Global warming: Science politicized

It's scary to think about the war on science, one of the many wars the radical right wing is waging.

Over a month ago, I was visiting my aunt, who lives in the Portland metro area. She had recently bought a copy of An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. I had heard about the book and the movie, and when I saw it sitting on her coffee table, I decided to look through it. It's a very accessible book; it's filled with graphs, pictures, and data that greatly help the reader understand the message. One can learn a lot just by looking through it casually.

I must admit that in the past I hadn't really understood global warming. I knew the basic premise that certain gases, called greenhouse gases, are being pumped into the atmosphere by humans, and as a consequence the world was warming up. But up until recently, I hadn't thought about it much, and when I did, I usually thought about it skeptically. I knew that some argued that the world is not getting any warmer than it has been in recent geological history, and that this warming trend was completely natural and normal. I favored this view because I thought global warming wasn't a certainty among the scientific community.

Browsing through An Inconvenient Truth changed this. To quote page 261:

There is a misconception that the scientific community is in a state of disagreement about whether global warming is real, whether human beings are the principal cause, and whether its consequences are so dangerous as to warrant immediate action. In fact, there is virtually no serious disagreement remaining on any of these central points that make up the consensus view of the world scientific community.

According to Jim Baker, when he was head of NOAA, the scientific agency responsible for most of the measurements related to global warming, "There is a better scientific consensus on this issue than any other...with the possible exception of Newton's Law of Dynamics." Donald Kennedy [editor in chief of Science magazine] summarized this point when he said of the consensus on global warming, "Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science."

I've bolded the last quote, which appears in big, all-capital print across pages 260 and 261, and which best gets the point across that we are as sure of global warming as we are of death and taxes.

Today, while I was thinking about what books I'd like to check out from the library, I thought of An Inconvenient Truth and quickly found the library's only copy. I've been looking through it today, like I had over a month ago. It really makes you think.

The book continues the discussion on the scientific consensus and the popular confusion onto page 262:

A University of California at San Diego scientist, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, published in Science magazine a massive study of every peer-reviewed science journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years. She and her team selected a large random sample of 928 articles representing almost 10% of the total, and carefully analyzed how many of the articles agreed or disagreed with the prevailing consensus view. About a quarter of the articles in the sample dealt with aspects of global warming that did not involve any discussion of the central elements of the consensus. Of the three-quarters that did address these main points, the percentage that disagreed with the consensus? Zero.

Has the disinformation campaign on global warming succeeded?

Well, alongside the study of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that showed 0% in disagreement with the consensus on global warming, another large study was conducted of all the articles on global warming during the previous 14 years in the four newspapers considered by the authors of the study to be the most influential in America: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

They selected a large random sample of almost 18% of the articles. Astonishingly, they found that more than one-half gave equal weight to the consensus view on the one hand, and the scientifically discredited view that human beings play no role in global warming on the other. The authors concluded that American news media had been falsely "giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming."

No wonder people are confused.

Zero percent of the peer-reviewed articles about global warming published in science journals, and 53 percent of the articles in the popular press, were in doubt as to the cause of global warming. No wonder, indeed.

I highly recommend this book, or the movie of the same title, to anyone who wants to understand global warming and what they can do about it. And I highly encourage you, the reader, to consider the potential consequences of the right-as-in-wing's war on science, which ranges from evolution to global warming. Also keep in mind this quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Accepting global warming as fact does not make me a liberal, or a Democrat. It makes me right.

— Athelwulf