Why River and Watershed Groups Need to Combat Climate Skepticism

Although I firmly believe that river advocates need to be involved in discussions around climate change, I’ve done my best to avoid using this blog to comment on the contentious and often vitriolic debate hovering around the science of global warming (in part, because it'd be too hard not to use epithets). But I recently came across a fantastic, must-read article written by Bill Mckibben that does a great job putting this worn-out climate debate in perspective. In short, climate change politics have evolved into an ‘O.J. moment.’

Before I delve into what Bill Mckibben means when he says the attack on climate change science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century, I want to provide some context for this post.

For the record, I believe the science is clear and its time to quite bickering and start figuring out solutions to our looming climate crisis. Many people are already noticing changes in and around their rivers – from the timing of spring runoff to the flowering of riparian plants – and there is a huge body of scientific evidence showing that greenhouse gas emissions could prove to be the single largest threat to our rivers and water supplies in the future.

As river and watershed groups began to realize the importance of climate change to their work – and as River Network realized the central role river and watershed groups need to play in addressing climate change – the water-energy nexus emerged as an ideal conduit for the watershed movement to work on both mitigating and adapting to the effects of global warming.

By working with our Partners to help decision makers and the general public better realize how (and how much) energy can be saved by saving water, River Network is promoting a strategy that simultaneously reduces greenhouse gas emissions and strengthens the resiliency of our freshwater ecosystems. By educating people on the water demands and water quality impacts of our energy choices, we are working toward a clean energy future that protects our climate and water resources alike. And by helping people understand that climate change will primarily be experienced through water, we are encouraging river and watershed groups to join us on the front lines in the battle to save our climate.

Of course, all of the water-energy work we’re doing – while beneficial in it’s own right – is predicated on the notion that we need to address climate change. If you don’t believe in the general concept of human-caused global warming, then you probably won’t believe it’s worth the effort to address.

Which brings me back to the Bill McKibben article. Most of us have inevitably run into climate skeptics or deniers who, no matter how much science and logic we throw at them, refuse to believe that humans are changing the climate. As McKibben explains in his article, push-back on climate change has, ironically, become stronger as the scientific evidence becomes more robust:

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning "a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome" on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Now that there is so much evidence supporting the notion that human’s are warming the climate, there are that many more pseudo-arguments for skeptics to throw out to derail our progress in addressing the issue. Can you and I or your average river advocate really be expected to fully understand the effects of the pacific decadal oscillation on our weather and long-term climate trends? What about the relative climate forcing of water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere? How about the reliability of temperature monitoring stations in relation to the disparity between tree ring samples and observed temperatures since the 1960’s?

All of these questions have been asked and answered by researchers many times over, yet skeptics continue to barrage the public and conjure up doubt with the same disproved arguments simply because they have so many at their disposal and its nearly impossible to keep up.

It is sad to think that providing more evidence just gives climate change deniers a bigger target to shoot at, but it is precisely this ability to identify and exploit tiny cracks in a mountain of evidence that Bill McKibben thinks the climate debate is having an O.J. moment:

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated -- a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made -- that’s what Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”

When civil debates regress into ad hominem attacks, there's not much you can do except to keep your cool and stick to the facts. Luckily, there are some great resources out there to find good information you can use to directly refute the most challenging skeptical arguments. One great place to quickly and easily access counter-arguments is Skeptical Science, a website that “gets skeptical about global warming skepticism.” They even produced an iphone app so you can keep a litany counter-arguments in your pocket. Another great website is Real Climate but it is produced by climate scientists and can get too technical for some readers. I also enjoy keeping up with the latest in the climate change debate at Climate Progress, where Joe Romm uses good science and a sharp wit to give anybody slowing down progress a piece of his mind.

But understanding the science and developing better talking points will not necessarily convince the masses that we need to address climate change immediately. As Bill McKibben explains:

It’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified…So let’s figure out how to talk about it.

McKibben goes on to list a number of approaches to talking about climate change in a way that people can relate to. Rather than repeat the long list of great ideas here, I highly recommend that you read his article from beginning to end. It’s both insightful and inspiring. Or better yet, buy his new book.

One of the most perceptive points that McKibben makes is something that is obvious yet often forgotten and poorly articulated by environmentalists and our allies:

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster.

Now let’s get out there and stop global warming, our rivers depend on it!