Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. …

In other news, birds fly, water wet. Film at 11.

Beautiful retrospective on the future of the past (or is that the past of the future) and how Walt Disney got us to the moon.

(There’s much richer social history out there, but the sequence of images is priceless.)

Happy Earth Day!

Antiquated tech gear sings “Bohemian Rhapsody.” No, really. There’s no joke.

It’s really kind of lovely. There’s the human-tech interface doing its thing. Wow.

Carry on.

Four months ago, greenhouse gasses were simply minding their own business, more or less. Today, they are a threat to human health (via MSNBC.com):

WASHINGTON – Having received White House backing, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Friday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a significant threat to human health and thus will be listed as pollutants under the Clean Air Act — a policy the Bush administration rejected.

“This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement.

The move could allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, but it’s more likely that the Obama administration will use the action to prod Congress to pass regulations around a system to cap and then trade emissions so that they are gradually lowered….

So the question (one of them, anyway) is: Was there a public health threat four months ago?

Politics is an incredibly unweildy way to deal with environmental problems. (And mainstream journalism can be a pretty dicey user’s manual.)

More on this… in my dissertation.

UPDATE: And, in three… two… one…

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) responded with typical couth. “Today’s action by the EPA is the beginning of a regulatory barrage that will destroy jobs, raise energy prices for consumers, and undermine America’s global competitiveness,” Inhofe said. “It’s worth noting that the solution to this ‘glorious mess’ is not for Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which replaces one very bad approach with another. Congress should pass a simple, narrowly-targeted bill that stops EPA in its tracks.”

We need to do some thinking about how we get, process, judge, and share information on the environment. It’s a unifying field, with infinite perturbations, so there is no “solution,” per se. But there is an aesthetic of information flow and cultural adaptiveness that we can work toward. Doctorow suggests MacKay’s new book fits into that model. Take a look:

David JC MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air” may be the best technical book about the environment that I’ve ever read. In fact, if I have any complaint about this book, it’s in how it’s presented, with its austere cover and spartan title, I assumed it would be a somewhat dry look at energy, climate, conservation and so on.

It’s not. This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy….

Using a charming, educational style that teaches how to think about this kind of number, how to estimate with it, and what it means, MacKay explains these concepts beautifully, with accompanying charts that make them vivid and clear, and with exhaustive endnotes that are as interesting as the text they refer to (probably the best use of end-notes I’ve encountered in technical writing — they act like hyperlinks, giving good background on the subjects that the reader wants to find out more about while allowing the main text to move forward without getting bogged down by details).

…

This reminded me of nothing so much as Saul Griffith’s wonderful talk on climate change as an engineering problem. Add up all the energy we can make if we harness every erg, every photon. Subtract all the energy we want to use. Examine this difference and come up with strategies for bringing the two into balance. Once you get this approach, it becomes a lot simpler to figure out what is and isn’t worth doing.

The author of “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” may have simply forgotten that he’s still alive and writing for the New York Times Health section:

Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.

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Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills….

Researchers have already tried to blunt painful memories and addictive urges using existing drugs; blocking PKMzeta could potentially be far more effective.

Yet any such drug, Dr. Hyman and others argue, could be misused to erase or block memories of bad behavior, even of crimes. If traumatic memories are like malicious stalkers, then troubling memories — and a healthy dread of them — form the foundation of a moral conscience….

Do I need to say anything else? I thought not.

Casuistry. I did not know that.