My West | Column by Todd Wilkinson

Flannery’s Doomsday Prediction Like Rapture, Only Real

By , 3-31-06

Why is it that so many people, who can recite chapter and verse from the Bible, who embrace the Kingdom Come apocalypse theory of "the Rapture" with glee, and who appear to be the most vehement supporters of the Bush Administration also happen to rank among the most vocal denialists that climate change, hastened by humans, is real?

One answer is that neither religious fanaticism nor those who believe that environmental protection should not require any personal lifestyle modification, put much credence in science.

A dozen years ago when I first began research for my book Science Under Siege: The Politicians' War on Nature and Truth, one of the first people I called was Dr. James Hansen.

Jim, at the time, was one of our country's leading climatologists. Indeed, he still is, and he works today for NASA, commanding respect around the world.
But back in the early 1990s Hansen was also a high-profile whistleblower who was harassed for speaking candidly about the link between rising temperatures on earth and the human burning of fossil fuels.

The oil and gas industry and lobbyists representing coal-fired power plants and auto manufacturers targeted Hansen. Together, they enlisted hired-gun scientists to counter what Hansen was saying and ultimately they attempted to discredit him and his work.

The same technique had been used twenty years earlier by pesticide companies to destroy Rachel Carson. It was also being employed, if you recall, to undermine the credibility of former tobacco industry scientist Jeffrey Wigand who said there was compelling evidence, namely dead and dying people, to suggest smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer.

The Sunday night news program 60 Minutes bravely profiled Wigand; Hollywood made a movie about him starring Russell Crowe; Americans who heard Wigand's story cheered for him, as we enjoy rallying behind all underdogs; yes, together with Erin Brockovich and the Enron insiders who went public with their accounting adventure tales, whistleblowing temporarily was no longer maligned as the art of meek snitchers.

James Hansen is no less a heroic figure, but this time he derives no satisfaction from being vindicated by empiricism. Over the last decade, he has persevered and his conclusions, corroborated now by hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies, firmly show that strange changes are accelerating in our atmosphere.

During the same amount of time, the credibility of the denialists has only grown thinner; as thin, in fact, as those delicate layers of light-permeable gaseous elements that delineate the difference between life on Earth and the spartaness of Mars.

Every day in the morning newspapers there are headlines chronicling the hottest heat waves and the warmest winters ever recorded, melting icecaps, bigger more violent storms, and huge payouts to clean up the messes of "natural" disasters. It's true, climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon and some locales may actually get cooler as the planet heats up, but never has the onset of an episode like this one raced forward with such increasing speed, experts say, and they have no real notion of how it will play out. The other epic fluctuations in climate predated the arrival of humans.

We living in ecosystems like greater Yellowstone and across the West, who pride ourselves on having a closer and more sensitive connection to nature than most places, should be concerned.

Still, if you're so convinced that climate change is a hoax, like novelist Michael Crichton does, perpetuated by Liberals to beat back civilization, suit yourself. Lambaste the Precautionary Principle when it pertains to protecting the life support systems of the environment yet invoke it when framed within the context of altering, in any way, the status quo of economic reasoning. Listen to Limbaugh, Bjorn Lomborg and reference the late Julian Simon. Continue to insist climate change is a partisan issue when it's not. Pray for the Rapture if you must, but the preponderance of science is not on your side, as noted by Tim Flannery.

I was thinking of Hansen's trials while reading Flannery's new critically-acclaimed work "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing The Climate and What It Means for Life On Earth".

If you think the book of Revelation is frightening as a fascinating late-night page-turner, Flannery lays out every credible study associated with climate change and connects the dots. He weighs what is known against what isn't. He acknowledges the naysayers while not being flippant.

Trying his best to avoid fear mongering, but knowing some will label him a Chicken Little, he says there is a substantial body of evidence suggesting that with the amount of carbon dioxide being sent into the atmosphere by cars, power plants, etc., we could be soon confronting a dangerous tipping point.

If left unaddressed by significant and radical action during the next 10 to 20 years, the "long summer," as Flannery calls it, really the last 10,000 years of climatic calm that has enabled Homo sapiens to thrive thanks to mechanisms regulating the global thermostat, could come to an abrupt end.

As in, go haywire. Take centuries to stabilize through human intervention, if ever. Wreak social and economic havoc. Return human existence to shorter lifespan. Incite more wars fought over finite resources and movements of refugees. Set society back to a medieval age.

Skiers worrying about greenhouse gases dramatically eliminating their beloved shredding opportunities; farmers and ranchers confronting epic drought; tourism purveyors thinking it might possibly affect your motel bookings; biologists fearful that grizzlies might not make it through the bottleneck; investors feeling jittery that they may have to ride out fluctuations in the market. These should be the least of your concerns if what Flannery tells us is looming because his book is not a mere flare sent into the sky warning of "economic impacts" but of repeating a climate-related extinction episode like those already written into the geologic record.

Humans, being a generalist weedy species like coyotes, dandelions, cockroaches, and rats will probably persist but it will be, for all practical purposes, the end of the world as we know it now.

Unlike the rhetoric of the free-marketeers in the current Bush Administration who have continued to pillory experts like Hansen and who insist vaguely that there'll be a technological fix to rescue us in the 11th hour, Flannery is skeptical but hopeful that actions might be taken to slow down the worst of possible effects.

NOTE TO THE FREE-MARKETEERS AND CITERS OF SCRIPTURE: As a Lutheran who has Baptist and Methodist grandparents and who is married to a Catholic wife, I enthusiastically invite you to enlighten me and fellow readers here with the technological fixes you imagine coming. Please provide us with an extensive source list showing that global climate change is an invention of radical environmentalists (passages from either the Old or New Testament may not be used as peer-reviewed documentation). Inform readers how not responding to climate change through regulation of industry and investments in lifestyle modification through such things as an Apollo project for alternative energy is less cost effective than chronically spending billions of public dollars for hurricane disaster relief in the Gulf states and fighting an expensive war, in part, to protect our oil interests in the Middle East. Since you reject the Kyoto Protocol, I would like to see a long list of companies that have voluntarily invested in pollution control mechanisms, and regulate themselves more stringently than current federal codes demand, and net results that provide an alternative that addresses U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in a substantial way.

Debunk Flannery and James Hansen, if you can.

And please, while we are at it, cogently convince us why deferring action on climate change will be good for our offspring and their offspring as you have rationalized, through your own silence, this administration's, and this Congress's, abandonment of fiscal conservatism in favor of an unprecedented, and growing, national debt.

Not all ardent evangelical Christians are so sanguinely receptive to Armageddon. (It should be mentioned that many of us are insulted and angered by the insinutation that we, somehow, are operatives of the Democratic Party). Earlier this year, 86 evangelical leaders wrote a joint letter to President Bush, encouraging him to take action on climate change by working with Congress to mandate the reduction of carbon dioxide. Even the scientific advisor at the Vatican has noted that climate change is a social issue that will impact the world's poor long before it seriously menaces the rich, but who themselves will hardly be insulated behind their fortresses of affluence.

In 2001, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops met and issued a statement on climate change. The USCCB in political terms could otherwise be considered a conservative massing of respected U.S. Catholic clergy (they, for example, have repeatedly represented the Catholic Church's unwavering pro-life stand).

During the same days in the summer of 2001 when the USCCB met and adopted its platform on climate change, Vice President Cheney was holding behind-closed-door meetings with energy company executives who contributed mightily to the Bush-Cheney election. We don't know exactly what was said because the vice president has refused to make public his notes written during those sessions. But we do know what word for word in some cases, Cheney's task force adopted their recommendations for the administration's national energy strategy that opened U.S. public lands to greatly expanded drilling for oil and gas, mining of coal, and streamlining of regulations for coal-fired power plants (all of which are linked to massive amounts of carbon dioxide emissions).

This is not to say that the U.S. economy is not driven by fossil fuels or that adaptive management will be easy. But the policy positions taken by the Bush Administration represented its rejection of crafting a protocol, in concert with other nations, for addressing climate change. Despite claims from Bush and Cheney that the science on climate change was not unanimously clear, this is the conclusion reached by Catholic bishops, who mission to millions of American Catholic parishoners:

"Responsible scientific research is always careful to recognize uncertainty and is modest in its claims. Yet over the past few decades, the evidence of global climate change and the emerging scientific consensus about the human impact on this process have led many governments to reach the conclusion that they need to invest time, money, and political will to address the problem through collective international action.

"The virtue of prudence is paramount in addressing climate change. This virtue is not only a necessary one for individuals in leading morally good lives, but is also vital to the moral health of the larger community. Prudence is intelligence applied to our actions. It allows us to discern what constitutes the common good in a given situation. Prudence requires a deliberate and reflective process that aids in the shaping of the community's conscience. Prudence not only helps us identify the principles at stake in a given issue, but also moves us to adopt courses of action to protect the common good. Prudence is not, as popularly thought, simply a cautious and safe approach to decisions. Rather, it is a thoughtful, deliberate, and reasoned basis for taking or avoiding action to achieve a moral good."

The bishops add (emphasis here made with capitalization of their declaration):

"IN FACING CLIMATE CHANGE, WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW REQUIRES A RESPONSE; IT CANNOT BE EASILY DISMISSED. SIGNIFICANT LEVELS OF SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS -- EVEN IN A SITUATION WITH LESS THAN FULL CERTAINTY, WHERE THE CONSEQUENCES OF NOT ACTING ARE SERIOUS -- JUSTIFIES, INDEED CAN OBLIGATE, OUR TAKING ACTION INTENDED TO AVERT POTENTIAL DANGERS. IN OTHER WORDS, IF ENOUGH EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT THE PRESENT COURSE OF ACTION COULD JEOPARDIZE HUMANKIND'S WELL-BEING, PRUDENCE DICTATES TAKING MITIGATING OR PREVENTATIVE ACTION."

Under a headine titled "The Universal Common Good," the bishops note that "global climate is by its very nature a part of the planetary commons. The earth's atmosphere encompasses all people, creatures, and habitats. The melting of ice sheets and glaciers, the destruction of rain forests, and the pollution of water in one place can have environmental impacts elsewhere."

They then recite, verbatim, the thoughts of the late Pope John Paul II who said: "We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well being of future generations."

The bishops concluded: "Responses to global climate change should reflect our interdependence and common responsibility for the future of our planet. Individual nations must measure their own self-interest against the greater common good and contribute equitably to global solutions."

The Catholic Church may have tormented Galileo Galilei but it has been light years ahead of how this administration and its devotees who subscribe to the Rapture regard the science of climate change. Indeed, average Americans appear to be ahead of the administration, too. In a recent poll conducted by TIME magazine, ABC News and Stanford University, 85 percent of Americans said they believed global warming is probably happening.

Of course, there are some Christian believers in America who do not mind visions of imminent doomsday, whether emanating from atmosphere, nuclear exchange, or insolvency. They see Jesus, poised like a "make-my-day" action hero, strolling forth out of the fog of catastrophe, which is different from the activist religious figure I was taught to revere.

For some, there is a splendid solace in forsaking the notion of humans stewarding a Heaven on Earth. By asserting through their own Biblical interpretation that material and economic self interest are divine pursuits, they deftly rationalize a diminished world that we will want deliverance from.

In eternity, as they see it, there is comfort believing that God hath made no room for environmentalists.

The president, to placate what some call "his base", has made it clear that he does not answer to G. Herbert Walker Bush whose own blue ribbon scientific panel recognized climate change as a legitimate policy issue, but he answers, he says, to a "higher Father" who apparently regards experts like Hansen as intellectual snobs too smart for their own good. The free-marketeers say that "creating wealth" is the answer to all of our human problems. Who would argue with being richer, healthier, and better educated?

Except that turning a blind eye to our own role in climate change as self determined consumers, and proposing to lift many of the world's despairing out of poverty on the backs of gas-guzzling engines, and encouraging U.S.-style resource consumption to take hold in a country like China, brings us closer to the brink faster.

As Flannery notes, the Bush Administration "has made it clear that it wants to hear nothing of climate change from the scientists in their employ" and meanwhile proposes spending billions of dollars rebuilding a city like New Orleans that is certain to get pummeled from climate-change related storms in the years ahead.

Ironically, he adds, there could be a lot of opportunity, more jobs and fortunes made by confronting the challenge of change rather than staving off action. The business community can and must lead the way.

The Weather Makers is a stunning, frightening, chastening read. Like the Rapture, this end of civilization scenario was caused by human sins, the most obvious being our own conceit?

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