not a made in Environment Canada.)
Also this month, a group of scientists published a letter in the National Post asking Harper to have public hearings on global warming so “Canadians will be permitted to hear from experts on both sides of the debate in the climate-science community.” And in Halifax, Herald columnist Paul Schneidereit brought up professor Richard Lindzen—the same one mentioned in Vanity Fair—as evidence that the scientific “bandwagon” needs to be questioned. For a nation that once got it, this talk of starting from scratch on global warming is a disturbing change in the weather.
Next week: Why Kyoto’s flaws don’t discredit emissions science. editor@thecoast.ca
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2006.
