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Tuesday, 20 February 2007 16:12 |
 | | Mark West |
There is an emerging consensus in the scientific world that human activity is connected to global warming. And there is a consensus in the international community that steps must be taken immediately to reduce CO2 emissions.
The recent report contained some pretty grim news. Among other things, the report predicted that Arctic summer sea ice would disappear in the second half of century; there would be an increase in heatwaves; and an increase in tropical storm intensity was very likely.
The report was issued in Paris by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from throughout the world administered by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization.
The
scientists, for the first time, said that there was 90 percent
certainty that human activity was causing global warming. And, perhaps
even more startling, the Bush administration accepted the findings of
the research, along with 113 other nations.
Not that the Bush administration agreed to do something about global
warming. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said that the U.S. was a
ìsmall contributor to the overall level of CO2, when you look at the
rest of the world.î
How Bodman came up with that assessment is a mystery. With about 5
percent of the worldís population, America contributes about a quarter
of greenhouse gas emissions.
European nations called for immediate measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
ìWhile climate changes run like a rabbit, world politics move like a
snail. [But] either we accelerate or we risk a disaster,î said Italyís
environment minister Alfonso Scanio.
And by Feb. 4, 45 nations answered Franceís call for a new
environmental body to slow global warming. The United States, of
course, was visible mainly by its absence.
The usual suspects, of course, came out to call global warming a
ìhoax,î like James Inhofe, whose ostrich act must surely be wearing
thin even for his oil-field constinuency in Oklahoma. As the
scientific consensus has moved increasingly to support the thesis of
the human influence on climate, Inhofe blamed the media for unfair
reporting, supported by media ëexpertsí like Patrick Michaels, who has
in the past claimed that networks like CNN under-represent skeptics on
global warming ó even thought the scientist most frequently represented
on CNN about global warming is Michaels himself.
As Al Gore puts it, global warming is an inconvernient truth for a
neoconservative movement devoted to endless growth and centralization
of economic power via megamergers, megastores, and megachurches. How
would such a movement deal with the inconvenient truth of the IPCC
report?
According to the Manchester Guardian, The American Enterprise Institute
offered $10,000 each to scientists to write articles contradicting the
findings of the IPCC report.
And from whence comes the funding of the AEI?
Big oil, among others. ExxonMobil gave $1.6 million to the AEI
recently, and some 20 members of the AEI have served as consultants to
the Bush administration. These include people like Lynne Cheney, wife
of the vice president; David Frum, who was for a while one of the
Presidentís speechwriters; and Richard Perle, one of the architects of
the American disaster in Iraq.
The AEI has an unenviable reputation for being wrong. It steered Bush
into the debacle in Iraq, and now, through Frederick Kagan and others,
it is advocating the ìsurgeî and ìvigorousî engagement with Iran. And,
fueled by Exxon money, the AEI is trying to muddy the waters so as to
delay or prevent U.S. action on global warming.
In politics, in general, there are no bad guys, only people with
divergent opinions. But, in the form of the AEI, I think weíve finally
found some old-fashioned bad guys.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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