The church of global warming: Jane S. Shaw is hot on the trail of environmental piety

ALEXANDER COCKBURN--always the contrarian--is in hot water again, this time over global warming. Cockburn had the temerity to suggest that global warming is not caused by human activity. Adding fuel to the fire, the iconoclastic New York Press and Nation columnist mischievously opined that in some quarters belief in global warming is "a matter of theological conviction."

Although Cockburn has impeccable environmentalist credentials--he's eager to save the redwoods--he was anathematized as "seriously warped" for holding such heretical notions. Says Cockburn: "Dispute the thesis and they want to burn you at the stake."

Nobody, not even those who drive SUVs, wants to swelter to death on an overheated planet. Still, one wonders: Why did sparks fly over Cockburn's relatively tepid remarks? Was the gadfly columnist hot on the trail of some uncomfortable truth?

A lot of people may not recall that only thirty years ago, scientists were worried about global cooling, not warming. Writing in Science, two scientists suggested that increasing dust in the atmosphere could cool temperatures by 3.5[degrees] C. "If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age," they said. One of those authors, Stephen H. Schneider, promoted "massive, worldwide actions to hedge against that threat."

But those who foresaw a new ice age were forced to chill out. What we really have to fear, it turns out, is global warming. Today Stephen H. Schneider is foremost among those who have warmed to the idea and are urging a massive, worldwide effort to stave off global warming's lethal effects.

Now, it is true that most scientists acknowledge an increase in average temperatures over the past century and expect at least a slight increase in the future. But whether this is going to cause significant harm is simply not known. MIT's Richard Lindzen, a highly respected scientist as well as a Democrat, points out that the whole theory of significant warming depends on feedback effects, especially how water vapor responds to slight temperature increases. Few of those feedback effects are understood.

Despite being far from certain, global warming has attained the status of a religious certainty. The idea that the world is going to shrivel with droughts, suffer floods and hurricanes, and drown in rising sea levels is accepted hook, line, and sinker. It has become a litmus test for environmental sincerity, a badge of concern about protecting the environment. If you interpret science in such a way that you think we must do something drastic immediately, then you are okay. If you feel we need to accumulate more scientific knowledge, you are part of the vast right-wing conspiracy--or perhaps simply ill-educated, selfish, or just plain stupid.

Since most journalists want to be accepted for their enlightened opinions, those who want to be objective about the issue don't really know what to say. Take Gregg Easterbrook, who has written and spoken on the issue of global warming. A writer for establishment publications, Easterbrook long ago recognized that global warming will not be Armageddon. "The chances of runaway global warming are extremely small," he wrote in 1993, and he seems to maintain that skepticism today. He wrote in the July 23, 2001, issue of the New Republic, "Increasingly complex scientific formulas have widened, not shrunk, the range of uncertainty in computer-generated climate models; over the last decade the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has both raised and lowered its 'best estimate' of how much the world may warm.

DESPITE BEING AGNOSTIC on the perils of global warming, Easterbrook thinks we must do something. He believes that by introducing a carbon-trading project and regulating methane emissions, President Bush could become "the world's greenhouse action hero"--and, according to Easterbrook, he ought to try it.

My theory is that global warming fills an important vacuum for those environmental activists who tend to be control freaks--modern Puritans. They want to take charge of every aspect of our lives from the cars we buy to the food we eat. Charles Rubin, a political science professor at Duquesne University, has sardonically suggested that instead of the word "environmentalism" we should substitute "everythingism." Since everything is "tied together in a fragile web of life, there is no event to which it is not possible to attach global significance," he explains. Thus "any aspect of human behavior might arguably need to be controlled."

But until global warming came along, everythingism was hard to get a handle on. Activists tried, one by one, to give various environmental issues "legs." Excessive population growth was going to destroy the planet, but that faded when it became clear that birth rates were plunging throughout the world. The ozone hole might have filled the void, but--let's face it--it's so arcane that only a few atmospheric chemists really understood it. It's also been a little less hip since the U.S. government signed the Montreal Protocol, which banned production of freon, a chemical blamed for our alleged ozone problems.

Fortunately, global warming, the "mother of all environmental issues," fell into the laps of activists at just the right time. Global warming is so--well--global. As its name implies, it can cover anything and everything. This was what they had been waiting for. Not to be cynical, but global warming also has enormous potential for fundraising.

Of course, the health of the planet and the people who live on it is hardly a frivolous concern. Environmentalists didn't invent their issues out of nothing. Back in the 1960s, when the movement was flexing its muscles, the air was dirty. Rivers and lakes were full of algae. Thanks to Rachel Carson, people were terrified of DDT. With such worries, it was natural (especially in the United States) for voluntary, activist organizations to proliferate. The fact that they chose to pursue federal legislation instead of voluntary actions was not surprising. Conservatives were concerned about the environment, too, but they were equally uncomfortable with the government expansion that various remedies implied.

At the same time, other things were going on, especially among influential intellectuals. A famous essay by a University of California history professor, Lynn White, Jr., became the mantra of many environmentalists. White had argued (in Science magazine, no less) that the Judeo-Christian religion as at fault for what he called the "ecologic crisis" because it places human beings above nature. The religions of Western civilization spur people to view nature as something to be manipulated and exploited.

Thus, a trend toward what as called biocentrism emerged. Epitomizing it was a comment by David Graber in the Los Angeles Times: "Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."

For anyone who looks carefully at biocentrism, it is full of holes. Economist Richard Stroup points our that it is really anthropocentrism at its most extreme. It allows nature to be "red in tooth and claw"; only humans are expected to treat every other species as they would like to be treated. Only humans can do evil. And they do. As Stephanie Mills wrote in 1989, people are "debased human protoplasm."

However off-base this view of mankind may seem, it has become deeply ingrained in activists' thinking. They toss off phrases like Dave Foreman's statement that we are a cancer on nature" or David Quammen's claim that the earth is becoming a "planet of weeds."

Children are taught to disparage humanity. One book for preschoolers, Rainforest, tells how a man on a bulldozer destroys the rain forest and its animal life. Then the rains come and wash the bulldozer off the cliff, killing the man. "The Machine was washed away!" the book concludes. "But the creatures of the rain forest were safe." To make the point clearer, a picture shows the man falling to his death.

College undergraduates get a similar message. In his textbook, Environmental Science, Daniel Chiras blames technology for unleashing "our biological imperialism," and for contributing to "the vast, unsustainable systems that support our lives."

Along with the creeping confusion about the relationship of man and nature is a vague but deep-seated anomie, an emptiness that takes the form of an avowed distaste for material goods, consumerism, and the capitalistic way of life. Many intellectuals long for a warm, communitarian life that is less consumerist and more spiritual (but not religious). The fall of the Soviet Union, for some of these intellectuals, was a disappointing event. Where could they take their idealism?

In an agonized article in the New Yorker, Robert Heilbroner in 1990 sorrowfully analyzed what went wrong with the Soviet economy. He then brightened. He concluded that there may be a place for their idealism after all, because of the "ecological crisis toward which we are moving at a quickening pace." This crisis will "affect all social formations, but none so profoundly as capitalism." With an environmental catastrophe looming, here was a refuge for these dejected souls.

Today, many intellectuals share Heilbroner's hope. Environmentalism has become the home of those who held out for something "better," those who wanted an alternative to the capitalism that has dampened the innate spirituality of humans and put them in the thrall of material goods. Today's environmentalism--which long ago handed over the mundane problems of cleaning up air and water to the bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency--reflects that hostility to capitalism. Global warming has been a godsend for them.

EVEN Newsweek has noticed it. A recent article explains that global warming gives coherence to the "globalization" protest movement. "Because this slow-motion apocalypse can be traced to enormous multinational corporations, who market the fossil fuels that generate carbon dioxide, it is a perfect unifying force for global protest," writes Christopher Dickey.

The typical American doesn't know that 17,000 scientists signed a petition urging that the U. S. government reject the Kyoto Protocol, the international climate treaty, because the science underlying global warming is so hazy.

Instead, we get a scary picture of global warming from places like Time magazine. The cover of an issue last spring pictures the earth as the bright-yellow yolk of an egg frying in a hot skillet. The inside has page after page of disaster scenarios, from melting glaciers to the spread of dengue fever. Time reports that food production could be "thrown into turmoil," with "hundreds of millions of people" having to "migrate out of unlivable regions" because of global warming.

Time writer Michael Lemonick devotes only one sentence to the fact, confirmed by hundreds of studies, that atmospheric carbon dioxide, closely associated with global warming, makes plants grow more profusely, increasing, not reducing, yields from crops, making more food available, not less. Many botanists, including Sylvan Wittwer, a retired professor from Michigan State University, suggest that at least 10 percent of the increase in crop yields around the world in recent decades may stem from the carbon dioxide that has already been added to the atmosphere.

This is the kind of information you can't bring up in polite society. If you do, you'll find yourself joining Alexander Cockburn at the stake. But there is another angle on global warming: What if it is not the fault of mankind's hellish, capitalist activities?

That is just what Sallie Baliunas, senior staff astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggests. Baliunas argues that solar changes are making the earth warmer: "The best scientific evidence says that global warming as a result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be slow and insignificant compared to the natural changes of the climate.

For devotees of the Church of Global Warming this is bad news indeed. It is as if Cotton Mather had suddenly learned that there was no such thing as sin. Bummer.

Jane S. Shaw is a senior associate at PERC--the Center for Free Market Environmentalism--in Bozeman, Montana.

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