Climate change was a scientific and bipartisan issue when it first came to public attention, in James Hansen's testimony about it to Congress in 1988. But then, as described
here, it was made into a political issue.
Nathaniel Rich wrote:After Hansen's hearing, there are these high-level conversations at the American Petroleum Institute and at Exxon about, essentially, what do we do about this? It seems clear that regulation is coming, George Bush is talking about it, and so on. And they reach the same conclusions, Exxon and API. They say, we need to be an active participant in any kind of policy discussion; we need to burnish our credentials as scientific experts on the subject, so we have credibility in it; we need to make sure that the policy doesn't extend beyond what science says; emphasize uncertainty in the science where it exists—that would become crucial later on—and perhaps most important, don't accept any policy that would hurt the bottom line. That's the beginning of it.
And then, as almost an afterthought at the time, API through its press office, which is coordinating the press for this industry group, Global Climate Coalition, starts to reach out to a couple of scientists who are friendly with the industry who have expressed some doubt about either the ozone or CO2, and they start encouraging them to speak to the press. Sometimes that encouragement takes the form of payouts — the head of the API program told me they gave $2,000 to a scientist whenever he wrote an op-ed for a national publication.
And that is almost an afterthought at the time, it's pretty low on the totem pole of what they're doing. They're also meeting with congressmen and so on. But it pays enormous dividends, because all of a sudden, national news publications start quoting these scientists — and it's really a handful of people, four or five people — over and over again. And an issue that to this point has been a story about fear of what's going to happen all of a sudden has two sides. And of course that's like catnip for journalists, and all of a sudden you have these pieces that start to appear that say, maybe there's not scientific consensus about this problem.
It starts almost tentatively, it starts with saying, well, it's not as certain as people say it is, as James Hansen says it is, there's problems with the climate models, the computer models, that Hansen uses. And then it goes into, we really don't know what the regional effects will be. And it grows and grows. It's almost like they're encouraged by their success and they become more and more brazen.
And then ultimately you get, after a number of years, into the '90s, you get into this bizarro universe where all of a sudden they're questioning the basic fundamental science itself, and of course that science goes back not just to 1979 but to the late 19th century, about what's the effect of pumping a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere and what warming will that cause.
And so we've entered this weird funhouse realm where now, if you jump ahead to the present day, you have a political party, the only major political party in the world that endorses a position that's essentially to the right, even, of what the industry now says in their public statements. Exxon publicly today doesn't deny climate change, but you have a party that does. And so I think it's something that future historians will spend a lot of time piecing out, is how this little lie grew into a big lie and overwhelmed our politics.
The denial movement can cherry-pick specific predictions by specific scientists that haven't panned out, but over the past 35 years, the evidence and the scientific consensus about the overall trend have only gotten stronger. The climate is destabilizing because of the increased heat trapped by the additional carbon in the atmosphere, and it will not re-stabilize until humans stop digging hundreds of billions of tons of carbon out of the ground and setting them on fire.
But when one political faction is committed to lying about a problem, it becomes a point of political dispute, and then people can dismiss it by saying "It's politicized!"