Will "Inconvenient Truth' Shake America Out of Its Global Warming Apathy?

Augusta Free Press
June 13, 2006

Scientists say that global warming is the biggest problem that America and the world face today.

Yet Americans don't see it that way. While more than half agree that the effects of global warming have already begun, most of us have other things on our minds.

Out of thirteen issues listed in a CBS News nationwide phone survey taken in April, global warming - which scientists call climate change, because there may be some unusual cooling and other effects, too - didn't even make the list, so it was lumped in with the environment category.

Even so, the environment ranked third to last, at number 11, behind such issues as the war in Iraq, immigration and family values.

When asked only about the environment, Americans put other problems such as water pollution and damage to the ozone layer - both of which have been largely solved - far ahead of global warming, according to a Gallup poll conducted in March.

This huge gap between science and public opinion is what the new film "An Inconvenient Truth" (www.climatecrisis.net), opening at theaters nationwide this month, seeks to bridge.

The film stars Al Gore - "I used to be the next president of the United States of America" - giving a slide-show presentation on global warming. Despite this unpromising premise, reviewers have pronounced the film to be highly watchable and entertaining, living up to its billing as an environmental horror film.

"What changed in the U.S. with Hurricane Katrina," Gore says on the film's Web site, "was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences."

"Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," continues the Web site. "If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."

Melting polar ice, already under way, is just one of the impacts the film relates. If the Antarctic ice sheet collapsed, as many scientists now fear, world sea level could rise 20 feet. This would flood many coastal areas, including half the state of Florida and much of lower Manhattan, putting the World Trade Center Memorial under water. In such a scenario, Gore imagines an incomprehensible 100 million refugees worldwide.

Some skeptics convert, others change tactics

Prominent global-warming skeptics have announced epiphanies after Gore's presentation, or after reviewing the evidence that Gore draws upon.

Michael Shermer of Caltech always distrusted gloom-and-doom from environmentalists, whose predictions often turned out to be wrong. He didn't like their tactics either. "Activists who vandalize Hummer dealerships and destroy logging equipment are criminal ecoterrorists," he wrote in Scientific American in May.

But Shermer started to change his mind after seeing the slide-show that inspired the current film, "the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard." Before-and-after photos of glaciers melting around the world helped answer Shermer's doubts.

"Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable," Shermer said. "No longer. It's time to flip from skepticism to activism."

Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution was another prominent skeptic, and the weight of scientific evidence in the last few years converted him also.

"Yes: The science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous," he wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post in May. "As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert."

Indeed, after numerous international and U.S. government reports in the last couple years saying that global warming has already started, that it is caused by humans, and that it will lead to serious and unpredictable changes in life on earth, no reputable scientists and few journalists today continue to deny that global warming is real.

Instead, the current generation of skeptics says that it won't be so bad, and urges restraint.

Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, who also serves as Virginia's state climatologist, has not yet seen "An Inconvenient Truth." But in general he finds that "Al Gore tends to emphasize the extreme."

As for warming's impacts on Virginia, Michaels told me that he hasn't seen any so far. The state, like the rest of the Southeastern U.S., has actually been getting slightly cooler over the last few decades, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Michaels can't explain why the Southeast has not heated up with the rest of the world, which has seen its 10 warmest years on record since 1990, and its hottest year in 2005. He does expect to see the state eventually heat up, but thinks that the impact will be minor, primarily reduced snowfall and a flattening out of the seasons, with winters warming up and summers perhaps cooling down a bit.

Michaels, who edits World Climate Report, a blog for skeptics of climate change, denies charges that he is biased against global-warming research from his connections with the libertarian Cato Institute and the coal industry's Western Fuels Association.

He predicts that Americans will be able to easily adapt to a warmer world with the help of businesses that find opportunities in climate change. He has more faith in the free market than in government efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.

Mainstream science sees real threat

The vast majority of climate scientists and environmentalists disagree with Michaels' view, and find such caution to be irresponsible in light of the dramatic threat facing humans and other species.

"In global warming, business as usual will yield a different planet," James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, perhaps the nation's most respected climate scientist, told the conference on Peak Oil and the Environment held in Washington, D.C., in May.

In February, Hansen had a well-publicized dust-up with NASA bureaucrats when a public-affairs officer tried to censor his contacts with the press on global warming. After some embarrassing publicity for the Bush administration, which has been reluctant to recognize and address climate change, NASA had to back down.

Out of deference to the administration's unease with government employees saying that global warming is a problem, Hansen told the conference that "anything I say relating to policy is my personal opinion."

"We have driven greenhouse gases far outside their historical ranges," Hansen said. He predicted that global temperatures are likely to rise by 2100 to a level higher than at any time in the last million years or more, and urged quick action to limit carbon emissions to avoid tipping points that could lead to sudden and unpredictable shifts in climate.

"Another decade of business as usual will make alternative solutions impossible. Our children and grandchildren are the ones who will pay."

Hansen offered a hopeful example from the '80s and '90s. When scientists reported that CFCs, widely used in aerosols and air conditioning, damaged the ozone layer, the public successfully pressured governments to limit and then ban the chemicals, which they did in the Montreal Protocol of 1987, despite heavy opposition from business.

"The media transmitted the scope of the problem well," Hansen said, and he thinks that the media can help the public understand the seriousness of global warming now.

As much faith as he puts in free markets, even skeptic Michaels recognizes that the pressure to limit greenhouse gases through legislation will probably produce some form of federal cap on CO2 in 2007.

As a prelude to such a move, in June 2005 the Senate passed a nonbinding Sense of the Senate resolution calling on Congress to pass a mandatory limit on carbon emissions in the near future.

Activists push for quick action

Global-warming activists agree that mandatory carbon caps will come, and they say that's a good thing.

Diana Dascalu of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (www.chesapeakeclimate.org) supports national measures like carbon caps, but feels that in the current political climate, more progress can be made at the local level, where her group has been trying to get Virginia communities to sign onto the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

The initiative was launched by Seattle mayor Greg Nickels on Feb. 16, 2005, the same day that the Kyoto Protocol - spurned by the U.S. but signed by dozens of nations - went into effect.

"We try to get localities to sign on and then to implement it," Dascalu told me. "It's not as difficult as people might think. Small localities don't often hear from their constituents on global warming, so when a couple of us sit down with government officials and ask them to sign on, they're usually pretty willing. Many mayors are very supportive and very interested, and it's sort of a breath of fresh air compared to what we have to do on a state level."

In Richmond, the political divide between Northern Virginia and the rest of the state presents an obstacle to addressing global warming on a statewide level.

"Some legislators don't understand global warming or believe that it exists," Dascalu says. Her group attempts to educate state officials on the problem and remediation measures, including efforts to promote conservation and clean energy.

Against skeptics like Michaels, Dascalu thinks that global warming has already begun in Virginia.

"In Appalachia there are already numerous species that are going to be endangered - spiders, the northern flying squirrel, and some species of birds - because they are losing habitat in forests that cannot sustain higher temperatures. Higher elevation forests are disappearing. This is of concern to hunters, fishermen and others who live off the Appalachians. It will become very severe in the future."

CCAN, which covers Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, is the only climate group in the U.S. focused on a specific local area, according to Dascalu.

To help bridge the gap between science and public opinion, CCAN screens their own 35-minute film, "We’re All Smith Islanders," at locales around the mid-Atlantic area. The film shows how a Maryland island in Chesapeake Bay is threatened by rising sea levels and how the whole Chesapeake area faces its own problems from global warming.

Higher sea levels have already caused residents to abandon one island in the Chesapeake that was inhabited for two centuries. Hotter temperatures have brought the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., to bloom several days earlier than in the past. Changing patterns of rainfall and frosts in Maryland have made farming more unpredictable and difficult, threatening to put longtime farmers out of business and thus drive up the price of local food.

The film predicts that Virginia could lose 30 percent of its productive farmland in the coming decades.

After exploring the threat, the film outlines solutions that the Chesapeake states can take to slow down global warming, particularly embracing clean energy and conservation, solutions that Dascalu's group has already started pursuing.

"We work with clean energy companies throughout Virginia," Dascalu told me. "We are working with GE, which has plants in the state that employ hundreds of people. They're actually making wind turbine components here in Surry and shipping them off to Denmark where there's a large demand." She hopes to see comparable demand within the state for wind power soon.

As to Al Gore's film, Dascalu has seen excerpts. "It's pretty scary. And if it only reaches out to one or two skeptics, it's done its job."

CCAN will send speakers to showings around the state, including Staunton, where "An Inconvenient Truth" will open at the Visulite Cinema on June 23. Tickets for the opening, which will include a panel discussion, cost $7.50 and must be purchased in advance. Info: http://www.visulitecinema.com/

Erik Curren is a regular contributor to The Augusta Free Press. Curren is the author of Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today. More information about Curren's works is available on-line at www.alayapress.com. The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press.