Robert M. Thorson
HARTFORD COURANT
Last month, I had the displeasure of attending a lecture-slide show titled "Climate Change in the American Mind." My unhappiness came not from its presenter — Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication — but from the tragedy he described.
Based on mountains of data collected since 2006, climate change has played an increasing role in polarizing the federal government. Fossil fuel lobbyists were critical in helping Republicans gain control of the government during the mid-term elections. With increasing belligerence, they are dismantling much of the progress made by the Obama administration. Among voters, this polarization is being driven by a well-funded media campaign financed by King Coal, Big Oil and Fracked Gas.
The success of this disinformation campaign depends on a canyon of ignorance about how the Earth works. This ignorance is being deepened by a national secondary school curriculum that virtually ignores geology for two deeply embedded reasons. The first involves spiritual anxiety on the part of democratically elected school boards regarding the meaning of fossils, the depth of time and rational explanations for what the religiously inclined call "acts of God." The second involves the scientific verity that modern geology is the integration of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics at the global scale. Few teachers feel qualified to teach it beyond a unit of ninth- or 10th-grade earth science. So, few students graduate knowing that the Earth's components garnering the most attention — biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere — are driven by what our rocky planet does internally.
Ideally, said Leiserowitz, everyone in America should have a semester-length course on Earth's climate. Knowing this will never happen, he instead hopes that everyone can learn five key facts about climate change. Each can be expressed by a two-word sentence: "It's real. It's us. It's bad. Scientists agree. There's hope."
With respect to "it's real," geologists have shown that climate change, rather than stability, is the long-term default condition. Knowing that "it's us" requires understanding how the earth carbon budget works as a coherent system. Knowing that "it's bad" requires looking back in time to former conditions reconstructed from the rock record. Knowing that "there's hope" requires nothing more than learning that Earth is not the fragile planet we've been led to imagine. Rather, it's tough and resistant to anything climate change can throw at it. It's humanity that is vulnerable.
The majority of Americans now agree that the climate is changing because their everyday lives are being affected. Examples abound, from ice-sheathed Florida to desiccated California to Buffalo buried in almost a year's worth of snow over three days in November. About half also believe that humans are responsible for the changes they see.
Yet only one-tenth of Americans realize that virtually all scientists have reached close consensus on these two issues of change and causation. The discrepancy between what Americans know from personal experience and what they know from media accounts is due to a deliberate misinformation campaign being amplified by conservative media outlets.
Leiserowitz proved this with an interesting turnaround regarding the public's first thoughts about climate change after being prompted. In 2007, only 7 percent of respondents reported thinking about the "naysayer" position, which either denies or minimizes climate change, or dubs it a left-wing conspiracy. By 2010, this first thought had risen to 26 percent to become the nation's most potent image of the subject, more important than melting ice, broiling soil or stranded polar bears.
Why the sharp turnaround between 2007 and 2010? Many causes. Economic collapse caused by greed. A decline in media coverage on climate change, down to about 0.1 percent of total news. Unusual weather. Political polarization. And most important, the strengthening of a climate denial industry.
The Keystone XL pipeline is a political symbol for the new Congress: a flag to raise on enemy ground. Meanwhile, the more symbolic polar bear is rapidly going extinct, its population having dropped 40 percent along North American shores within the last decade.
How selfish it is for us to believe planet Earth was made for us. It wasn't.
Robert M. Thorson is a professor at the University of Connecticut's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His column appears every other Thursday. He can be reached at profthorson@yahoo.com.
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