Voodoo science

The rejection of Kyoto rests on three legs: Energy-industry interests, the conservative media -- and scientists who contend that global warming doesn't really exist

by Dan Kennedy

The United States' refusal two weeks ago to join with most of world in signing a revised version of the Kyoto Protocol was more than just the latest evidence of George W. Bush's isolationism. It was also the culmination of the hopes and dreams of his most ardent supporters: the energy-industry titans and their lobbyists, who made him the most lavishly financed presidential candidate in history, and whose economic horizons would be narrowed considerably by any serious effort to deal with global warming.

But if that's the main story, the back-story is more complex. Because it's not just a straightforward combination of money, influence, and politics driving the Bush administration's global-warming nonpolicy. The business interests may be paramount, but they're not alone. Supporting them are a small but influential group of scientists, some who deny that human activities are contributing to global warming, others who go so far as to assert that global warming doesn't even exist. Then there are the conservative media, pushing Bush back to the right every time he and his supporters even consider taking a pro-environment stance.

Bush's father, of course, was a well-known squish -- a conservative whose moderate tendencies made him ever suspect in the eyes of the hard right. So when George W. began his own presidential campaign, he was pressured to hew an orthodox line. As far back as July 1999, National Review Online noted approvingly that Bush, on his campaign Web site, had backed off from his earlier greenish musings: "[M]ost conservatives will be pleased to see that Bush's statement that he believes global warming is real has morphed into `Recognizes that global warming must be taken seriously but will require any decisions to be based on sound science and a thorough cost-benefit analysis, opposes Kyoto protocol.' "

Throughout the campaign, Bush stuck with this pro-industry position. So, in a very real sense, the US's failure to act last week was not merely an exercise in international hubris, but the fulfillment of a campaign promise as well.

After entering the White House, though, Bush gave his supporters a momentary reason to worry. Reacting to the unpopularity of his plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and his rejection of Bill Clinton's policy to decrease acceptable levels of arsenic in drinking water, the Bush team decided to go green. Most of its strategy consisted of little more than photo ops. But the conservative press feared that Bush might actually decide to do something about greenhouse gases.

Leading the resulting charge was conservative columnist Robert Novak, who pushed the White House to back off a campaign pledge to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by power plants. In a March 1 column, Novak recounted an interview he had conducted on CNN's Crossfire with Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Whitman. "George Bush was very clear during the course of the campaign that he believes in a multi-pollutant strategy, and that includes CO2," Whitman told Novak. "He has also been very clear that the science is good on global warming." Wrote an outraged Novak: "That would come as a surprise to voters, who heard Republicans upbraid Democratic candidate Gore all through 2000 for swallowing the scientific predicates of global warming."

The Bushies quickly reversed themselves, leaving Whitman hanging out to dry. But Novak kept up the drumbeat throughout March and April, issuing warnings every time a pro-Kyoto environmentalist was seen passing through the White House gates. Monica Lewinsky's comings and goings were never watched as closely.

Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot was singling out Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill for torture. Though O'Neill himself is a former captain of industry -- he was the head of the aluminum company Alcoa, which is not quite the same as being the president of, say, the Sierra Club -- he is sufficiently worried about the possibility that global warming is real to have drafted a three-page memo urging Bush to act on "global climate change." Big mistake. On March 16, Gigot wrote sneeringly that "Mr. O'Neill's memo to the president reveals some of the traits that have made him an early administration weak spot. One is a political tin ear."

The message was received at the White House, where chief political adviser Karl Rove has made a fetish of keeping Bush's conservative base happy. Among those sacrificed: Ian Bowles, a Democrat and a Clinton-administration holdover who had been working with the Bush team on carbon dioxide regulation, and who decided to leave in mid March -- a few weeks earlier than he had planned -- after he came under fire from the right.

Bowles, reached at his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, says there is "no question" in his mind that the columns by Novak and Gigot, and criticism from others on the right, had an effect. "They were getting a lot of pressure from those folks, and they were responding to it," says Bowles, now a senior research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who jokingly refers to "the evil deeds of the Clinton holdovers, of which I was one."

SOME YEARS back, MIT professor William Thilly spoke in Woburn, Massacnusetts about a test he hoped to develop that would show definitively whether a person's DNA had been altered by exposure to industrial pollutants. When he was asked about the possibility of introducing such test results in court (eight families had just come out on the short end of an out-of-court settlement following the trial that was later made famous in A Civil Action), Thilly replied that he would hope to stay off the witness stand. "For every PhD," he explained, "there is an equal and opposite anti-PhD."

The audience laughed, but his point -- that a scientific expert can be found who'll testify to just about anything -- was a valid one. And it is directly relevant to the science of global warming.

The theory behind global warming is fairly well known. According to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, we have been pumping ever-increasing amounts of greenhouse gases (principally carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. These gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere rather than letting it escape into space, caused a one-degree temperature rise during the 20th century, which manifested itself through such evidence as retreating glaciers, thinning Arctic ice, rising sea levels, lengthening growing seasons in some areas, and the earlier arrival of migratory birds. What's more, the worst is yet to come: over the next century, according to the report, computer models show that the average global surface temperature will rise by 2.5 to 10.4 degrees.

For Bush, the report was particularly painful: he had ordered it rather than accept an international report prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead of contradicting the IPCC report and giving Bush a way out, the National Academy essentially ratified it, putting the president on the spot.

But even though many scientists say that consensus on global warming is strong and getting stronger, critics remain. Some of those critics say the National Academy findings themselves support their doubts, claiming that a government-drafted press release used by most journalists papers over the uncertainties contained in the report. And it is a fact that one of the 11 "top climate scientists" who contributed to the report is MIT professor Richard Lindzen, who has outspokenly criticized the view that human-caused global warming is a serious problem.

Global-warming critics cite a varied range of arguments. One well-known naysayer, Sallie Baliunas, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, attributes rising temperatures to changes in the magnetic output of the sun. She and others note that there have been times in the past when temperatures were much warmer than they are today -- such as the period between the years 800 and 1200, when Greenland, or parts of it anyway, were green. The inadequacies of computer modeling are discussed in loving detail. Some skeptics contend that temperatures worldwide actually went down between 1945 and '70, when CO2 emissions were roaring along. There's also an argument that because temperature measurements taken by satellites show no increase in warming, those taken at the surface should be discounted, since they can be affected by such localized factors as urbanization.

Each one of these arguments brings a counterargument, which in turn brings a counter-counterargument. The point is that there are two sides to the debate. And though the consensus opinion clearly lies with those scientists who believe global warming is real, substantially human-made, and dangerous as all hell, the opposition includes some well-credentialed people.

"The firm belief I have is that the science is a long way from settled. It is speculative on both sides of the issue," says Peter Leavitt, a certified consulting meteorologist based in Newton, Massachusetts and the former CEO of Weather Services Corporation. "The whole global-warming issue is being managed by both its proponents and opponents the way a political campaign is being managed." The "obvious logical argument," Leavitt adds, is to continue studying the issue, and to hold off on drastic action until more is known.

AS LEAVITT suggests, the debate over global warming looks, at times, like a political campaign -- and an unusually down-and-dirty one at that. Take the case of S. Fred Singer and Ross Gelbspan. Singer is the president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and a leading global-warming skeptic. Gelbspan is the author of The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle over Earth's Threatened Climate (Addison-Wesley, 1997).

Gelbspan's book is not just about global warming, but also about what he calls the "disinformation" campaign conducted by the global-warming skeptics, who, he charges, receive much of their funding from industry groups. "The science has become so robust that these guys are laughingstocks in the scientific community, but they really do have a strong foothold in the White House," says Gelbspan, who's based in Brookline, Massachusetts. "Singer," he adds, "is the most reckless of these skeptics." Gelbspan cites ExxonMobil's contributions to SEPP, which are openly listed on the oil company's Web site. Gelbspan notes that Singer, in a letter to the Washington Post earlier this year, denied having received any oil-industry money in nearly two decades.

"I despise the man," responds Singer, reached at SEPP's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. "He lies, he says things about me that aren't true. He uses ad hominem attacks." But strangely, when asked for an example, he cites Gelbspan's claim about the ExxonMobil money -- because, he explains, he has not personally received any oil money. "We have received some donations. So what?" Singer demands. "We have never asked for it. There are no strings attached." Singer then uncorks a high hard one of his own: he claims that Gelbspan has falsely claimed to have won a Pulitzer Prize, an accusation that, on close inspection, falls apart. Gelbspan, a retired Boston Globe staffer, was an editor on "Boston: The Race Factor," a series that won the Globe the 1984 Pulitzer for local reporting. The Pulitzer board, which does not officially recognize the contributions of editors, does not name Gelbspan as a recipient. But the Globe has always recognized Gelbspan; both his name and his photo are on the Globe's online list of Pulitzer winners.

Bottom line: there's no reason to think Singer's scientific conclusions are anything other than his honest opinion, regardless of where SEPP gets its money; and Gelbspan, technicalities aside, is a legitimate Pulitzer winner.

If the theories cited by global-warming skeptics such as Singer are uncertain, their effect is anything but. The effect is not necessarily direct; after the National Academy of Sciences report was issued, George Bush himself felt compelled to give a short Rose Garden address in which he acknowledged its findings. "We will act, learn, and act again, adjusting our approaches as science advances and technology evolves," he said. Indirectly, though, the skeptics succeed by sowing doubt, by sapping the will to act, by holding out hope that the enormous sacrifices necessary to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions need not be made at all.

Conservative journalist and author James Glassman, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the host of a Web site called TechCentralStation.com, has become a leading debunker of global warming. He's written in conservative publications such as the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page -- often in collaboration with Sallie Baliunas, who has the scientific credentials he lacks -- contending that the global-warming theorists are wrong, and that they're leading us down a road that will ruin our economy.

When asked what influence he thinks he's had on Bush-administration policy, he replies, "I think it's really hard to tell whether we've had a direct effect. I have no evidence. I'm not plugged in to the administration. I hope we've had a direct effect." As for his own beliefs, he says, "There are huge gaps in the knowledge. I realize that we have to proceed with public-policy decisions before we have 100 percent certainty on anything. But in this case, the only logical public-policy position is to wait until we know more."

By the way, Glassman is the co-author of a book titled Dow 36,000 (Times Books) -- a case for why the Dow Jones Industrial Average will reach 36,000. It's a case that looked stronger in 1999, when the book was published, than it does today. "The thesis of the book is just as sound as it's ever been," Glassman insists. Still, you can't help but think the reality of global warming will be proven long before the Dow hits 36,000.

TO SUSANNE Moser, a climate-change staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the case for human-caused, potentially catastrophic global warming has long been proven. Never mind the computer models and the surface-temperature readings that the skeptics are so fond of citing, she says; consider, instead, the evidence that glaciers are melting, and that plant and animal species are moving from warmer to cooler latitudes, and from lower to higher altitudes. And it is an established fact that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than there has been at any time over the past 450,000 years.

"All these physical and biological reactions don't happen for no reason," she says. "For me it's getting harder and harder to understand why the skeptics maintain that there is no evidence. I can only conclude that they must be driven by some personal desire to influence the debate in a certain way, or are too stubborn to admit they made a mistake."

Bob Reiss, the author of The Coming Storm: Extreme Weather and Our Terrifying Future (Hyperion, September 2001), says, "Scientists who don't believe in global warming have been around since the debate started, and scientists who don't believe in global warming will be around in 50 years."

The potential consequences of global warming are truly terrifying, ranging from the spread of tropical diseases to a new ice age, a counterintuitive possibility that might come to pass if rising temperatures disrupt ocean currents.

Who knows? Maybe the business interests that are driving Bush's environmental policies, and the conservative media and naysaying scientists who provide them with political and intellectual support, will someday be proven right.

But it bears repeating that theirs is a minority view, and that the mainstream scientific consensus is that we need to take drastic action -- the sooner the better.

The skeptics will have much to answer for if it turns out that they're wrong.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.