"...instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence"

Retreat of Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies, 1919-2005 (photos from different angles, but most of the foreground of the recent picture was covered by ice in 1919)

The quote in the title comes from a column by economist Paul Krugman, and it is well worth a few moments of your time. Briefly, Republicans in Congress held a hearing on climate change and global warming in which they invited a lawyer, an economist and a professor of marketing, and an actual scientist known for being involved in climate skepticism. The professor, Richard Muller of Berkeley, has been working with a study called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which (with some funding from conservative groups including the Koch foundation) was to review and perhaps dispute the findings of global warming studies by NASA and NOAA.

One of the leaders of the skeptics/denialists of global warming, Anthony Watts, was "prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong". Unfortunately for the manufactured doubt/denialist crew, Muller said that the preliminary results of their work finds that there is a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

As Krugman reports, the denialists, including Watts, have predictably not changed their minds. Still, this is huge development; imagine if back in the 1960s and 1970s if a researcher from the tobacco industry had reported that cigarettes did in fact cause cancer. There should not be any argument that global warming is occurring. One needs only to look at what is happening to glacial ice across the planet.

The problem is that if energy companies and car manufacturers and others were to admit the reality of global warming, they would have to take responsibility for their role in producing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They don't want to do that, so they will continue their efforts to muddy an issue that is clear to climate scientists, but is a difficult issue for those uneducated in the earth sciences.

I posted the pictures above just over a year ago in a blog about who accepts the findings of science, and who doesn't.

Accretionary Wedge #24: Our Geological Heroes

Callan Bentley at Mountain Beltway is hosting this month's Accretionary Wedge, with the goal of paying tribute to the extraordinary individuals who helped make our life, our science, and our planet better than they would otherwise have been: our geological heroes.


It took me awhile to consider who that hero would be, because I have had quite a few in my life...I've written about some of them, especially here and here. But given the coincidence of the Wedge and fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, I thought I would talk about one of the more important literary influences that led me to where I am today: a teacher, a geologist, and an unapologetic environmentalist: an advocate for the Earth, not because I love it more than the people that live on it, but because a healthy planetary ecosystem is a better place for people to live.

With that in mind, I offer up my geological hero: Edward Abbey. Anyone my age in the outdoor sciences probably traces their love of the outdoors to his rants in books like Desert Solitaire and the Monkey Wrench Gang, and it might seem odd to consider his screeds to be a celebration of humanity. In fact, one feels he would have preferred a world without humans (from the last chapter of Desert Solitaire):

"In deep stillness, in a somber solemn light, these beings stand, these fins of sandstone hollowed out by time, the juniper trees so shaggy, tough and beautiful, the dead or dying pinyon pines, the little shrubs of rabbitbrush and blackbrush, the dried-up stalks of asters and sunflowers gone to seed, the black-rooted silver-blue sage. How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence; how necessary. I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief - like a whisper of wind - when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.

Grateful for our departure? One more expression of human vanity. The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas - the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things well emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass - already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox.

Yes. Feet on earth. Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all."

A world without people? Maybe. But Abbey wrote his books to all of us, in hopes that his readers would come to understand the Earth in a different way. I grew up in the sixties, when the very idea of limiting our emissions from cars and factories was a laughing matter. Plumes of filth rising from smoke stacks was a sign of financial security. Dumping waste in our rivers was a convenient way to make bad things disappear. Paving over wildlands was a sign of success, of human domination over the land. Earth Day was first seen by many as another amusing hippie protest, all wrapped up in other protests over wars in faraway places.

In 1967, the first picture of the entire Earth was taken from space. In 1968, Edward Abbey published Desert Solitaire. In 1970, the first Earth Day took place. I don't know that Abbey's book was as influential as the other two events, but when I picked up the book for myself in the early 1970's, it provided me a new way to look at the planet, and was one of several events that led me on the path into geology, and even more importantly, into teaching.

We as a people made progress towards a cleaner and safer world in the 1970's, with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA (plus the Wilderness Act of 1964). There was a backlash in the 1980's, as the military-industrial complex caught on to the PR game. We lost many critical years in our fight for a sustainable clean energy future after 2000, but we may find ourselves forced to confront the issue as oil runs short. We appear to have confronted the problem of ozone depletion successfully.

But there are still so many problems. Today, humanity faces a craven political stalling game over global warming by those who stand to lose profits in the energy industry. That global warming is happening is not in doubt. That we have caused it is also not in doubt. Finding solutions will be difficult, especially in the face of a well-funded manufactured doubt "controversy". We face an appalling problem of soil erosion and loss. The agricultural soil base of our food supply was greatest some 10,000 years ago, and we have been losing it ever since. The vast increase in production of the last century has come from an intense application of energy and chemicals that will soon be in short supply.

The Earth is an impassive mother. She doesn't exactly care if we survive or not, and 99% of all the species that ever emerged on our planet are extinct, for many different reasons. We humans are apparently the first species ever to be aware of that fact. What choices will we make with that knowledge?

Today's picture is moonset under Landscape Arch, the largest span (290 feet) in Arches National Park, and the either the largest or second largest in the world.

Climate Change, Global Warming and the Deniers

In a week following a fracas on our campus with a climate change denier on our faculty, and in light of new polls showing growing doubt among Americans about the existence and cause of global warming, it becomes clearer than ever the need for scientists to be more proactive about showing how the sciences and the search for knowledge work. The lay public also needs to understand the many ways in which public opinion is influenced and manipulated by carefully planned public relations efforts by companies who feel they stand to lose profitability. It has been called "manufactured doubt".

On the former subject, I recommend a short note by four Yale professors describing just where we stand in our understanding of climate change. It provides a good geological perspective to charges that earth's climate has always been changing: it has, but not at the pace we are experiencing today.

From "The Big Picture":

"However, Earth’s history has something to say about climate sensitivity and the role of carbon dioxide, as well.

The reconstruction of Earth’s history reveals a story of slow and rapid climate change and clear evidence for immense variations in temperature. While most discussions in the popular press focus on the past 100 to a few 100,000 years and the precise relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, it is informative to examine the full range of climate variations over millions of years.

Earth was, in fact, ice-free for most of its history. For example, Earth was much warmer and had no significant polar ice between 65 to about 34 million years ago. Fifty-five million years ago, rapid and massive releases of carbon acidified the oceans and warmed Earth’s surface about 5 degrees Celsius above what was already a warm planet. At peak warming, about 50 million years ago, crocodiles roamed the Arctic amongst subtropical flora and fauna, even though the Sun’s intensity was lower than today. Much higher carbon dioxide during this time is revealed by various paleoclimate reconstructions, and subsequent global cooling is shown to have followed carbon dioxide decline.

Earth’s history tells us that the leading driver of climate change is the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Not the only driver, but the leading one. It also reveals that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is possibly much higher than discussed in policy-making circles. About five million years ago, carbon dioxide was as high or only slightly higher than 2009 values, and Earth reached temperatures 4 degrees Celsius warmer than now, with sea levels tens of meters higher. The present-day location of Yale University was underwater.

Many lines of evidence and study tell us about the effects of carbon dioxide release. In the past, large increases in carbon dioxide corresponded to major warming events. It is unwise to think that today’s increase in carbon dioxide will, for some reason, produce a different outcome."

As to the idea of "manufactured doubt", recall the kinds of things that went on with the connection of smoking with cancer in the 1960's, and concerns about the decline of the ozone layer in our upper atmosphere in the 1970's and 1980's. It's happening again with the political battle (not the scientific debate) over the cause of global warming. For a good review of how to politically manufacture doubt about scientific research, check out this article at the Weather Underground:

"The history of the Manufactured Doubt industry provides clear lessons in evaluating the validity of their attacks on the published peer-reviewed climate change science. One should trust that the think tanks and allied "skeptic" bloggers....will give information designed to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there are respected scientists with impressive credentials that these think tanks use to voice their views, but these scientists have given up their objectivity and are now working as lobbyists. I don't like to call them skeptics, because all good scientists should be skeptics. Rather, the think tanks scientists are contrarians, bent on discrediting an accepted body of published scientific research for the benefit of the richest and most powerful corporations in history. Virtually none of the "sound science" they are pushing would ever get published in a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal, and indeed the contrarians are not scientific researchers. They are lobbyists. Many of them seem to believe their tactics are justified, since they are fighting a righteous war against eco-freaks determined to trash the economy."

Of course, don't take my word for it. Do some research yourself, and not just from politically motivated sources. Global warming is clearly already affecting our planet, from massive ice loss from Antarctica, Greenland, and the mountain ranges around the planet, earlier and earlier springs, movement of species to higher latitudes and altitudes, larger and more intense wildfires in places like Australia and the western United States, and crippling droughts.