to fall into the water. They say that the risk of jumping grows more frightening by the day. Whom do you trust?
That’s a tricky question because here, on the climate change cliff, some of the lifeguards are just not that qualified, some have forgotten entirely whose interests they are supposed to protect, and some seem quite willing to sacrifice the odd swimmer (or the whole swim team) if they think there is a good profit to be made in the process. That’s what this book is about: lousy lifeguards—people whose lack of training, conflicts of interest, or general disregard have put us all at risk of storming off the cliff like so many apocryphal lemmings.
I’m not saying that all of the lousy lifeguards are evil or ill-intentioned, although some may shake your faith in humanity. Rather, the whole lifeguarding institution seems to be failing, and not necessarily by accident. In the past two decades, and particularly on the issue of climate change, there has been an attack on public trust and a corresponding collapse in the integrity of the public conversation. The great institutions of science and government seem to have lost their credibility, and the watchdogs in media have lost their focus. Here we are, standing on the most dangerous environmental precipice that the human race has ever encountered, and we suddenly have to take a fresh and frightening look at the lifeguards in our midst.
The view is not reassuring. Take, for example, the case of Freeman Dyson. Dyson is an incredibly impressive character, a physicist who many people believe should have been given a Nobel Prize for his early work in quantum field theory. Later in his career he also distinguished himself as a good writer with a talent for simplifying and popularizing science. His 1984 antinuclear analysis, Weapons and Hope, won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson was always a contrarian, but at age eighty-five (he was born on December 15, 1923), he has become fully argumentative. He is, for example, an outspoken skeptic of many aspects of modern climate science, and he has become a popular expert among those who would like to ignore or deny the risks of global warming.
That’s all well and good. It makes sense that skeptics would seek out other skeptics to try to bolster their—perhaps delusional but perhaps sincere—opinions about climate change. It’s also entirely reasonable that Dyson should want to keep up his profile and keep commenting on issues of scientific interest. But it doesn’t explain why, on March 25, 2009, the New York Times Magazine would have presented an eight-thousand-word cover story on Dyson, lauding him as “the Civil Heretic.” Neither does it explain why the Times, certainly one of the most respected sources of journalistic information on the continent, sent a sportswriter (Nicholas Dawidoff) to write the story. No criticism of Dawidoff: he’s a wonderful writer, the author of some particularly excellent baseball books. But it’s reasonable to ask why the Times would choose someone with no expertise, no education, and no background in climate science to interview a man apparently dedicated to undermining public confidence in the majority view about the risks of global warming.
As a lifeguard, the last time Freeman Dyson went down to the bottom of the cliff to check on the rock pile was, well, never. He too has no background in climate science, having done no research whatever—ever—on atmospheric physics or on climate modelling. Even in theoretical physics, his area of expertise, his greatest contributions date to the late 1940s and early 1950s. So again, in a free society Dyson has every right to stand at the top of the cliff and shout, “Jump!” But it’s reasonable to wonder why the New York Times Magazine would give him the soapbox, especially when most of the time the magazine pays relatively little attention to this, the most urgent environmental issue humankind has ever faced.
Here’s another fairly current example: the Globe and Mail, Canada’s answer to the New York Times and arguably the most influential newspaper north of the 49th parallel, carried an opinion piece on April 16, 2009, by Bjørn Lomborg, the famously self-described Skeptical Environmentalist (per the title of his best-selling 2001 book). Under the headline “Forget the Scary Eco-Crunch: This Earth is Enough,” the article sets out to dismiss the concern that humans are currently consuming global resources at a pace that cannot be sustained.
Lomborg begins by criticizing the concept of an ecological footprint, in which scientists try to estimate actual human impact on the environment rather than counting only the land we cover with roads and houses. As Lomborg says, scientists working on behalf of the World Wildlife Foundation have calculated that when you add up all the land affected by human consumption habits—the land where we live, the land used to grow our food, the land that is destroyed by mining or polluted by industries that produce our consumables—“each American uses 9.4 hectares of the globe, each European 4.7 hectares, and those in low-income countries one hectare. Adding it all up, we collectively use 17.5 billion hectares. Unfortunately, there are only 13.4 billion hectares available. So, according to the W WF, we’re already living beyond Earth’s means, using around 30 percent too much.”
Complaining that these calculations oversimplify the situation and don’t factor in potential future changes, Lomborg goes on to say, “ . . . it is clear that areas we use for roads cannot be used for growing food, and that using areas to build our houses takes away from forests. This part of the ecological footprint is a convenient measure of our literal footprint on Earth. Here, we live far inside the available area, using some 60 percent of the world’s available space, and this proportion is likely to drop because the rate at which the Earth’s population is increasing is now slowing, while technological progress continues. So no ecological collapse.”
This logic is impenetrable. Lomborg implies, first of all, that we can disregard the ecological aspect of our footprint because it’s tricky to tally with absolute certainty. Then he says our literal footprint is actually going to get smaller because the population is rising, but at a slightly reduced rate. (Lomborg alone understands how more humans will take up less space.) Then, the skeptical environmentalist reassures us with this: “Due to technology, the individual demand on the planet has already dropped 35 percent over the past half-decade, and the collective requirement will reach its upper limit before 2020 without any overdraft.”
That’s wonderful, or it would be if it could be proven. But if Lomborg has some secret source of information for this contention, he is not sharing it with readers. Instead, he throws these assertions out without attribution or substantiation. He runs to the cliff, grabs the Globe and Mail megaphone, and shouts, “Jump!”
Again, that is his right. But why is Canada’s leading newspaper promoting this as a reliable viewpoint? Lomborg is not a scientist (his Ph.D., in political science, concentrated on game theory), and his previous work has been widely and publicly criticized for its inaccuracy. (See Chapter 10 for more on Lom-borg’s checkered track record.) Why, even under the guise of “opinion,” would a serious newspaper present this unsourced and inexpert argument as worthy of public attention?
It’s not as though the true state of the world’s environment is a mystery—or that it is left unstudied by leading and highly qualified scientists. For example, a collection of 1,360 such experts completed the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005. Those scientists, all leaders in their fields, concluded that, “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.”
“Substantial and largely irreversible.” That sounds more dramatic than Lomborg’s reassuring promise of “no ecological collapse.” The whole Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report suggests very specifically that humankind is destroying the environment at a frightening pace. We are burning down forests, trashing the ocean, and changing global climate in a way that is making it extremely difficult for other species to survive—substantial and irreversible. In a way, we have to hope that Lomborg is right: we have to hope that this Earth is enough—and it may be, especially if humans pay attention to the warning signs and start behaving differently. But Lomborg
