After decades of delay, the longstanding scientific consensus that man-made pollution is warming the planet is now finally clear to the majority of Americans.
U.S. public opinion has lagged far behind scientific understanding, as well as nearly every other country, in large part due to a concerted campaign created and funded by global corporations to cloud the issue. Now that 76 percent of Americans consider global warming a serious problem, serious action to curb emissions seems a near certainty.
Emissions cuts may not survive the current president’s veto pen, but they are likely to be signed into law by his successor. With California now at the forefront, a growing list of states and municipalities are already preparing for the inevitable. Boulder will join that list if voters pass Initiative 202 on Nov. 7. The rest of Colorado would be well- served to follow.
Initiative 202 would allow Xcel Energy to collect a tax (amounting to about $20 per year for an average Boulder homeowner) to fund the city’s Climate Action Plan. The voluntary system would offer businesses and homeowners an energy audit in an effort to reduce the amount of energy consumed and therefore decrease our carbon emissions.
Temperatures at the Earth’s surface are highly sensitive to the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This fact has been known for 110 years. Natural greenhouse gases warm the Earth’s surface from an otherwise inhospitable temperature below 0 degrees Fahrenheit to a habitable 60 degrees. One need only look to our closest planetary neighbor, Venus, which averages a hellish 850 degrees, to see what happens when greenhouse gases run out of control. To those who understand the physics, the link between rising greenhouse gases and rising temperatures is inescapable.
Add to this the dramatic and accelerating rise in every global temperature indicator, including three independent instrumental networks, retreating sea ice, melting glaciers and permafrost, poleward species migration, earlier spring thaws, and past climate proxies from tree rings and ice cores. Seventy out of 81 glaciers measured by the World Glacier Monitoring Service are shrinking. These great sheets of ice are impervious to short-term temperature fluctuations, and their rapid loss provides clear evidence of warming.
A recent TV ad produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) touts studies showing that “Greenland’s glaciers are growing, not melting; the Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner.” But Curt Davis, lead author of the Antarctic study, has condemned the ad for twisting his research, which only studied a section of the Antarctic ice sheet. In fact, the growth of some ice in the interior of Antarctica and Greenland is a predicted consequence of global warming. A more recent satellite study of the entire Antarctic ice sheet in fact revealed it to be shrinking “significantly.”
The CEI campaign is a good example of the sly tactics of the denial industry, funded by global corporations. As Al Gore points out in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the tactic is borrowed from the tobacco industry, which for decades successfully battled the scientific consensus on the harms of smoking. In fact, it was Big Tobacco that created the global warming denial industry. An Oxford professor uncovered internal documents showing that Phillip Morris created the phony “grassroots” Advancement of Sound Science Coalition in 1993 to cast doubt on the dangers of secondhand smoke. In order to throw a smoke screen over the group’s ties to Big Tobacco, it campaigned on other issues, including global warming. The group received funding from Exxon Mobil, and became one of the major organizations casting doubt on global warming.
Last March, President Bush finally admitted that “the globe is warming.” But he quickly added, “The fundamental debate: Is it man-made or natural?” Among the scientific community, there is no such debate. Republican pollster Frank Luntz developed Bush’s strategy for casting doubt on the science of global warming in 2000. This summer, Luntz admitted that “there is global warming taking place, and that the behavior of humans are affecting the climate.” Bush, meanwhile, is still trying to deny the science.
It may already be too late to save drowning polar bears, but we may be able to avoid untold future catastrophes. States that begin to regulate greenhouse gases now will foster the technologies the world will need for the coming carbon-free economy. Boulder is taking the first step, with its Climate Action Plan. Will Colorado follow suit?
Michael Mills (mills@colorado.edu) is an atmospheric scientist at CU-Boulder and interim director of Boulder Pride.
