Propagandizing Nature

The right wing doesn’t know how to cool it.

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
3/13/05
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/S&E/propaganda.htm

The news from the high latitudes continues to be unrelievedly grim. Today, the Observer (the Sunday edition of the Guardian) reported on a new study which showed carbon dioxide levels rising at between 2.5 parts per million and 3 parts per million per year at a station in northern Norway. That is yet another substantial increase in the rate of increase, and worldwide, levels are at about 380 parts per million. Over the previous 800,000 years, it has never exceeded 280 parts per million.

According to the article, 500 parts per million is considered a (somewhat arbitrary) “tipping point,” at which time climate change becomes irreversible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we have 40 years to mull over our options.

The article states, “Scientists and campaigners are desperate for politicians to reach agreements that will prevent the 500 ppm 'tipping point' being breached in the next half-century. These new data suggest they may have a far shorter period of time in which to act.” Unfortunately, we may not even have that slim hope.

French Climatologist Philippe Rekacewicz ran a series of computer projections based on various scenarios ranging from the Putsch Junta approach (make no serious effort to control CO2 emissions) to somehow eliminating 90% of them in the next five years. The former indicated CO2 levels of about 960 ppm by the end of the century, and the latter showed levels of about 600 ppm. All nine scenarios showed levels exceeding the magic 500 level at a point somewhere between 2050 and 2060.

So global climate change is going to happen. In the north, it’s already happening on a wide scale. The annual period over which the ice cap reaches the shores of Greenland and Canada has been reduced by three weeks a year since 1970, which cuts into the amount of time both native tribes and polar bears have in which to secure food for the summer. As a result, the polar bears are slowly dying off, and the tribes are learning to build boats and fish. (One tribe in Greenland tried hunting walruses from boats, and lost a number of boats and too many hunters before determining that a full grown walrus with a harpoon in his hide had better not be attached to a boat much smaller than a destroyer.)

The Observer article also mentioned that the Greenland ice cap was degrading at a rate much faster than anyone expected. As is the Antarctic ice sheet, which is a surprise, because temperatures there remain far below freezing. What I’m guessing is that the ocean ice shelves surrounding Antarctica have had a damming effect on the katabatic ice flow, the vast glaciers that sweep down from the ice cap to the Antarctic coast, and with the amount of sea ice in rapid decline, the damming effect is lessened, and the ice flow has increased sharply. In the case of both it and Greenland, there is concern that immense areas of icecap could suddenly break off and slide into the ocean at once; with the ice shelf gone, the most immediate effect might be gigantic tsunamis that could dwarf the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

Another cause for concern is that the Gulf Stream has reduced its rate of flow by 30%. This is caused by cold fresh water pouring off Greenland from glacial melt, which diverts the normal warm flow out of the southwest Atlantic. It’s what keeps temperatures in northern Europe above zero in the winter, and without it, it’s unlikely that the British Isles and the Scandinavian Peninsula will be able to support the tens of millions living there now.

A La Niña is forming in the Pacific. While this is hardly unusual (they tend to show up every 7 to 12 years or so, a part of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation pattern in the Pacific) this one looks like it could persist into the fall. Two features of this particular pattern for the United States are severe drought in the Southwest, which is already in severe drought, and increased tropical storm activity in the Gulf and up the Atlantic seaboard. Ah hem.

Oscillations – not just the one that causes El Niño/La Niña, but nearly all periodic and/or seasonal variations that are a normal part of climate patterns – are expected to intensify. Global warming not only means hotter and drier summers, it means more ferocious winter storms. It can mean dust bowls in the American south, glaciers in England. The extent of dislocation is far vaster, of course, and include factors such as how and where diseases spread, along with blights, and crop-destroying pests and fungi. People like to fixate on the slow rise of the oceans, but of far more immediate concern is the shifting climate and the effect it will have on our food supply.

Even as their former allies in the petroleum and automotive industry concede both the reality of global warming and the role their products have played in it, the ideological right clings desperately to the fantasy that it’s all just a liberal plot, and it will go away just as soon as liberals are eliminated.

The far right Australian Broadcasting Company, for example, dismissed the recent reports of a growing La Niña as “premature,” claim it was “six months out of phase.” Just what it was six months out of phase with the Murdoch media conglomerate didn’t make clear, but it would go away.

It -could-, of course. Sometimes these oscillations just peter out. Nobody knows why. But we aren’t so lucky with global climate change.

Bill Steigerwald, of the Richard Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, decided that global warming was all just a liberal plot. As proof of this, he noted that the Washington Post interviewed “climatologist” George Taylor, and that the piece noted he wrote articles for the Petroleum industry funded TCSDaily.com website. Steigerwald huffed, “Funny. No one else in The Post's article who gets government money had his credibility smeared. Just the guy who wasn't a global-warming true believer.” Actually, everyone else in the article had affiliations and related activities mentioned. Only Taylor’s was considered a “smear.”

Actually, the Post was kind to Taylor, failing to mention that he was Chief Executive Officer of the George C. Marshall Institute (“Science for Better Public Policy,” a slogan that right away tells you that this is an outfit that wants its science to meet its criteria for proper “public policy”), a right-wing think tank that has spent years trying to debunk global warming.

Only the monied elite, and the right wing crackpots who slave for them, push the notion there is no global warming, no looming crisis.

It isn’t just disgraceful. It’s bizarre. The very people funding this idiotic and suicidal mission to propagandize the mounting crisis of global warming away are the ones who have the most to lose from their actions.