The Collapse of Western Civilization

by Naomi Oreskes

  13. Sarah Collins and Tom Kenworthy, “Energy Industry Fights Chemical Disclosure,” Center for American Progress, April 6, 2010, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/fracking.html; Jad Mouawad, “Estimate Places Natural Gas Reserves 35% Higher,” The New York Times, June 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/business/energy-environment/18gas.html?_r=1.

  14. See http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas.

  15. Emil D. Attanasi and Richard F. Meyer, “Natural Bitumen and Extra-Heavy Oil,” in Survey of Energy Resources, 22nd ed. (London: World Energy Council, 2010), 123–140.

  16. David W. Schindler and John P. Smol, “After Rio, Canada Lost Its Way,” Ottawa Citizen, June 20, 2012, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/Opinion/6814332/story.html.

  17. See http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/08/militarys-plan-for-a-green-future-has-congress-seeing-red/.

  18. “Georgia Power Opposes Senate Solar Power Bill,” The Augusta Chronicle, February 18, 2012, http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2012–02–18/georgia-power-opposes-senate-solar-power-bill.

  19. Arctic Sea Ice Extent, IARC-JAXA Information System (IJIS), accessed October 10, 2013: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm; Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis, National Snow & Ice Data Center, accessed October 10, 2013: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/; Christine Dell’Amore, “Ten Thousand Walruses Gather on Island As Sea Ice Shrinks,” National Geographic, October 2, 2013; William M. Connolley, “Sea ice extent in million square kilometers,” accessed October 10, 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seaice-1870-part-2009.png.

  20. Gerald A. Meehl and Thomas F. Stocker, “Global Climate Projections,” in Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2007—The Physical Science Basis.” February 2, 2007.

  21. Clifford Krauss, “Exxon and Russia’s Oil Company in Deal for Joint Projects,” The New York Times, April 16, 2012.

  22. For statistics on continued coal and oil use in the mid-twentieth century, see U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2011 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy, 2011), 139, Figures 110–111, http://205.254.135.7/forecasts/ieo/.

  23. On twentieth- and twenty-first-century subsidies to fossil fuel production, see http://www.oecd.org/document/57/0,3746,en_2649_37465_45233017_1_1_1_37465,00.html; and John Vidal, “World Bank: Ditch Fossil Fuel Subsidies to Address Climate Change,” The Guardian, September 21, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/21/world-bank-fossil-fuel-subsidies.

  24. “Canada, Out of Kyoto, Must Still Cut Emissions: U.N.,” Reuters, December 13, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/13/us-climate-canada-idUSTRE7BC2BW20111213; Adam Vaughan, “What Does Canada’s Withdrawal from Kyoto Protocol Mean?” The Guardian, December 13, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/13/canada-withdrawal-kyoto-protocol; James Astill and Paul Brown, “Carbon Dioxide Levels Will Double by 2050, Experts Forecast,” The Guardian, April 5, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2001/apr/06/usnews.globalwarming.

  25. Acknowledgments to http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2012/Pages/spiceprojectupdate.aspx.

  26. Paul Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?,” Climatic Change 77 (2006): 211–219, http://www.springerlink.com/content/t1vn75m458373h63/fulltext.pdf. See also Daniel Bodansky, “May We Engineer the Climate?,” Climatic Change 33 (1996): 309–321. Also see http://www.handsoffmotherearth.org/hose-experiment/spice-opposition-letter/.

  27. Andrew Ross and H. Damon Matthews, “Climate Engineering and the Risk of Rapid Climate Change,” Environmental Research Letters 4(4) (2009), http://iopscience.iop.org/1748–9326/4/4/045103/.

  28. Ian Allison, et al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science (Sydney: University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, 2009), esp. 21; Jonathan Adams, “Estimates of Total Carbon Storage in Various Important Reservoirs,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory, http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon2.html.

  29. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120312003232.htm; http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.short.

  30. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (London: The Folio Society, 1997).

  31. A. Hallam and P. B. Wignall, Mass Extinctions and their Aftermath (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), gives the Big 5 as occurring at the end of the Devonian, Ordovician, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods, on the classical Western geological timescale.

  3. Market Failure

  1. Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2011).

  2. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).

  3. For an example of this characteristic, see Justin Gillis, “Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.,” The New York Times, March 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/science/earth/study-rising-sea-levels-a-risk-to-coastal-states.html. Note how Gillis frames the evidence, first stating that “the handful of climate researchers who question the scientific consensus about global warming do not deny that the ocean is rising. But they often assert that the rise is a result of natural climate variability.” He then quotes Myron Ebell, who was not a climate researcher, but an economist and paid employee of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was heavily funded by the carbon-combustion complex and committed to market fundamentalism. See http://cei.org/.

  4. Richard Somerville, The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change (Washington, DC: American Meteorological Society, 2008); Stephen H. Schneider, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth’s Climate (Washington DC: National Geographic Press, 2009); Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, Climate Change: Picturing the Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); Burton Richter, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). For an analysis of scientists’ difficulties in dealing efficaciously with public communication media, see Maxwell T. Boykoff, Who Speaks for the Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  5. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

  6. Scholars note that even nineteenth-century markets were not free. See Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); and Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

  7. Dennis Tao Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961: A Survey and Comparison to Soviet Famines,” Comparative Economic Studies 50 (2008): 1–29.

  8. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards,” November 18, 1991.

  9. Naomi Oreskes, “Science, Technology, and Free Enterprise,” Centaurus 52 (2011): 297–310; and John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

  10. See, for example, David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004).

  11. On twentieth- and twenty-first-century subsidies for fossil fuel production, see http://www.oecd.org/document/57/0,3746,en_2649_37465_45233017_1_1_1_37465,00.html; and John Vidal, “World Bank: Ditch Fossil Fuel Subsidies to Address Climate Change,” The Guardian, September 21, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/21/world-bank-fossil-fuel-subsidies.

  12. Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Text and Documents: The De
finitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87.

  Epilogue

  1. For estimates of populations at or near sea level at the turn of the twenty-first century, see Don Hinrichsen, “The Coastal Population Explosion,” in The Next 25 Years: Global Issues, prepared for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Trends Workshop, 1999, http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/websites/retiredsites/natdia_pdf/3hinrichsen.pdf; and http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/websites/retiredsites/supp_natl_dialogueretired.html.

  Interview with the Authors

  1. See http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/denying-sea-level-rise-how-100-centimeters-divided-state-north-carolina.

  About the Maps Inspiration for the 20-meter sea level rise in our scenario came from the Ohio State glaciologist John H. Mercer, who perceived the possibility of a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in 1968 and published a detailed examination in 1978.* Recent satellite observations suggest Mercer was more right than he knew, and rapid ice loss is occurring in both West Antarctica and Greenland.† The maps drew on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.‡

  * John H. Mercer, “West Antarctic Ice Sheet and CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster,” Nature 271:5643 (1978): 321–25, DOI:10.1038/271321a0.

  † Andrew Shepherd et.al., “A Reconciled Estimate of Ice-Sheet Mass Balance,” Science 338 (2012): 1183, DOI:10.1126/science.1228102.

  ‡ T. G. Farr et al., “The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission,” Rev. Geophysics 45 (2007), RG2004, DOI:10.1029/2005RG000183.

  About the Authors

  Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Her books include The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (1999), Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming (with Erik M. Conway, 2010), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change (forthcoming). Her latest project is Assessing Assessments: A Historical and Philosophical Study of Scientific Assessments for Environmental Policy in the Late 20th Century (with Michael Oppenheimer, Dale Jamieson, Jessica O’Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Keynyn Brysse).

  Erik M. Conway is a historian of science and technology based in Pasadena, California. His publications include Blind Landings: Low-Visibility Operations in American Aviation, 1918–1958 (2006), Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History (2008), and Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming (with Naomi Oreskes, 2010). His next book will be the history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Exploration of Mars (forthcoming).