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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.

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