Saturday, 10 January 2015 15:34 By Pierce Nahigyan
It is a testament to the political spin machine that an issue like climate change can be so polarizing. Unlike the debate of Creationism vs. Evolution, this is not an issue that can be decided by faith; unlike Roe v. Wade, it is not an issue that hinges on morals or feminism or the dictates of jurisdiction. Climate change, unlike these issues, is not subjective, not beholden to opinion or faith, and yet Congress continues to treat it as such – in particular, the Republican party. Why?
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Historical Climatology Network has recorded warmer winters in every state. Winters nationwide have exhibited warmer temperatures at a rate 4.5 times faster per decade than over the past 100 years. Though surface temperatures hit a peak in 1998 and have slowed since then, the world's oceans continue to heat up. This has caused ice sheets at the Earth's poles to enter a state of "irreversible retreat," and western Antarctica is now melting.
According to NASA's Eric Rignot, this circumstance is non-negotiable: "It's passed the point of no return."
In January, NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released their report on global temperatures since 1951. Both bodies found that, with the exception of 1998 (which was host to a record-breaking El Nino event), the ten hottest years on record have all occurred in the new millennium. Bear in mind, there have only been 14 years in the new millennium. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 13 of those years have been hotter than anything they've recorded before.
What's causing this increase in heat? Is it natural or is it man-made? For those who have stopped denying climate change but still cast doubt upon its causes, this is the point they continue to cling to, that the Earth is going through a natural cycle of climate change.
2aIce cores taken from the East Antarctic dispute this claim.
By measuring the composition of air in ice that dates back over 650,000 years, scientists found that atmospheric carbon dioxide saturation ranged between 180 and 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late Quaternary Period. In the last 200 years (since the Industrial Revolution), the concentration of carbon dioxide has risen 40 percent to 400 ppm. That's the highest it's been in recorded human history.
Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere and trap the heat of the sun. This is known as the greenhouse effect, sometimes called global warming. But in 2010, Thomas Friedman suggested we throw out the term global warming in favor of "global weirding," because trapped heat will affect more than just the temperature.
"The weather will get weird," he wrote. "[S]ome areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever."
In January, the Polar Vortex struck the northwest United States and, despite the fact that the last thirteen years have been the hottest in recorded history, climate deniers seized the opportunity to proclaim the death of the "global warming debate." Unfortunately, freak weather occurrences like the Polar Vortex are exactly what Friedman was talking about when he coined the term global weirding. I broke down the controversy in my article, "If Global Warming Is Real, Why Is It So Cold?"
The point is, the science is not debatable. Forty years ago, perhaps. But not twenty years ago.
In 1995, cap-and-trade reduced acid rain emissions by 3 million tons in that year alone. It was a carbon-management system put in motion by President George H.W. Bush, a staunch Republican who looked at the science and understood that sulfur dioxide emissions were poisoning the environment. It was bad for the Earth and bad for business, which is why he pushed for an improved Clean Air Act in 1990. The New York Times considers his amending the Act to be the highest achievement of his presidency.
Though the move was controversial amongst the more conservative members of Bush I's party, environmentalism, at that time, was still a bipartisan issue. What's more, nobody was trying to pick a fight with the science. More sulfur dioxide equaled more acid rain. To reduce acid rain, reduce the pollution. To reduce the pollution, improve the air. The facts were consulted, a policy was enacted.
Today, 97.1 percent of experts agree that climate change is real and man-made, a consensus reached by studying over 11,000 peer-reviewed articles between 1991 and 2011.****
But Republicans don't agree. The most vocal of the GOP dispute climate change, dispute man's effect on the environment, argue that renewable energy isn't worth Americans' time or money and, at times, even find themselves at legislative odds with the very states they represent.
In June, President Barack Obama proposed a landmark cut in carbon emissions and, despite experts saying that the reduction doesn't go far enough, Republicans castigated the president for throwing American coal workers, the American economy and American business to the wolves.
This is not just a matter of Democrats and Republicans being the most polarized they've been in the last 150 years. This is something else.
The Roman consul Lucius Cassius had a famous saying: "Cui bono?"
"Who benefits?"
Who benefits from Republicans burying their heads in the sand, even as ocean levels rise and the air fills with carbon? Who benefits from turning a scientific certainty into a political tug-of-war?
Filling Up the Republican Tank
Dr. Michael Mann, Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, is not coy in his sentiments for the Republican agenda, nor in discussing where they take it from.
Dr. Mann has been on the forefront of the climate change debate for as long as the idea of a "debate" has been in vogue. He is an expert in climate science, one of the co-authors of the third assessment report for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and perhaps most famous for publishing the "hockey stick graph" in 1999, which shows consistent warming throughout the 20th century.
In his interview with Planet Experts, Dr. Mann detailed the hostility and death threats he received for simply presenting the data that greenhouse gas emissions were warming the atmosphere.
"Unfortunately," says Mann, "at the base of this is the fact that a number of very well-heeled private interests – the Koch brothers in particular – have spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars poisoning – literally poisoning – our public discourse over climate change by funding professional climate change deniers, creating front groups and funding think tanks that exist to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Funded by the Koch brothers, or in many cases funded by their fossil fuel interests."
The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are the heads of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in America. They are two of Forbes' richest men in the world (worth about $40 billion each) and their combined businesses and subsidiaries in oil and gas, polymers, fibers, consumer products, minerals, fertilizers, forestry and ranching generate an annual $115 billion in revenue. Charles Koch considers himself a libertarian and has made it his mission to free his several businesses from the oppressive regulation of government. For the sake of his fossil fuel interests, this has extended to founding anti-environmental groups and funding climate change skepticism.
Through their main political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Kochs spent $45 million in the 2010 mid-term elections. That year, David Koch personally attended the swearing-in ceremony of Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner. This year, Koch-backed organizations have already donated more than $25 million to Republican midterm campaigns.
Not only have the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests paid their way into Republican pockets, they also make it difficult for pro-environmental Republicans to get elected.
"One of the other things that they've done," Mann continues, "is to challenge Republicans that come out and express a thoughtful view about climate change. Any Republican now who comes out and says they accept what the scientists have to say will almost certainly be targeted in the primary campaign – it's what's known as being 'primaried' out of their seat. One of the best examples of that is Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina, who was primaried out of his congressional seat some years ago by a candidate heavily funded by the Koch brothers."
Former Vice-President Al Gore has also pointed to the Koch brothers as the main antagonists to the climate cause. Prior to these billionaires' seemingly limitless funding, both Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) were perfectly willing to admit to the science. In recent years, however, both men have backtracked on their belief in anthropogenic (man-made) climate change.
"It apparently no longer matters in Congress what health experts and scientists think," said Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman. "All that seems to matter is what Koch Industries thinks.... It can be argued, however, that the Republican members of Congress in general are also wholly owned subsidiaries of Koch Industries."
Last week, President Obama's top science advisor, John Holdren, appeared before the Republican-led House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. The Committee was supposed to discuss Obama's climate action plan and the EPA's proposal to reduce nationwide carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030. But the proceedings quickly devolved into Republicans questioning Holdren on climate science and then jeering at the answers he calmly supplied.
I encourage you to click the link above because the Committee's disdain for Dr. Holdren, an alumnus of MIT and Stanford University, must be seen and heard to be believed. It raises the question, who is really paying attention to what politicians do in Washington?
It seems the height of absurdity that a committee of science, space and technology can be led by men such as Representative Larry Buchson (R-IN), who told Holdren that he could take the time to read scientific literature, but that would only lend credence to "climatologists whose careers depend on the climate changing to keep themselves publishing articles."
"Yes, I could read that," the Congressman told Holdren, "but I don't believe it."
Above is from: Why Do Republicans Reject Human-Made Climate Change?
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**** The following article is the basis for the statement: “percent of experts agree that climate change is real and man-made, a consensus reached by studying over 11,000 peer-reviewed articles between 1991 and 2011”
Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
John Cook1,2,3, Dana Nuccitelli2,4, Sarah A Green5, Mark Richardson6, Bärbel Winkler2, Rob Painting2, Robert Way7, Peter Jacobs8 and Andrew Skuce2,9
1 Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, Australia
2 Skeptical Science, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
3 School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Australia
4 Tetra Tech, Incorporated, McClellan, CA, USA
5 Department of Chemistry, Michigan Technological University, USA
6 Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, UK
7 Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
8 Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, USA
9 Salt Spring Consulting Ltd, Salt Spring Island, BC, CanadaJohn Cook et al 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024© 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd
Received 18 January 2013, accepted for publication 22 April 2013
Published 15 May 2013Supplementary data Tag this article Create citation alert PDF (501 KB)
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Abstract
View all Environ. Res. Lett. video abstracts
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
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A Perspective for this article has been published in 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 031003
Corrections were made to this article on 31 May 2013. A data file was added to the supplementary data. Further corrections were made on 30 October 2013. A link to further supporting data was added.
- Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
1. Introduction
An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy (Ding et al 2011). Communicating the scientific consensus also increases people's acceptance that climate change (CC) is happening (Lewandowsky et al 2012). Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming (GW; Leiserowitz et al 2012, Pew 2012). In the most comprehensive analysis performed to date, we have extended the analysis of peer-reviewed climate papers in Oreskes (2004). We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC, published over a 21 year period, in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW).
Surveys of climate scientists have found strong agreement (97–98%) regarding AGW amongst publishing climate experts (Doran and Zimmerman 2009, Anderegg et al 2010). Repeated surveys of scientists found that scientific agreement about AGW steadily increased from 1996 to 2009 (Bray 2010). This is reflected in the increasingly definitive statements issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the attribution of recent GW (Houghton et al 1996, 2001, Solomon et al 2007).
The peer-reviewed scientific literature provides a ground-level assessment of the degree of consensus among publishing scientists. An analysis of abstracts published from 1993–2003 matching the search 'global climate change' found that none of 928 papers disagreed with the consensus position on AGW (Oreskes 2004). This is consistent with an analysis of citation networks that found a consensus on AGW forming in the early 1990s (Shwed and Bearman 2010).
Despite these independent indicators of a scientific consensus, the perception of the US public is that the scientific community still disagrees over the fundamental cause of GW. From 1997 to 2007, public opinion polls have indicated around 60% of the US public believes there is significant disagreement among scientists about whether GW was happening (Nisbet and Myers 2007). Similarly, 57% of the US public either disagreed or were unaware that scientists agree that the earth is very likely warming due to human activity (Pew 2012).
Through analysis of climate-related papers published from 1991 to 2011, this study provides the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date in order to quantify and evaluate the level and evolution of consensus over the last two decades.
Read the entire article by clicking on the following: Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - IOPscience
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