February 17, 2006
Fair and Balanced Reporting on Global Warming
By Froma
Harrop
Fair and balanced
reporting doesn't mean simply quoting one expert who says that
global warming is an urgent problem and another who says it's
not. That's ignorant reporting. Nearly every climatologist now
says that global warming is upon us, human activity is at fault
and that unless we do something about it very soon, the devastation
will become unstoppable.
The Bush administration
has no plans to do anything about global warming. Thus, it must
have felt greatly inconvenienced when NASA's top climate expert,
Dr. James E. Hansen, said that we might have only a decade left
to avert disaster. Bush appointees in NASA's public-affairs department
jumped on him, demanding that he clear with them what he says
and to whom.
Let the record note
that Hansen is director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. He is not a servant of the Bush administration, but of
the American people.
And it matters very
much that the public hears his views. Sadly, many in the media
have botched their coverage of global warming, in part because
they've internalized the intimidation. They know that if they
also don't question the evidence, a pile of e-mail charging liberal
bias will land on their heads. That's why reporters often pair
scientific warnings about global warming with skeptical views
of fishy origin.
The result is that
a few mavericks get an inordinate amount of attention. One is
Richard Lindzen, of MIT. Lindzen is pretty much alone in his belief
that water vapor in the atmosphere will balance out the rising
levels of carbon dioxide, the cause of global warming. Lindzen
is an avid contrarian who is known to say things like smoking
does not cause lung cancer.
That he gets so much
press coverage exasperates Wallace Broecker, one of the world's
leading earth scientists. Broecker is famous for identifying the
"great conveyor belt" of ocean currents that influences
climate. He is Newberry professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory and winner of the Vetlesen Prize, regarded as
the Nobel Prize for geology.
"What do you
mean by 'fairness'?" Broecker asks. "That's saying someone
like Ralph Nader should get equal coverage (with major-party candidates).
You don't get that in politics, but in climate you do."
Broecker goes on:
"You should always state that people who take that point
of view are a very small minority. And maybe there's a few percent
chance that Lindzen is right. But in that kind of situation, you
don't take a chance. You don't wait until things heat up."
Broecker has some
surprising views on how to deal with global warming -- surprising
in that, unlike most environmentalists, he does not regard windmills
and fuel-efficient cars as the best solution. (I'll discuss his
ideas in a later column.)
As for James Hansen's
urgent warning, Broecker thinks that he's right on the mark. Hansen
says that global warming has already begun and that if C02 emissions
keep growing at their current rate, the planet will warm by about
5 degrees Fahrenheit before the end of the century.
These changes, he
says, will create a "different planet." The Arctic will
not have sea ice in summer or fall. There will be no more polar
bears in the wild or reindeer on the frozen tundra. And the other
enormous changes will occur in a time frame of centuries, not
millennia.
Hansen notes that
the last time Earth was 5 degrees warmer, about 3 million years
ago, the sea level was 80 feet higher and Florida was underwater.
Disintegration of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica will
start slowly, but once it gets well under way, he says, "it
will become out of our control." At 5-degree warming, "we
can guarantee that it will become out of our control."
The NASA climatologist
has described more attractive scenarios if we take action now.
That's what got him in trouble with the Bush apparatchiks, who
accused him of trying to make policy. Stalin himself couldn't
have designed a more evil system of controls -- where scientists
face retribution for presenting evidence the autocrats don't want
to hear.
Well, thank heavens
Hansen is talking, and journalists should be taking notes. For
all our sake, the media have got to get smart and tough on global
warming -- and they'd better do it fast.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
