The news and social media are constantly buzzing about the so-called climate change conspiracy. By climate change, I mean anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, because no one can doubt that the climate is actually changing. Glaciers are melting around the world, the Arctic Sea no longer freezes over, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are retreating and thinning, the permafrost is melting. These facts cannot be denied. But deniers claim that humans are not causing it; that it is part of the normal climate fluctuations the Earth is constantly undergoing.
Well, that's a valid argument. If we are not causing it, all we can do is to try to prepare for the effects - sea level rise, desertification of the Midwest, crop failures, more extreme storms, mass migrations of dispossessed people, etc. The future is a daunting challenge, but we will face it because we have no choice - nature is foisting these changes upon us.
But if it is true that this devastation is directly the result of our policies, are we not morally required to change those policies, in order to mitigate damage and reduce suffering? So determining whether or not we are causing climate change is of primary importance.
How can we do that? No amount of debate will resolve the issue; no political pundits pontificating will reach the truth. The only solution is to put people to investigating the issue. This is the role of science - come up with a theory, devise tests and experiments and measurements that will unequivocally prove or disprove those theories, and publish the results openly to the whole world. Then other scientists read those papers, repeat the tests or measurements, and confirm or deny the results. If several of these peers show that the initial paper was incorrect, the originating scientist must either prove that the reviews were inaccurate or admit his error and retract his results. No scientist can publish a paper that is incorrect or merely his opinions or beliefs, because he knows he will be challenged. Anyone can make a mistake, but science is self-correcting. A scientist who willfully or repeatedly publishes false information is shamed and driven from the ranks. Charlatans and liars cannot survive.
Science has been applied to the question of climate change. Because it has such an immense impact on our lives, every country in the world put its best scientists to studying the problem. These scientists are from nearly every country on Earth, of every political party, economic system, and religion. They studied all the evidence of current climate change. They studied evidence of previous climate changes in ice cores, lake sediments, and ocean bottom sediments. They analyzed the gases that are causing the rises in temperature to determine their origins. They searched for other possible causes of global warming, such as fluctuations in the sun's output, volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean currents, and everything else anyone could propose.
The results are in. 97% of the tens of thousands of scientists, including hundreds of Nobel laureates, who studied the problem say that the climate is changing, that it is changing faster than at any time since humans have lived on the planet, and that it corresponds exactly with the increase in carbon dioxide emissions due to our burning of fossil fuels. Yes, humans are definitely causing the global climate to change. We need to get off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy as quickly as possible. But that just makes sense, because by definition fossil fuels are not renewable. Their quantity is finite and we can foresee that we will be running out of them within this century. We'll need all those complex hydrocarbons for making plastics and medicines and fertilizers anyway, and it's just short-sighted to burn them for fuel. It's like castaways setting their lifeboat on fire to keep warm.
So that should be the end of the story, right? We need to convert our power plants and vehicles to use one of the several proven sources of renewable energy and the problem is solved. In the meantime, we need to capture the greenhouse gasses being emitted and sequester them. Science has saved us again. We have identified an immense threat to our well-being, determined what's causing it, and identified a solution. But science has also found that the problem is accelerating, and that many of the effects of climate change cause others. Melting permafrost, for instance, releases methane, an even more effective greenhouse gas. Melting ice caps reflect less solar energy into space, further warming the planet. Carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean makes the water more acidic, killing corals and disrupting the basis of food chains on which half the Earth's human population depends. So the longer we wait to start correcting the problem, the worse it becomes. Moreover, science warns us that the Earth is approaching a tipping point beyond which reducing our burning of fossil fuels will not save us from ecological collapse. And whether or not you consider yourself an environmentalist or care about spotted owls or desert pupfish, ecological collapse means the end of our food supply. This is not a liberal or conservative issue or a philosophical debate. It threatens our survival as a species. Yes, the Earth is resilient and has survived thousands of shocks much greater than this one, but most species did not survive those shocks. No, it is not the end of the world. But it could well be the end of our species.
But we have known the results of the science for decades now. Competing conclusions (the ice is actually increasing in Antarctica, this is just a normal fluctuation like others we've survived, the sun's energy output has increased, etc.) have all been conclusively disproven. And still very little is being done and efforts to control greenhouse gases have consistently met with stiff resistance, even ridicule, from the public, industry, and some government officials.
Why? Because fossil fuels have been essential to our economy for nearly two centuries. Oil and gas have fueled our industries, technological development, and travel to the extent that they are embedded in our culture. It is hard for most people to imagine an advanced technological society like our own that is not powered by fossil fuel. Also, an immense infrastructure has grown up around them. Millions of people earn their livings in the fuel industry or in dependent industries like transportation and automobile manufacture. Those companies and their boards and employees see any effort to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels as an assault on their well-being. The energy industry has poured billions into campaigns of misinformation, asserting that the case for anthropogenic climate change has not been proven, establishing and funding their own "institutions" to publish unsubstantiated claims against climate change, and poured more billions into getting candidates elected who will consistently vote against any measures to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. They push for decisions like Citizens United, which posits that corporations are people and are free to influence elections and government policies in secret, an idea antithetical to everything Americans hold dear.
So I understand why oil companies are resisting the change. The conversion to renewable energy will be immensely expensive and disruptive to their status quo. I can understand why employees of oil companies might feel threatened by the change as well, even though renewable energy is one of the greatest sources of new jobs throughout the world. I understand why some car companies are slow to develop cost-effective electric cars.
But why are so many citizens still convinced that the threat isn't real? The social media are a-buzz with conspiracy theories - that the whole issue is a liberal plot. For one thing, I don't understand why they perceive it as a liberal-conservative issue. Don't we all want to keep a healthy productive world for ourselves and our children? Do liberals care more about the planet than conservatives? I don't get it.
I repeat: all the science comes down on the same side - our activities have already caused the global temperature to rise two degrees Centigrade. The rise is increasing, and if it goes up another two degrees, there will be massive disruptions - extinctions, desertification of farmlands, droughts, much more extreme storms, etc. No one wants this to happen. So if all the facts point to just one conclusion, why do so many people refuse to accept it?
First, they follow media that are paid for by the energy companies - Fox News has been proven to be lying in 80% of what they report. The titans of the energy industry also control many media outlets and their money pays for advertising and news reports casting doubt and ridicule on the science. They cherry-pick news items and contend that debates among scientists about the results of climate change mean that the issue is still not decided. No doubt many right-wing people simply fear and distrust government interference. But regulations would not be necessary if the oil companies acknowledged the problem and got behind the solution. But they have not and there is no sign they are willing to. So, like it or not, only government regulations can address the problem.
So if all the world's scientists and all the facts are on one side of the argument, what is on the other? What do climate deniers give as evidence for their case? That it's a liberal conspiracy. Let's look at this idea.
First, I see no motive for it. Why would anyone make up such a frightening idea and try to foist it on the world? As a way of justifying more regulations? But what do liberals gain by imposing limits on carbon emissions? Where is the political or economic gain?
Second, how would they go about this conspiracy? Supposedly agents of the liberal conspiracy would have to secretly approach the leading scientists and either convince, threaten, or bribe them to start falsifying their results. Many scientists are not liberals - in fact, many are conservative Evangelical Christians or devout Muslims. Science is a method, not a religion or political party. But somehow these agents convince every scientist in the world to go along with their nefarious plot. Even though there is no evidence of climate change, they would have to make up facts and figures to indicate that there was. The scientists would have to concoct false data, with convincing graphs and data sets. They would have to force everyone in their labs to support it without question although they knew it was false. And then they would publish their paper, knowing that if even one other scientist tried to reproduce the data (as they are required to do), they would be shown to be frauds and lose their positions, their reputation, and their funding.
When the false papers were published, other scientists would review them and try to reproduce the results. Many of those reviewing scientists would be competitors of the original authors, and would love nothing more than to prove their rival mistaken. But everyone would suppress this urge to advance their careers. They would instead instruct their teams to repeat the experiments, then falsify their own results in exactly the same way. They would then publish their own papers, exonerating their rivals and putting their own careers at risk.
This plot couldn't succeed if even one scientist broke ranks. If there were even one honest, conscientious scientist in the world; if even one paper were published pointing out the false data, the whole thing would collapse. The liberal agents must have secretly visited every lab in the world, met with every employee, and convinced them to further the plot, all before the first false paper was published. They got the Russians and the North Koreans and the Muslim scientists in Iran to further the secret agenda of the Democratic Party. And everyone is so great about keeping such a secret. Not one has broken the biggest story of the century. Not one scientifically-trained reporter or journal reviewer has noticed the false data in all the hundreds of thousands of papers published; not one investigative reporter has broken the story; not one climate scientist has been forced to retire in disgrace; not one of the scientists has ever gotten drunk and blabbed the story. No disgruntled grad student has gone to the newspapers. Those liberal conspirators sure have done a great job.
So who is telling the truth - the tens of thousands of scientists who investigated the facts and who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by lying; or a dozen oil companies who could lose a lot of money if the world knew they were killing the human race?
