by Al Gore
Stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming have always been considered almost completely separate phenomena, but in 2012 scientists discovered that global warming is producing an unexpected and unwelcome threat to the stratospheric ozone layer—this time above highly populated areas in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere.
Just as the extra heat energy absorbed in the tropics is causing the updraft of the Hadley cells to nudge the top of the troposphere higher, the extra heat energy being absorbed in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere is causing more powerful thunderstorms to punch through the top of the troposphere, injecting water vapor into the stratosphere, where it freezes into a new and dangerous concentration of ice crystals—thus creating the conditions for triggering stratospheric ozone loss by providing the surfaces on which the CFCs still in the atmosphere can come into contact with stratospheric ozone and sunlight to destroy the protective ozone layer. This new phenomenon has begun to appear at a time when the stratosphere is also getting colder, in inverse proportion to the warming of the lower atmosphere. Long predicted by climate models, stratospheric cooling is a result of the Earth’s atmosphere attempting to maintain its energy “balance.” Much more work will need to be performed before this troubling surprise is fully understood, but it already illustrates the recklessness of this “planetary experiment” that humanity has under way. We are not only playing with fire, but ice as well. As Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either one, he added, “would suffice.”
THE RISKIEST OF EXPERIMENTS
The idea that we are engaged in an unplanned experiment with the planet was first articulated by Roger Revelle, who was my teacher and mentor on global warming. In 1957, Revelle wrote with his coauthor, Hans Suess, that, “Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment.” They also noted, “The increase of atmospheric CO2 from this cause [combustion of fossil fuels] is at present small but may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially.”
The word “experiment” is worth a little reflection. There are ethical prohibitions against human experimentation that puts lives at risk or seriously damages those who are subjects of the experimentation. Since there are millions of lives put at risk by the “unplanned experiment” that is radically changing the Earth’s atmosphere and threatening the future of human civilization, surely the same ethical principle should apply.
Climate science began more than 150 years ago when the legendary Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide traps heat. The actual mechanism by which this occurs is more complicated than the popular metaphor of a “greenhouse effect”; the bonds holding together the atoms of the CO2 molecule absorb and radiate energy at infrared wavelengths, impeding the flow of energy from the surface outward toward space much like a blanket.
But the consequences are the same—the CO2 in the atmosphere, like the glass in a greenhouse, retains heat that comes in from the sun. Tyndall’s historic finding occurred the same year, 1859, as the drilling of the first oil well by Colonel Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania.
Thirty-seven years later, in 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius cited Tyndall in a landmark paper in which he addressed the following question: “Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gasses in the atmosphere?” Arrhenius performed more than 10,000 calculations by hand in order to arrive at his conclusion that a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would raise global average temperatures by several degrees Celsius.
In the second half of the twentieth century, in the midst of the postwar burst of industrialization, research into global warming picked up considerably. The International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 led to the establishment by Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling of a historic project to begin the long-term systematic measurement of CO2 concentrations in the global atmosphere. The results were astonishing. After only a few years of measurements it became obvious that the concentration was increasing steadily by a significant amount, a result confirmed in the following years by installation of observation stations all over the world.
Because most of the landmass and deciduous vegetation is in the northern hemisphere, the CO2 concentration shows an annual cycle of CO2 intake and outgassing by the terrestrial biosphere, which is so much larger north of the equator than south. As a result, the CO2 concentration in the northern hemisphere goes up in winter (when uptake of CO2 by leaves and plants is low) and down in summer (when the trees and grasses are once again pulling CO2 from the air).
But the observations also showed clearly that the overall concentration of CO2 throughout this yearly seasonal cycle was being shifted steadily upward. After the first seven years of the iconic measurements contained in what is now known as the Keeling Curve, the low point in the annual cycle was already higher than the high point when the measurements began. Fifty-six years later, these measurements still continue every day—from the top of Mauna Loa; at the South Pole; in American Samoa; in Trinidad Head, California; and in Barrow, Alaska. In addition, there are sixty other “distributed cooperative” sets of measurements, including aircraft profiles, ship transects, balloons, and trains. The project is now overseen, by the way, by an outstanding scientist, Ralph Keeling, who happens to be Dave’s son. He is also now monitoring the small but steady reduction in the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere—not a cause for concern in itself, but yet another validation of the underlying climate science, which has long predicted this result, and an effective cross-check on the accuracy of the CO2 measurements.
Ten years after Revelle and Keeling began measuring CO2 in the atmosphere, I had the privilege of becoming Revelle’s student in college and was deeply impressed by the clarity with which he described this phenomenon and the prescience with which he projected what would happen in the future if the exponential increase in fossil fuel combustion and consequent CO2 emissions continued.
A decade after leaving college, I began holding hearings about global warming in Congress, and in 1987–88, I first ran for president in order to focus more attention on the need to solve the climate crisis. In June of 1988, NASA scientist Jim Hansen testified that the evidence of human-caused global warming had become statistically significant in observations of rising global temperatures. Six months later, in December, the United Nations established a global scientific body—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—to provide authoritative summaries of the evidence being found by scientific studies around the world.
Today, a quarter century after the IPCC began its work, the international scientific consensus confirming the dominance of human activities in causing global warming is as strong as any consensus ever formed in science. The threat is real, is linked primarily to human activities, is serious, and requires an urgent response in the form of sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Every national academy of science and every major scientific society in the world supports the consensus view.
In a joint statement in 2009, the national academies of the G8 nations and five other nations declared, “The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.” According to a peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., “97–98 percent of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (anthropogenic climate change) outlined by the IPCC.”
It is also significant that virtually all of the projections made by scientists in recent decades about the effects of global warming have been exceeded by the actual impacts as they later unfolded in the real world. As many have noted, scientists in general and the scientific process in particular are inherently cautious in coming to a conclusion, even, you might say, conservative. Not conservative in the political sense of the word, but conservative in their methodology and approach. This tradition and long-established culture of caution is reinforced
by the peer-review process, which demands convincing proof of any claims that are published. The same culture discourages statements about even seemingly obvious implications that may reflect common sense but cannot be adequately proven to the degree required for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Nevertheless, in spite of this conservative culture, the global scientific community has loudly and publicly warned policymakers that we must act quickly to avert a planetary calamity. Yet even with the mounting toll from climate-related disasters and the obvious warming of the Earth that is now viscerally apparent to almost everyone, there have been very few significant policy changes designed to confront this existential threat.
With the future of human civilization hanging in the balance, both democracy and capitalism are badly failing to serve the deepest interests of humankind. Both are unwieldy and both are in a state of disrepair. But if the flaws in our current version of democracy and capitalism are addressed, if the barnacles of corruption, corporate control, and domination by elites can be scraped away, both of these systems will be invaluable in turning world civilization in the right direction before it is too late. Yet this difficult policy transition will require leadership and political courage that is presently in short supply, particularly in the United States.
In order to understand why so many political leaders are failing to address this existential crisis, it is important to explore the way public perceptions of global warming have been manipulated by global warming deniers, and how the psychology of the issue has made that manipulation easier than it should be. Powerful corporations with an interest in delaying action have lavished money on a cynical and dishonest public campaign to manipulate public opinion by sowing false doubts about the reality of the climate crisis. They are taking advantage of the natural desire that all of us have to seize upon any indication that global warming isn’t real after all and the scientists have somehow made a big mistake.
Many have described the climate crisis as “the issue from hell,” partly because its complexity, scale, and timeframe all make public discussion of the crisis, its causes, and its solutions more difficult. Because its consequences are distributed globally, it masquerades as an abstraction. Because the solutions involve taking a new path into the future, improving long-familiar technologies, and modifying long-standing patterns, it triggers our natural reluctance to change. And because the worst damages stretch into the future, while our attention spans are naturally short, it makes us vulnerable to the illusion that we have plenty of time before we have to start solving it.
“Denial” is a psychological tendency to which all of us are vulnerable. One of the first to explore how this phenomenon works was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who taught, according to the organization she founded, that “Denial can be conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, or the reality of the situation. Denial is a defense mechanism and some people can become locked in this stage.” The modern psychiatric definition of this condition is: “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.”
Certainly the prospect of a catastrophic threat to the future of all global civilization qualifies as “an unpleasant thought.” And the natural tendency for all of us is to hope that the scientific consensus on global warming is not an accurate depiction of the real danger that we face. Those who become locked into this psychological strategy typically respond to the stronger and stronger evidence of global warming with stronger and stronger denunciations of the entire concept, and stronger attacks on those who insist that we must take action.
We have learned a lot about human nature over the last century. We now know, for example, that the “rational person” assumed by Enlightenment thinkers—and the definition of human behavior implicit in the work of Adam Smith and other classical economists, which some now refer to as “Homo economicus”—is really not who we are. Quite to the contrary, we are heirs to the behavioral legacy shaped during our long period of development as a species. Along with our capacity for reason, we are also hardwired to be more attentive and responsive to short-term and visceral factors than longer-term threats that require the use of our capacity for reason.
Two social scientists—Jane Risen at the University of Chicago, and Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkeley—asked two groups of people the same series of questions about global warming, with the only difference being the temperature in each room. Those who responded in a room that was ten degrees warmer gave answers indicating significantly larger support for doing something to counter global warming than the group in the cooler room. The differences showed up among both liberals and conservatives. In a second study, two groups were asked for their opinions about drought, and those given salty pretzels to eat had a markedly different outlook than the group that wasn’t as thirsty.
At a time when the world is undergoing the dramatic changes driven by the factors covered in this book—globalization and the emergence of Earth Inc., the Digital, Internet, and computing revolutions, the Life Sciences and biotechnology revolutions, the historic transformation of the balance of political and economic power in the world, and the commitment to a form of “growth” that ignores human values and threatens to deplete key resources vital to our future—the climate crisis easily gets pushed down the list of political priorities in most nations.
The flawed definition of growth described in Chapter 4 is at the center of the catastrophic miscalculation of the costs and benefits of continuing to rely on carbon-based fuels. The stocks of publicly traded carbon fuel companies, for example, are valued on the basis of many factors, especially the value of the reserves they control. In arriving at the worth of these underground deposits, the companies assume that they will be produced and sold at market rates for burning. Yet any reasonable person familiar with the global scientific consensus on the climate crisis knows that these reserves cannot all be burned. The very idea is insane. Yet none of the environmental consequences of burning them is reflected in their market valuation.
In addition to denial and our misplaced blind reliance on a deeply flawed economic compass, there is another ingrained tendency to which all of us are prone: we want to believe that ultimately all is right with the world, or at least that part of the world in which each of us lives. Social psychologists call this the system justification theory, which holds that everyone wants to think well of themselves, the groups they identify with, and the social order in which they live their lives. Because of the scale of the changes necessary to confront global warming, any proposal to embark on this necessary journey can easily be portrayed as a challenge to the status quo and trigger our tendency to defend it by automatically rejecting any potential alternative to the status quo.
When there is an existential threat that requires quick mass mobilization—the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, for example—the natural reluctance to break out of our comfortable patterns is overridden by a sense of emergency. But most such examples are rooted in the same group conflict scenarios that characterized the long period in which we as human beings developed. There is no precedent (except the ozone hole) for a fast global response to an urgent global threat—especially when the response called for poses a big challenge to business as usual.
President Reagan, when confronting the need for nuclear arms control, expressed the same thought on many occasions, including once in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly: “In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” Some members of my political party ridiculed Reagan’s formulation during his presidency, but I always thought that it embodied an important insight.
THE POLITICS OF DIVISION
We do, of course, face a common threat to all human
ity where the climate crisis is concerned. But it is not from aliens; it is from us. So our capacity to respond by uniting to overcome the threat can be undermined by “antagonisms of the moment.” America’s founders recognized the importance of this ingrained trait in human nature. More than two centuries later scientists tell us that the tendency to form opposing factions is deeply rooted in the history of our species.
As E. O. Wilson recently wrote, “Everyone, no exception, must have a tribe, an alliance with which to jockey for power and territory, to demonize the enemy, to organize rallies and raise flags. And so it has ever been.… Human nature has not changed. Modern groups are psychologically equivalent to the tribes of ancient history. As such, these groups are directly descended from the bands of primitive humans and prehumans.”
That is one of the underlying reasons that the denial of global warming has somehow become a “cultural” issue, in the sense that many who reject the scientific evidence feel a group kinship—almost a “tribal identity”—with others who are also locked into denial. In the U.S., the extreme conservative ideology that has come to dominate the Republican Party is based in part on a mutual commitment to passionately fight against a variety of different reform proposals opposed by members of a disparate coalition.
It could be called the Three Musketeers Principle: all for one and one for all. Those primarily interested in opposing any form of gun regulation agree to support the position of oil and coal companies opposed to any efforts to reduce global warming pollution. Antiabortion activists agree to support large banks in their opposition to new financial regulations. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “So it goes.”