Monday, August 17, 1998

Global warming and the heat wave

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN - As Texas endures the slow, agonizing death of our entire agricultural sector by drought, a check of our media and political leaders shows we are also suffering from a bizarre silence on a topic that could be described as "the cause that dare not speak its name."

Local newspapers have responded heroically to the heat wave that has now killed more than 120 Texans, unleashing a torrent of community efforts to help those most in peril, keeping people informed of water shortages and conservation plans, and praising the emergency and medical workers who are saving lives.

The one topic they have not addressed is: Why is this happening?

Of the few articles on the subject, all are limited to the answer "El Nino," which is half right. According to climatologists, this is an El Nino drought: El Nino shifted the jet stream just enough to hold the high that normally sits over the Rockies in the summertime east over Texas, so we are not getting the clouds and cooling that normally give us some relief. But the other half of the answer, global warming, has gotten little or no attention.

The media are doing so poorly on this issue that it's an embarrassment to the profession, and we are being hoist partly by the petard of our infamous "objectivity." We continue to report global warming as though it were a "debate" among scientists. It is not.

What we mistake for a "debate" is actually a public relations campaign by the American Petroleum Institute, which has recruited and funded a few scientists who question the entire phenomenon. They, in turn, are given equal weight by the media, as though they were precisely as objective as the 2,500 scientists who work with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

According to USA Today, when 14 energy industry lobbyists gathered in April to work out the details of a $6 million lobbying plan on global warming, they targeted Congress, the news media, the public and ... schoolchildren. "Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect a barrier against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future," says a memo from the meeting obtained by the National Environmental Trust.

The notion that the IPCC is some group of fear-mongering enviros is easily disproved by study of any of its cautious work or the testimony of its chairman, Robert T. Watson. On the other hand, the API's notorious PR campaign is designed, in the words of its own strategy documents, to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact." And it has been quite successful at doing so. In a Newsweek poll, as reported by Gelbspan, conducted in 1991, 35 percent said it believed global warming was a serious problem; by 1996, the number had dropped to 22 percent.

In addition, a number of conservative think tanks have been churning out dubious studies allegedly proving that doing much of anything about global warming will cost each and every citizen a small fortune and "radically" affect all our lives. These studies have been given solemn coverage by the press.

Perhaps the funniest media blooper so far was to bite on what purported to be a petition sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and signed by "16,000 scientists," all of whom agree that global warming is hooey. It turns out that the institute is a small outfit in Cave Junction, Ore., run by a biochemist who specializes in home schooling and building nuclear shelters. The petition was put on the Internet; anyone who claimed to be a scientist could "sign" and be counted. Enviros soon caught on, and among the 16,000 "scientists," they added, among others, the real name of Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, Dr. B.J. Hunnicut of "MASH," actor Michael J. Fox and a raft of other patently ridiculous names, none of which were checked.

Among the most important developments this year is the formation of a coalition of major companies - including Sun Co., 3M, British Petroleum, Lockheed, Maytag, United Technologies, Boeing, etc. - that not only accept climate change as a serious threat but also believe action is necessary and can be taken without economic damage. Of course, the one industry with the largest stake in all this is insurance, which has taken the problem seriously for years. According to Gelbspan, insurance losses in the 1980s averaged $2 billion a year; in the 1990s, they have been averaging close to $12 billion a year.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Texas has adopted the flat statement: "We oppose the theory of global warming and the Kyoto Agreement." That certainly takes care of that as far as Texas Republicans are concerned.

Creators Syndicate, Inc.