The Warm Flat Earth Society

By Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com. Posted December 8, 2003.

Reading or watching the news these days can be frustrating. But there's really only one line of reasoning that brings forth in me the urge to slap somebody.

Like, for instance, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ebell announced to the world last week: "If global warming turns out to be a problem, which I doubt, it won't be solved by making ourselves poorer through energy rationing."

Ebell, and other East Coast pseudo-academic commentators whose fondness for America's fossil fuel consumption is related directly to their paychecks, were then promptly buried under a foot of snow over the weekend. It can't be easy, insisting that the world is flat while having to shovel evidence to the contrary.

As scientists and negotiators from around the world begin their second week in a Milan, Italy U.N. conference on global climate change, one thing is eminently clear: the world is not flat. Major global climate change, triggered by rapidly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, is an established fact. Human activity as the major cause of it is an established fact. Nobody outside corridors of power in Washington, D.C. and Houston has debated any of this for years. As the body of scientific evidence grows, the scope and speed of climatic changes are, if anything, proving far worse than the most alarmist scientific predictions of only a decade ago, affecting not just temperature -- nine of the ten warmest years in recorded human history have come in the last 14 years -- but extremes in atmospheric pressure, a resulting increase in wind speeds, drought, sea level increases, extreme cold, and extremes in precipitation -- like last weekend's unusually heavy and early East Coast snowfall.

As science has scrambled to track all these changes, and to track the havoc that changing climates are already beginning to wreak on what turns out to be an exquisitely balanced natural world, the phrase "global warming" turns out to be a misnomer -- a euphemism, even, for a cluster of trends so catastrophic that without dramatic human counteraction will, in a matter of decades, threaten food and water supplies and much of the natural and technological infrastructure that we humans have developed to support ourselves. Warming is a symptom -- an important one, as the increased CO2 levels trap more solar radiation in our lower atmosphere -- but only one of many impacts. By using a term that defines the problem as solely one of temperature, we get two levels of denial -- oil company Flat Earthers sneering at "junk science" (didn't Copernicus hear that, too?), or comments like those of Russian President-for-Life Vladimir Putin, who joked earlier this year that for his country, warming "might even be good. We'd spend less money on fur coats and other warm things."

Putin is a central figure this week in Milan. He is expected to announce -- after an electoral victory Sunday that gives him firmer control over Russia's Parliament -- whether Russia will ratify the 1997 Kyoto accord. But Russia only has this much leverage because the obstinacy of the United States leaves Russia's ratification necessary for the treaty to take force -- and Russia's decision is a question only because, after five years of publicly backing Kyoto, Putin's government has backtracked in the past year due to fierce anti-Kyoto pressure from the Bush Administration.

Bush policy on climate change has been nothing less than a crime against humanity -- and, for that matter, a crime against many of our biosphere's other inhabitants too. But it's not just Bush that's been the problem; it's all of us humans, especially all of us in consumption-happy America. As Bill McKibben -- one of the earliest authors to spotlight climate change as an urgent issue with 1989's The End of Nature -- noted recently, global warming is being thought of by leaders and ordinary people alike "in the way they think about 'violence on television' or 'growing trade deficits,' as a marginal concern to us, if a concern at all."

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