MOsanthrope

Posted by Chris on April 6, 2006 at 8:47 am.

While listening to a discussion of corporate America and climate change on Friday morning’s Diane Rehm Show, I was struck by the remarks of panelist Jim Schultz, the vice president of the American Iron and Steel Institute. Schultz seemed well-spoken and level-headed. The gist of his commentary was that while almost everyone now concedes that global warming is a real threat, it may be too late to do anything about it. He effectively summed up three decades of industry spin in a single response:

Roger made the comment just before we broke that he thought I would agree with the fact that there is some temperature increases, that there is some global warming, and I think I would agree with that. I think probably the dilemma for us is, you know, what’s the cause of it? You know, is it something we’re doing, you know, in terms of fossil fuels, or what is it? And then what can we do about it? I mean, what really can we do about it that would be effective? And then if there’s something that we can do about it as a country, or as a globe, will it really make a difference?

 
Translation: For thirty years we’ve engaged in an insidious public relations campaign designed to marginalize studies by leading environmental scientists as partisan “junk science,” and we’re not yet ready to completely give up on that line; however, it now appears — to our great shock and dismay — that the scientists were right! Unfortunately, it’s probably too late to do anything about the problem. So, why bother?

That’s beautiful.

Regrettably, if we don’t soon decide to take this issue seriously, Schultz my be proved right about the last part. There now exists a consensus among leading climate scientists that recent changes in the Earth’s climate are largely the result of human activity. What’s worse, scientists now believe that the rate of global warming is greater than previously thought, and the impact of melting polar ice sheets has been underestimated:

The problem — as scientists suspected but few others appreciated — is that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. That’s just what’s happening now.

Perhaps we might not have approached the environmental point of no return if industry and its accomplices in the media had not engaged in a self-serving propaganda war against science, and if non-scientists in positions of power had not censored leading experts and systematically altered reports by our government’s own scientists.

The evidence that we’re reaching the “Sorry, kids — our bad!” point is now compelling. It’s time to stop the winking and elbow-bumping and get serious about this issue.

Filed under: Politics, Business, U.S., Environment, World