I recently finished Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth . I wasn’t terribly compelled by its yawn-inducing cover—a flaming ice cube—but my timing in taking on the book couldn’t have been better, and the book itself was superb.
As far as the timing goes, Al Gore had just won a well-deserved Nobel Prize for his work on spreading awareness of climate change. His particular contribution, as everyone now knows, was the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
It has been about a year since the British government released the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, which showed the world that fighting global warming would actually save money—and lives—in the long run.
Flannery, an Australian scientist, reviewed data and studies on climate change to produce the book. His conclusion: we must act soon if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming by the middle of this century.
The book is a compelling read written for the layperson. You do not need any particular knowledge of science to understand the issues.
Flannery helpfully debunks global warming myths, including many of those propagated by our own state senator responsible for the Conejo Valley, Tom McClintock.
This is good reading for anyone looking to combat Republican attacks against global warming science. Most of the these attacks are based on long-discredited arguments, pseudoscience, and studies commissioned by energy companies. As such, Flannery’s well-supported arguments should cause serious readers to think twice about swallowing the GOP’s assertions.
The Republican line, that climate change is a hoax dreamed up by liberals and scientists looking to keep grant money flowing, has led President Bush to strongarm scientists and public servants into watering down their own reports of the effects of climate change.
The Bush administration’s sins against the environment are well documented. Let’s take a look at some of the headlines over the course of his tenure as president.
It all started when Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol: see “Global Warming: U.S. Turns Its Back on Kyoto,” published by CNN in 2001. Bush’s intransigence was a giant step backward. Both the United States and Australia refused to ratify the treaty, which would have required modest cuts in carbon emissions.
The Bush administration argued that these cuts would harm the U.S. economy, an allegation conclusively put to rest by the United Kingdom’s 2006 Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change.
In 2001, “Scientists Warn Bush on Global Warming” appeared on the BBC News website. After the National Academy of Sciences report mentioned in the article was released, the Bush administration had to tone down its very loud, public doubts about climate change.
It did not stop them altogether.
“Bush Disses Global Warming Report: Dismisses His Own Environmental Protection Agency’s Findings,” appeared on www.cbsnews.com on June 4, 2002. The EPA report, said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, “undercuts everything the president has said about global warming since he took office.”
Even the Pentagon spoke truth to power: “Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us” appeared in the Guardian in February 2004.
The Pentagon report, leaked to the press, predicted war and the possibility of a dangerous escalation using nuclear weapons as nations try to defend dwindling food supplies in the face of traumatic climate change.
“The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists,” wrote authors Mark Townsend and Paul Harris.
The president, still apparently disbelieving in the veracity of scientists’ claims about the human causes of global climate change, tried to stifle the constant stream of science unfavorable to his opinions.
In “NASA Scientist Rips Bush on Global Warming,” released by the Associated Press and published on MSNBC.com on October 27, 2004, NASA scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said, “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now.”
What else should Americans expect from a Texas oilman?
The Republican Party Platform of the ill-fated 2004 election trotted out its same old arguments about climate change, but at least acknowledged the problem:
“Republicans are committed to meeting the challenge of long-term global climate change by relying on markets and new technologies to improve energy efficiency. These efforts will help reduce emissions over time while allowing the economy to grow. Our President and our Party strongly oppose the Kyoto Protocol and similar mandatory carbon emissions controls that harm economic growth and destroy American jobs.”
This carefully crafted paragraph is the epitome of Republican prevarication. It seeks to recognize the problem, but scuttle any chances of resolving it.
The problem with this logic, as Flannery points out in his book, is that Bush offers no alternative to Kyoto that will address the urgency of the climate change problem.
It is instructive that the GOP’s website, in its issues page, does not even list global warming or climate change, but does devote a panel to “Faith & Values.”
All of this evidence makes it clear that the president and his party are pursuing the wrong set of values: In its meek offering to public opinion, the GOP touts the president’s advocacy of “coal, nuclear, natural gas, and renewable sources” of energy. Note the first on this list—the biggest polluter of all, and an industry that is a big supporter of the GOP.
Conejo Valley residents are an educated bunch. A good number of us are employed by Amgen or Baxter, biotech firms, or Countrywide, a mortgage broker. Intelligent people staff each company and have driven their success, which persists despite recent setbacks.
These people, despite living in an area called Reagan country—due to the influence of the former president and his library in nearby Simi Valley—are savvy about climate change and will discriminate between the good arguments offered by scientists and bad arguments offered by a few feckless politicians.
Among the latter are Tom McClintock and Tony Strickland. McClintock is our current Republican state senator for District 19 and Strickland is vying for his seat with the eventual Democratic nominee, be it Hannah-Beth Jackson or Jim Dantona.
There is little the average voter with limited time can find out about Strickland’s views on climate change. Except, of course, his voting record as a state assemblyman.
As Jackson points out on her website, Strickland and McClintock “have consistently opposed sensible measures to protect our air, water and wild places.”
Strickland and McClintock “both opposed important measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles (AB 1493, 2002), to recycle toxic electronic wastes (SB 20, 2003), and to increase California’s supply or clean, renewable energy (SB 1078, 2002).”
Given this record, and given the urgency of the problem of climate change, we cannot afford to elect Strickland or anyone like him.
Things have changed in the past few years—the problem has become more urgent and voters are more educated about climate change thanks to Al Gore and others.
Conejo Valley residents will no longer elect climate change deniers.
