9/11
and Global Warming: Are They Both False Conspiracy Theories?
By
David Ray Griffin
Introduction
September 11, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
Some people have argued that global warming is
a conspiratorial lie, deceiving the public for pernicious reasons.
The most well known of these people is Oklahoma Senator James
Inhofe, who in 2012 published a book entitled
The Greatest
Hoax, which warns
people against “the global warming conspiracy.”
Some members of the
9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed this view. Believing that the
Bush-Cheney administration conspired with others to claim falsely
that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, they say that the
government’s false conspiracy theory about 9/11 should make us
suspicious that other governmental claims may also be conspiracies
to mislead the public.
Suspicions about
governmental conspiracies are not baseless. Claims that the U.S.
government has given a false account of this or that event are,
however, generally rejected by the press. Since the time of The
Warren Commission Report, which did not quiet suspicions that
the assassination of President Kennedy had been an inside job,
beliefs about huge government crimes have been derided by the CIA
and the press as “conspiracy theories” in the pejorative sense of
the term. People who give voice to such beliefs are ridiculed as
“conspiracy theorists,” a label that implies that the conspiracy
claim is obviously false.
So if people, believing
that there is good evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, are aware
of the U.S. government’s involvement in these other conspiracies,
there is no good reason to doubt that there are additional examples
of conspiracies that have been engineered at the highest levels.
In particular, if it is
assumed that 9/11 was indeed an inside job, would this assumption
provide a good basis for suspecting that the theory of global
warming has resulted from a deceitful conspiracy?
The phrase “theory of
global warming” is used here as shorthand for a fourfold
conviction:
-
Increases of the
percentage of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere are raising the planet’s average temperature.
-
The main cause of
these increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases is the burning
of fossil fuels.
-
The global warming
produced by these fossil-fuel emissions is starting to change
the climate.
-
This climate
change, if it continues, will become increasingly destructive.
Because this fourfold
conviction is held by virtually all climate scientists around the
world, the theory of global warming can also be called “the position
of climate science.” Individuals and organizations who dispute
climate science in this sense are referred to as “climate-science
deniers,” “climate-change deniers” or “global-warming deniers.”
Often the term “denialism” is used for the active argument against
climate science, with those engaged in this argument called “denialists.”
I ask the question
about the relevance of 9/11 to climate science not only because many
members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have supported global-warming
denialism, but also because the success of this denialist movement
has been disastrous.
As I have documented
in a 2015 book,
the denialist movement was formed and financed by the
fossil-fuel industry, and the doubt it created has been used to
delay legislation to restrict the use of fossil fuels – a delay that
may result in the destruction of civilization. Climate deniers call
this fear “alarmism.” But there are times when alarm is appropriate
and, my book argues, this is the supreme example.
Believing that it is a
shame that many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have been misled
into supporting self-interested propaganda by the fossil-fuel
industries, I ask whether this movement’s basic conviction - that
the official story about 9/11 is a lie - provides a basis for
accepting climate-science denial.
The transition from the
one to the other is typically made on the basis of two beliefs:
-
Climate scientists’
claims about global warming are analogous to the government’s
claims about 9/11.
-
Just as evidence
proves the falsity of the government’s 9/11 account, evidence
shows the falsity of the idea that the burning of fossil fuels
is threatening civilization by warming the planet.
The first two parts of
this article looks at these two beliefs in order; the third part
argues that we do indeed have a climate emergency.
Part
I: Are 9/11 and Global Warming Analogous?
Because the claims
about global warming are analogous to the government’s false claims
about 9/11, some people believe, these claims are also probably
false. But the Bush-Cheney administration’s claims about 9/11 are
not at all analogous to the widely accepted views about global
warming.
9/11, Global
Warming, and Science
A well-known member of
the 9/11 Truth Movement, who writes under the name “Victronix,”
has argued that
standard beliefs about 9/11 and global warming are not only very
different, but also different in ways that prevent 9/11 beliefs from
providing an analogy to scientists’ belief about global warming. The
idea that global warming is a lie, she pointed out, implies that “the
vast majority of the scientific community is working in collusion to
create a worldwide hoax - including Russia and China and the entire
industrialized world - that a worldwide environmental crisis is
unfolding.” In other words, thousands of scientists from many
countries around the world, including countries that are strongly
opposed to each other, all agreed to tell a huge lie.
By
contrast, she said, 9/11 involved “a single national government (and
collusion by other intelligence and government leaders who also
benefit) with highly limited and controlled science whose evidence
is completely controlled, destroyed or hidden.” This “controlled
science” is very different from the science supporting global
warming belief: “Scientists all over the world can and are
investigating and confirming the same findings over and over.”
Unlike the purported events used to claim that Muslims attacked
America on 9/11, the science of global warming is based on “ongoing
events whose evidence is available to everyone all over the world to
examine simultaneously using the scientific method and simple tools
to measure and analyze.”
Making
this point more succinctly, Australians
Will Grant and Rod Lamberts
wrote: “The idea of an international conspiracy across dozens
of disciplines, hundreds of institutions and thousands of
individuals is honestly laughable.”
So this
is the appropriate analogy: The 9/11 Truth Movement, which is
supported by scientific evidence, is disputed by the U.S.
government, which the 9/11 Truth Movement regards as behind the 9/11
attacks. And the theory of global warming, which is based on
scientific evidence, is disputed by the fossil-fuel industries,
which climate scientists see as primarily responsible for global
warming.
So in
each case, the views of independent scientists are
disputed by huge enterprises, which clearly have
self-interested reasons for challenging the
scientific evidence.
Accordingly, the idea that 9/11 skepticism is similar to global
warming skepticism has the relationship backwards. When it is
claimed that “they” are deceiving the public about global warming,
just as “they” deceived the public about the 9/11 attacks, it is
necessary to determine the identity of the “they.” The best clue to
the likely “they” in each case is to determine who would have
benefitted from deception.
The
9/11 Truth Movement has considerable consensus on the question of
who benefited from the official account of 9/11: The Bush-Cheney
administration (which wanted
Afghanistan’s minerals and
natural gas and also
planned to attack Iraq
for its oil); the biggest U.S. oil companies (the CEOs of which
were covertly members
of Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force); Israel (as
stated
by the 9/11 Commission Report’s executive director,
Philip Zelikow); the U.S. military (the budget of which
went way up);
and the U.S. intelligence agencies (whose budgets
doubled after 9/11).
But who are the “they” with regard to global warming?
Who Benefits from Climate Denial?
Victronix concluded her discussion of global warming by asking, “who
benefits from the claims that human involvement is a hoax?” The
answer to that question is, of course, fossil-fuel companies, which
have spent
hundreds of millions
of dollars to promote denial of climate science.
For
many years, the main promoter of climate-science denialism was
ExxonMobil, the world’s most successful corporation, earning roughly
$40 billion a year and paying its CEO over
$30 million a year.
Besides
giving millions of dollars to scientists, lobbyists, and politicians
to promote climate denial, ExxonMobil gave at least
$25 million since 1998
to support some 100 climate-denying front groups. ExxonMobil thereby
created the impression that climate denial had arisen spontaneously
from scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. According to a
2009
article by Raw Story,
a “group promoting climate skepticism
has extensive ties to Exxon-Mobil” (it was
on a website responding to this article that
Victronix posted her comments).
This
denialist report was released and promoted by the Heartland
Institute, which between 1998 and 2009 had received at least
$676,500 from ExxonMobil.
The lead author of this report was S. Fred Singer, who has had a
notoriously bad scientific career, having previously been proven
wrong in a series of issues in which he contested the scientific
consensus. But his career path has been financially successful.
In
1998, Singer started an organization called the Science and
Environmental Policy Project, in order to begin a book on global
warming, and for which ExxonMobil gave him
$20,000 between 1998 and 2000.
Nevertheless, after
having been wrong time and time again, Singer was asked by the
Heartland Institute to be the lead author of its report,
the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change, which claims that the burning of fossil fuels
is not creating dangerous global warming. Besides whatever
money Singer made for writing this book, he has also served as a
consultant by several other
organizations funded by
ExxonMobil, including Frontiers of Freedom
(which ExxonMobil gave at least $1,272,000) and the National Center
for Policy Analysis (which ExxonMobil gave $615,900).
Two dark money trusts (which promise their
contributors complete anonymity), named Donors Trust and Donors
Capital Fund, between them doled out $118 million to 102 groups,
reported the
Guardian.
The purpose of the money was to help “build a vast network of
thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to
redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly
polarising ‘wedge issue.’" This funding stream, said the
Guardian, “far outstripped the support from more visible
opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the
conservative billionaire Koch brothers.”
However, it is possible
that much of this money actually came from the Kochs: A 2014
Washington Post
story suggested that these two dark money
trusts were simply part of a “Koch-Backed Political Network,” which
raised over $400 million for right-wing political causes in 2012.
Who Would Benefit
from Fabricating Global Warming?
There is a clear
answer, accordingly, to the question of who benefits from climate
denial. But if climate science is a lie, who would benefit from
spreading this lie?
The idea that the
“government” – perhaps the U.S. government, or U.S. and European
governments, or perhaps most of the world’s governments - fabricated
global warming would make this lie parallel to the 9/11 lie, with
each being a government-created lie. But this would make no sense.
Neither the U.S. government nor governments in general have wanted
to reduce their burning of fossil fuels. The climate scientists of
the IPCC – indeed, most climate scientists everywhere - have been
pleading with governments to reduce their fossil-fuel use, but in
almost all countries, the use has continued to rise.
Some people suggest
that the “government” in question is the United Nations. But the
U.N. is not a government and has no power to act apart from the
willingness of the nations to follow its suggestions – or, in the
case of the Security Council, of the nations constituting it. The
U.N. did create the IPCC and supports its work, but it has no power
to act on climate change other than calling meetings and publishing
reports. And the IPCC did not create the idea that emissions from
fossil fuels are causing global warming, which in turn causes
climate change. Rather, the IPCC was formed in response to a growing
consensus among climate scientists about these connections.
So, if there is a
culprit for a global warming hoax, it must be the scientists
themselves. And that is, indeed, what many deniers claim. For
example, a 2007 documentary film, “The
Great Global Warming Swindle,” argued that
“the publicized scientific
consensus is the product of a ‘global warming activist industry’
driven by a desire for research funding.”
Some
climate scientists do indeed apply for grants, and a few of them
actually receive them. But there are five reasons to doubt that the
desire by scientists for funding could explain their published
statements about global warming:
-
Although there is considerable fraud in science – as has been
extensively documented
- scientists who engage in fraud are a small minority. Although
there are many reasons to criticize mainstream science, few
scientists would consciously engage in fraud. Of course,
scientists who work for corporations or government agencies must
sometimes either falsify evidence or lose their jobs. Members of
the 9/11 Truth Movement believe that this was the case with the
scientists at NIST
(the National Institute of Standards and Technology),
which was tasked with writing the reports
about the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. But this was an
example of “controlled science,” which, as Victronix said,
“is very different from the
[peer-reviewed] science supporting global warming.”
-
Even if a few important climate scientists had published false
evidence for global warming, they would not have been able to
persuade most of the rest of the world’s thousands of climate
scientists to support their false claims.
The fact of fraud by individual scientists provides no evidence
that thousands of scientists around the world could be persuaded
to engage in fraud.
-
If
most scientists are primarily motivated by money, they would
have gone into some other line of work. It is true that a few
people, after going into science for noble reasons, have become
devoted to making money to an unseemly
degree. But getting government grants is
seldom a road to riches. As
Grant and Lamberts said:
“Tell the TCCD [Typical Climate Change Denier] to go to
any university car park and count the luxury vehicles parked
near science buildings. They won’t even need all their fingers
to keep track.”
Again,
if there is an analogy between 9/11 and global warming, it is not
between the official 9/11 story and the theory of global warming. It
is between climate science and the 9/11 Truth Community’s position.
Just as large numbers of independent scientists have rejected the
official 9/11 story, most climate scientists reject the idea that
global warming is a hoax.
And
just as a few scientists whose salaries are paid by the U.S.
government have supported the official account of 9/11, Singer,
Michaels, and some other scientists paid by the fossil-fuel industry
have endorsed climate-change denial. In the one case,
independent
science is opposed by Big Government; in the other, independent
science is opposed by Big Carbon. In both cases, the scientific
evidence is overwhelmed by Big Money, whether this be governmental
or fossil-fuel money.
In
other words, said Hill, both the Bush-Cheney administration and the
climate deniers funded by ExxonMobil and the Kochs have foisted a
false, unscientific theory on the world, especially the American
people, for the sake of oil. (To be sure, Hill’s statement would
need to be qualified by the fact that, as mentioned earlier, oil did
not provide the only motive for the 9/11 attacks.)
Part II: Does Scientific Evidence
Disprove Global Warming?
In
addition to suspecting global warming to be a hoax, some members of
the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed the view, promulgated by
climate denialists, that the true facts do not support the global
warming theory. Instead, these denialists argue, the
facts show the
global warming theory to be a fabrication.
One of
those members is Australian chemist Frank Legge. Besides warning
Victronix that she should “be careful about using global warming in
the argument,” because it is “looking pretty shaky from a scientific
point of view,” he in 2008 wrote an article called
“The Global Warming Emergency.”
Because
this was so many years ago, I wrote Legge in November 2014 to ask if
he still stands by that essay. He replied that if writing it now, he
would update a few items, but “the general thrust would be exactly
the same.”
Legge
said that the conclusion that there is a climate emergency would
require a threefold argument: (1) Global warming is occurring, it is
not trivial, and the claim that the temperature and sea level will
continue to rise must be based on good science; (2) “the
current and predicted temperature is unusual and dangerous”; and (3)
“the warming is largely caused by man-made carbon dioxide.”
1. Is Global Warming Significant and Destined to
Rise?
Suggesting that global
warming, if it is occurring at all, will be minor and short-lived,
Legge based this suggestion on several claims, which he derived from
climate-science deniers.
Satellite Data
In one of his
arguments, Legge wrote: “The
recent warming period is giving signs of coming to an end: satellite
measurements of global atmospheric temperature have been declining
this decade.” In support of that argument, Legge referred to an
argument by Roy Spencer, one of the handful of climate scientists
who reject the consensus view. But citing Spencer’s claim about
satellite measurements hardly adds credibility to Legge’s argument.
In the
1990s, Spencer and fellow climate denier John Christy argued that
the satellite data showed no warming – that the
troposphere was not warming
in conjunction with surface warming.
"Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed
encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global
warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis,
but . . . did little or nothing to root out possible sources of
errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess."
Spencer and Christy’s treatment of this issue, along with some
others, led Romm to write
an article
asking, “Should You
Believe Anything John Christy and Roy Spencer Say?”
Urban Heat Island Effect
Legge,
however, cited the climate denialist who has made this case most
strongly, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts, who has a website
called “Watts Up With That.” Watts had long argued that temperature
recordings have been skewed by the fact that most recordings are
made in urban areas. In 2010,
Watts wrote:
“UHI is easily observable. I’ve been telling readers about
UHI since this blog started.”
In
2010, when Watts made this comment, it seemed for various reasons
that a project called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST)
project, organized by UC Berkeley professor
Richard Muller,
was soon to verify Watts’ claims. As Joe Romm explained:
-
Muller had long been critical of climate science, believing that
many scientists and their admirers, including Al Gore, had
exaggerated the evidence. Moreover, the “Climategate” charges
made him suspect that climate scientists had “concealed
discordant data,” about which he examined
the claims of denialist
bloggers.
-
Muller chose as a climate scientist Judith Curry, who,
according to Romm,
has “now taken the crown as the most debunked person on
the science blogosphere” and who has, in fact, “abandon[ed]
science.”
-
However, Muller chose good scientists
to carry out the study, including lead scientist Robert Rohde, and
the study did not work out as deniers expected. Based on data from
some 40,000 weather stations around the world, the study’s results,
reported the BBC,
were “remarkably similar to those produced by the world's
three most important and established groups, whose work had been
decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles” –
namely, the reports by NASA, NOAA, and the “collaboration between
the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which
the emails that formed the basis of the ‘Climategate’ furor were
hacked.”
Muller told the BBC:
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely
with the warming values published previously by other teams in the
US and the UK.”
Writing in
the
Wall Street Journal,
Muller said:
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had
raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our
results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups.
We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in
their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of
that. . . . Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help
cool this portion of the climate debate.”
Before Muller’s report had been published,
Watts had written:
“I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it
proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the
method has promise.” However, after learning what the result
actually was, Watts reneged. He first refused to accept Muller’s
report on the grounds that it had not yet been peer reviewed.
“When the science and peer review is
finished,”
Watts predicted,
“the results are likely to look different.”
However, when the
report
was published
(in a peer-reviewed journal), the results, contained
in five papers,
were not different. In an interview, moreover, Muller emphasized the
report’s main point about UHI, saying “urban
heat islands contribute essentially
zero to the warming.”
This report, which challenged Watts’ main claim to fame, was never
accepted by him, in spite of his promise.
Sensitivity: Feedback as Negative
Climate scientists
acknowledge that they have an imperfect understanding of “climate
sensitivity,” meaning the amount the planet will warm because of the
various feedbacks affecting the climate. Sensitivity is usually
discussed in terms of the temperature increase to be caused by a
doubling of the preindustrial CO2 concentration of 275
parts per mission (ppm) to 550 ppm. If the sensitivity is extremely
low, then doubling the concentration of CO2 would not
raise the planet’s temperature much. But if sensitivity is very
high, the doubling will be catastrophic. The IPCC puts the likely
temperature increase to range between 2 and 4.5°C, with 3°C being
most likely, and James Hansen, whose
ideas are taken very seriously by fellow climate scientists,
believes the increase to be near the
top of that range.
By contrast,
Roy Spencer argued
that the sensitivity is much lower – so low in fact, reported Legge,
that the feedback will be negative, not
positive, so that “there is no cause for alarm.”
“[I]t is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer
review. It should not have been published [because] there is no
merit whatsoever in this paper.”
The fact that it was
published led the journal’s editor to resign, saying that Spencer’s
paper was "fundamentally
flawed and therefore wrongly
accepted” by the team of reviewers, which he (the editor) had
chosen.
2. Current and Predicted Warming:
Not Unusual and Dangerous?
In line
with Legge’s claim that insofar as there is currently some global
warming, it is minor and short-lived, he also argued that the
warming is not unusual and dangerous.
Medieval Warm Period
He
based this view primarily on the Medieval Warm Period, citing
denialist stories claiming that during this period – which occurred
between the 10th and 15th
centuries, A.D. - the planet was warmer
than today. Referring to the fact that the Vikings had farms in
Greenland, Legge said that “it appears that
the present temperature is not yet
quite as high as during the Medieval warming.”
Present Warm Period
On the
question of whether today’s temperature is dangerous in the sense
that it might lead to runaway global warming, Legge argued that this
“seems unlikely . . . as it did not happen in the previous warm
periods.” However, that probability cannot be judged apart from the
question of what has caused the recent warming, which Legge assumed
to be just one more example of natural variability.
The attempt to explain the 20th-century
increase as an example of natural variation is made even more
difficult by a
2013 study in
Science
of the global temperature for the past 11,300 years.
This study showed that the planet, after the Medieval Warm Period,
had been cooling for 5,000 years. But in the 20th
century, this long period of cooling was abruptly ended, with the
rate of warming since 1900 being 50 times greater than the rate of
cooling in the previous 5000 years.
Climate deniers try to explain this 20th-century
uptick in the global temperature by increased radiation from the sun,
which was true of the Medieval Warm Period. However, the
increase in solar radiation leveled off after 1950, so that since
about 1970, greenhouse gases have clearly been the main contributor
to warming. Since 1970, in fact, the sun and the climate temperature
have been
moving in opposite directions:
While the sun has had a slight cooling trend, the climate has been
getting warmer and warmer. As one scientist put it, “We should be
cool, but we're not.”
This contrast has been articulated by physicist
Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research. “Within a hundred years, the cooling of the previous 5000
years was undone,” said Rahmstorf. “[W]ithout the increase in
greenhouse gases caused by humans, the slow
cooling trend would have
continued.”
3.
The Role of Carbon Dioxide
In arguing his third
claim – that CO2 cannot explain whatever recent global
warming there has been – Legge employed several of the common
denialist points, all of which have been answered in the literature,
most systematically at Skeptical Science.
CO2
Minor Compared with Water Vapor?
One of Legge’s reasons
for claiming that increased CO2 cannot explain much is
that “it plays a minor role compared with
water vapour.” His argument is that, because water vapor is the
dominant greenhouse gas, constituting most of the greenhouse effect,
CO2 is insignificant.
“Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 would warm the globe
around 1°C. Taken on its own, water vapour feedback roughly doubles
the amount of CO2 warming. When other feedbacks are included . . . ,
the total warming from a doubling of CO2 emissions is
around 3°C.”
Another important
factor is that, whereas the water vapor in the atmosphere is
short-lived (it arises from evaporation and then falls as rain and
snow), CO2 stays there for about a century. So after CO2
enters the atmosphere, it will increase the water vapor, with its
powerful greenhouse effect, for a long time.
Accordingly, one should
not denigrate the importance of CO2 by comparison with
water vapor. Rather, they work together. It is the positive feedback
relation between them that explains why the climate is so sensitive
to additional CO2 emissions.
CO2
Increase Followed Temperature Increase?
According to Legge, it
is an “inconvenient fact” for Al Gore “that
the temperature rises about 1000 years before the CO2
level rises.” Legge was referring to the fact
that, based on Antarctic ice core data from the past 400,000
years, changes in CO2 level followed temperature changes
by
some 600 to 1000 years.
This fact has been used by climate deniers, such as U.S. Congressman
Joe Barton of Texas, to argue that today’s global warming could not
possibly be explained by the increasing percentage of CO2
in the atmosphere.
However, whereas the
initial increase in temperature during this period was due to
changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, this increase led to a
positive feedback process: The rise in ocean temperatures led to
releases of CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere,
which increased the planet’s warming, which in turn led to the
release of more CO2 from the oceans, and so on. As
Skeptical Science explained:
“This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between
glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too
weak to cause such variation.”
In fact, as Skeptical
Science continued, “While the orbital cycles triggered the initial
warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming
occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase.“
Global Temperature
Pause?
In a third argument against the role of rising CO2, Legge
said that “it is hard to see any correlation
between the rising CO2 level
and temperature during the last decade.” This statement reflects the
apparent fact that, although CO2 and the surface
air temperature of the planet went hand in hand in the 1980s and
‘90s, the two seemed to diverge in the present century: While the CO2
ppm continued to rise, the increase in the air temperature seemed to
slow down. This appearance led to the conclusion
that there has been an
end to - or at least a pause in - global warming.
However, that conclusion was based on
the equation of the planet’s temperature with its surface air
temperature. This is a very big mistake, because
about “90
percent of the warming of the planet is
absorbed in heating the oceans.” Accordingly, there has not really
been a pause, but only – in Joe Romm’s phrase,
a faux pause.
All that has happened is that a higher percentage of the warming
than previously went into the deep ocean, evidently because of
changes in the trade winds.
Global Warming’s
Evil Twin
About
half of the human-caused CO2
produced since the beginning of the industrial age has been absorbed
by the ocean, and this absorption has resulted in
ocean acidification,
which Jane Lubchenco - who headed the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - called global warming’s “equally
evil twin.”
Ocean acidification
results from the fact that about 30 percent of our CO2
emissions have been absorbed by the
ocean. This absorption keeps down the warming of the atmosphere that
would otherwise be produced by these emissions. But this absorption
also reduces the ocean’s PH level, thereby making the water more
acidic. Tests have shown that since the industrial revolution, there
has been a
30% increase
in the ocean’s acidity. This acidity increases when CO2
mixes with water, resulting in
carbonic acid.
Just as carbonic acid eats out limestone caves, it does the same for
animals with chalky skeletons, which make up a big percentage of sea
life. Elevating the percentage of carbonic acid makes it
increasingly difficult for these organisms - such as plankton,
corals, crabs, clams, mussels, oysters, and snails - to calcify to
make their skeletons.
The planet’s CO2
is now slightly above 400 ppm. If it reaches roughly 500 ppm, says
one expert, “you put
calcification out of business
in the oceans.” If this happens, phytoplankton and corals will die,
which will mean the death of all sea animals, from plankton to fish
to whales. And this will greatly increase the food problem, because
the ocean serves as the primary source of food for
3.5 billion people.
Part
III
Climate Emergency
Once it is seen that
the recent temperature increase is not due to natural variability,
but instead to the increase in greenhouse gases, it is obvious that
climate change is dangerous, not only because of the risk of seafood
extinction and runaway global warming, which is likely to occur if
global warming continues, but also because of various features of
climate change, such as sea-level rise.
While admitting that
the sea level had been rising, Legge said that “in
the last few years [it] appears to be falling or at least to have
leveled off.”
However, if the percentage of
CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere continues to rise, the sea level, which rose about 8
inches (20 centimeters) in the 20th century, will rise
much faster in our century. Until recently, IPCC
scientists expected
it to rise 3 feet (roughly 1 meter) by 2100, with some scientists
predicting more like
6 to 7 feet
(2 meters). But in 2015, leading climate scientist James Hansen and
16 fellow scientists released
a new study
saying that, if fossil fuels are not radically curtailed, the ocean
could rise 10 feet (about 3 meters) before the end of the century.
In addition, although
sea-level rise may be the most obvious danger created by global
warming-caused climate change, there are dangers in every feature of
climate change – as I have documented in the first part of my
Unprecedented:
-
Heat waves will
become hotter, eventually becoming so hot that humans and plants
will not be able to survive.
-
Droughts will last
more often and longer, with some places becoming permanently
dry; and the drier weather will result in more and worse
wildfires.
-
Storms of various
types – rain storms, snow storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes -
will become more deadly.
-
Fresh water will
become increasingly insufficient, due to various factors,
including loss of snowpack and the melting of glaciers (which
provide the major source of water for billions of people).
-
Food will become
increasingly insufficient, due to drought, excessive heat,
sea-level rise, and fresh-water shortage (as well as loss of
seafood because of ocean acidification).
-
Sea-level rise and
other features of climate disruption will increasingly create
climate refugees and climate wars.
Contrary to Legge’s
supposition, therefore, we
do have a climate emergency.
The
website
for Skeptical Science - which
advocates “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism” – has
rebutted (under
“Arguments”) over 175 denialist
claims, beginning with the most popular ones, such as “climate’s
changed before,” “it’s the sun,” “it’s not bad,” and “there is no
consensus.” In most cases, these claims can quickly be seen to be
false with only a little study, so people who support them are
either deceivers or deceived.
The deceivers are the
fossil-fuel companies, along with their hirelings, who make these
claims while knowing them to be false. As pointed out above, the oil
companies have known this since 1995, just as tobacco companies have
known cigarettes to be carcinogenic since 1965.
The covert operations
of this billionaire’s party are carried out only on behalf of causes
that support Koch interests, which generally are not the interests
of the members of the Tea Party.
Frank Rich wrote:
“When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the
1980 Libertarian ticket . . . , his campaign called for the
abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies
and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,
and public schools — in other
words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his
business profits or increase his taxes.”
Although the Kochs call
themselves libertarians, they are “libertarians who hate the free
market” (as pointed out by an article discussing the Koch brothers
as “America’s
Greediest”).
In an essay entitled “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded
and Inspired by Billionaires,”
George Monbiot said
that the Tea Party is “mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning
people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they
have been organised by the very interests they believe they are
confronting.”
Conclusion
I wrote this article
because members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not let themselves
be deceived by the fossil-fuel corporations and the
front-organizations they have created. Holding that the Bush-Cheney
administration gave the public a completely unscientific account of
what happened on 9/11, the members of this movement should not
accept the completely anti-scientific denial of global warming and
climate change. Seeing the official story of 9/11 as a self-serving
lie sold by Big Government, the members of the 9/11 Truth Movement
should not fall for the self-serving lie told by Big Money.
David Ray Griffin is
emeritus professor of philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate
University and Claremont School of Theology. His most recent book is
Unprecedented: Can Civilization
Survive the CO2
Crisis? (Clarity Press, 2015).