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| Chuck Kutscher is a
principal engineer and manager of the Thermal Systems Group at
the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He is a past ASES
chair and was chair of the SOLAR 2006 conference, which
resulted in the ASES report, “Tackling Climate Change in the
U.S.” He teaches a course at the University of Colorado
entitled “Climate Change Solutions.” The opinions expressed
here are solely those of the author. |
Several years ago, magazines and newspapers began declaring that the
climate change debate is over. But is it really? While most Americans
now apparently believe that our planet is warming, a surprising number
of us believe it is a natural variation. Why is this? And does it
matter?
When I talk to people about climate change, I come away with one
consistent impression: Whether a person believes we are responsible
for warming the planet is strongly correlated to a person’s political
orientation. To say that climate change has been politicized is an
understatement. When it comes to the politicization of scientific
issues, climate change should be in Guinness World Records. It is said
that all of us tend to get our information from sources that reinforce
our points of view. And there is no denying that one end of the media
spectrum touts the message that climate, like the weather, is simply
going through a natural cycle.
TV personalities John Stossel, Glenn Beck, the commentators
and guests on Fox News and others spread this gospel. So do
the Wall Street Journal and many radio talk show hosts. Google “global
warming” or “climate change” and you will find plenty of
environmental-sounding web sites that promote this message. Check the
shelves in your local book store and you will find titles like Global
Warming and Other Eco-Myths. Some people seem to love reading that
global warming is a left-wing hoax aimed at destroying our economy. It
didn’t help that the excellent Oscar-winning film on global warming,
An Inconvenient Truth, was the work of a prominent Democrat.
According to a 68-page report published in 2007 by the Union
of Concerned Scientists (http://ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf
),
Exxon-Mobil distributed $16 million among 43 different
organizations to cast doubt about global warming. By issuing reports
and appearing on numerous talk shows, the "skeptics” have given the
impression that there is another side to the overwhelming evidence for
human caused climate change described in the peer-reviewed scientific
journals. Following the earlier tactics of the tobacco industry, these
people know that most journalists would rather show two sides of a
story than take on the harder job of digging up the truth.
When I attended the 2007 annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the skeptics were nowhere to be found.
Instead the scientists were holding forums on how to convince
Americans that climate change is a true manmade crisis. These
scientists generally don’t like to appear on television and debate the
skeptics. In part, this is due to a concern that by appearing in a
debate they will reinforce the misperception that there is a
scientific debate. I also suspect they fear that in a public forum,
emotional arguments and debating tactics will trump scientific
evidence.
But does it matter that many people believe we are not
responsible for climate change? After all, in spite of the
misinformation, we have seen considerable progress at the state and
local levels with renewable electricity standards, regional carbon
cap-and-trade agreements and efficiency incentives. And with the rapid
melting of ice we are now witnessing at both poles, we clearly can’t
wait to convince everyone before we act. But when we measure our
progress by the only yardstick that matters — atmospheric carbon
dioxide — we are failing miserably. For the past three years, the rate
of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide has exceeded the worst-case
scenario set forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) back in 2000.
Tackling climate change
successfully will
require
a bipartisan effort
Unless people recognize that human greenhouse gas emissions
cause the problem, we can’t fix it. When people ask me
exactly how much of the warming we are responsible for, I tell them
that the latest IPCC report concluded that human activities account
for over 90 percent of climate warming since preindustrial times, with
changes in solar output making up the rest. (See
www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-
faqs.pdf.) And
detailed solar measurements show that for the past 20 years no warming
trend can be attributed to the sun, meaning that in the past two
decades our greenhouse gas emissions have caused all of the warming.
Climate change is a creeping crisis, with no Pearl
Harbor to unite us. Yet successfully tackling it will require a
bipartisan effort. So it is essential that we do a much better job of
clearly communicating to others what the science, not the politics,
tells us. While we mustn’t allow ourselves to get caught up in a false
debate, we should understand the flaws in the skeptic arguments and
know how to respond to them. To that end, I recommend reading “How to
Talk to a Climate Skeptic” at
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics . For those more interested in
scientific details, I highly recommend the website run by climate
scientists, realclimate.org.
We should also understand the underlying reasons why many people
accept the notion that climate change is a hoax. People don’t want to
hear that they need to change their lifestyles, so we need to better
explain that efficiency and renewable energy technologies really do
not require much in the way of compromise. And while conservation has
admittedly fallen out of vogue in recent years, I sense that the
pendulum is finally swinging back to our more traditional American
values that abhor not just wasteful spending but waste of any kind.
Many Americans also fear that reducing carbon emissions will damage
the U.S. economy and require increased government regulations. But
many studies have shown that energy efficiency and renewable energy
will create millions of more jobs than fossil fuel industries can
provide — jobs that can’t be shipped overseas. And if the recent
economic collapse has taught us anything, it is that reasonable
government regulation can play a vital role in the marketplace. We
should also point to the many studies showing that the costs our
children will bear in repairing the worst damage from climate change
will be many times greater than what it will cost us now to prevent
it. We owe it to them to act.
Copyright © 2009 by the American Solar Energy
Society Inc. All rights
http://solartoday.org SOLAR TODAY
January/February 2009
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