I knew living in the country was good for you …

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There’s been a lot of talk about the ill effects of loosing touch with nature, but most has focused on how it affects the spirit or leads to behavior that damages the natural world. Now, here’s a physical health reason to drop the smartphone and take a walk in the woods. Reminds me of a remark my quite healthy dairy farming neighbor made the other day: “You’re not a real Vermonter unless you’re knee deep in shit.”

From the Editor’s Choice section of the 8 June issue of Science:

MICROBIOLOGY

Hygiene Can Hurt

As human societies urbanize, chronic inflammatory disorders become more apparent. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that individuals exposed to infection in childhood are less likely to develop inflammatory disease because exposure to microorganisms is important for stimulating responses that maintain epithelial cell integrity. Hence, in urban environments, reduced contact with the full diversity of the microbial world may be leading to the increased incidence of inflammatory disorders. Hanski et al. took a random sample of 118 adolescents from towns, villages, and isolated dwellings in eastern Finland, tested their immune function and allergic responses, surveyed their skin microflora, and investigated the biodiversity within their homes. They found several significant correlations, not least that low biodiversity was surprisingly strongly associated with atopy, and concluded that humans need to interact with natural environments for their physical health, not just for their peace of mind.

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 10.1073/pnas.1205624109 (2012).

History Rewritten

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Let’s see … It’s been a little less than three years since George Bush left office and about four years since I published Censoring Science. How quickly we forget–especially when we’re helped to forget.

Last week’s issue of Science magazine included a letter I had written to them a couple of months ago.  The letter is pretty much self-explanatory; I’ve appended it below. It’s about an attempt to revise history that I found in the magazine’s obituary of John Marburger, the former science adviser to Mr. Bush.

Although I thought the record ought to be corrected (and am gratified that Science has agreed), I saw no need to bring up the widespread criticism that Marburger faced during his tenure, as some obituary writers have (links here and here). On the other hand, it probably is worth pointing out that Nature, which is published in Britain and which did allude to the criticism in its obituary, also did a much better job of covering the censorship while it was taking place than Science did. Science is based in Washington and is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One wonders whether the editors felt constrained by the fact that, historically, Republican administrations have reacted to bad news from the scientific community, be it in their findings or in their policy or political statements, by cutting science funding.

It is true that John Marburger staunchly defended the indefensible acts of the Bush Administration when it twisted, suppressed, and censored scientific findings, on his watch. However, most of the insiders I interviewed for the book told me that he was probably one of the good guys, one of the many “governors of occupied territories” in that administration who tried their best to do the right thing under very difficult circumstances. Another was Dr. James Mahoney,  Assistant Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere in the Commerce Department. Commerce oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where the suppression of climate science was institutionalized. Mahoney was additionally placed at the head of the US Climate Change Science Program, an organization that Bush (or, most likely, Dick Cheney) set up, ostensibly to coordinate climate science across the many agencies that conduct it, but in fact to control, spin, and suppress it. I was told that Mahoney, like Marburger, chose to work from the inside to limit the damage, rather than to turn in his badge. I don’t know what I would have done had I stood in either of these men’s shoes; but, as I say in the letter, it is not my place to second guess them. They may very well have been doing the bravest and most ethical thing.

When the editor from Science got in touch with me a few weeks ago, mainly to ask for references, I came across another case of history being rewritten–or, in this case, erased altogether. The first reference in my letter is to a report on political interference with climate science that was prepared by the House Oversight Committee–which was controlled, admittedly, by Democrats at the time. It is a solid report, nevertheless, based on extensive documentary evidence and fact-finding. The Oversight Committee is now controlled by Republicans. When I searched its Web site for the report, I found that it had been expunged, along with the transcripts of testimony that had been given at the congressional hearings that provided much of the basis for it. My guess would be that this is illegal.

Furthermore, it was quite depressing to skim over the titles of the most recent reports by the Republican majority, since this brought me face to face with the toxicity and childishness of the present discourse in Washington. They read like headlines from the editorial page of a right-wing tabloid, or press bulletins from a Tea Party public relations firm. Here are the four most recent:

Report: “Uncovering the True Impact of the Obamacare Tax Credits: Increases the Deficit, Expands Welfare through the Tax Code, and Implements a New Marriage Tax Penalty” – October 27, 2011

Report: How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs – September 22, 2011

Report: Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama’s Promise of Regulatory Reform – September 14, 2011

Report: Doubling Down on Failure: Before Asking for a New Stimulus Package, Will the Obama Administration Admit that the First One Failed? – September 8, 2011

This puts me in mind of a remark I came across in a column in our local newspaper up here in Vermont, written by one of our local treasures, outdoor writer Gary Moore. (This is the first time I’ve ever seen him stray into politics.)

I have been frustrated, embarrassed and angered by what has been happening in Washington as our Senators and Congressmen pontificate and obfuscate and do little of worth.

I am reminded of what Henry Ward Beecher wrote in the late 19th century.

“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won’t.”

I’d prefer not to contemplate the level of scientific censorship we will see if any of the current choices on the Republican side are elected president. We may look back on the Bush/Cheney years as the good old days.

Anyway, here’s the letter. The links to Science and Nature may be problematic since they’re behind paywalls. If you wish, you can find additional details on the “resources” page of the Censoring Science Web site–Paul Thacker’s Freedom of Information Act documents are especially interesting–or in the book itself.

The one thing I wish I had added to the letter was that, before James Connaughton became Bush’s most trusted advisor on climate and other environmental matters, he worked as a lobbyist in Washington for major industrial polluters. His firm helped General Electric and ARCO, for example, skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites.

 

Science Adviser Faced Tough Political Climate

Raymond Orbach’s retrospective on the life of John Marburger contains an astounding statement that deserves a rebuttal. After observing that, in his role as science adviser to George W. Bush, Marburger dealt with “formidable scientific issues…including stem cell research and climate change,” Orbach asserts that “those who differed with Administration policy during his tenure often injected politics into the scientific debate.  They would resort to intimidating attack, mixing their ideology with scientific argument.”

This is at best arguable and at worst a gross distortion of fact and history. A vast amount of documentary evidence and congressional testimony (1–5) demonstrates that Orbach has it exactly wrong. From its inception, the Bush Administration injected politics into scientific issues, evoking outrage in scientists, both in the United States and abroad (6–8).

From what I could tell as I interviewed numerous government scientists and other public servants in the course of  writing a book about the censorship of climate science under the Bush Administration (9), John Marburger was a fine man who fought the good fight under very difficult circumstances. He made his own decisions on how to deal with the widespread distortion, censorship, and suppression of science that took place on his watch, and it is not our place to second-guess him. He was, as Orbach writes, “the longest-serving presidential science adviser in U.S. history,” but we should also remember that President Bush did not seek much advice about science. He waited an unprecedented 10 months before even appointing a science adviser, and he stripped away the title “assistant to the president” as he did so (10, 11). Thus, Marburger never had direct access to the president. Bush’s top adviser on climate was James Connaughton, the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, who was a lawyer (12).

Mark Bowen

1.     U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Political interference with climate change science under the Bush Administration (2007).

2.     Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project, Atmosphere of pressure: Political interference in federal climate science (2007).

3.     T. Maassarani , Redacting the science of climate change: An investigative and synthesis report (Government
Accountability Project, Washington, DC, 2007).

4.     A.C. Revkin, NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet, The New York Times, 22 July 2006.

5.     Union of  Concerned Scientists, ExxonMobil report: Smoke, mirrors, and hot air (2007).

6.     C. Macilwain, G.  Brumfiel, US scientists fight political meddling, Nature 439, 896 (2006).

7.     A. C. Revkin, Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue, The New  York Times, 19 October 2004.

8.     Union of  Concerned Scientists, “2004 scientist statement on restoring scientific
integrity to federal policy making” (2004).

9.     M. S. Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack
on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming (Dutton, New York, 2007).

10.  Breakthrough of the Year, “Bush mystery science theater,” Science 294, 2446 (2001).

11.  G. Brumfiel, “Mission Impossible?” Nature 428, 250 (2004).

12.  The White House,  Ask the White House, James L. Connaughton.

Ed Douglas Calls on Climbers to Bear Witness

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Somehow I can’t seem to leave global warming behind …

Ed Douglas is a fine writer and an avid climber, whom I once met over dinner at a friend’s house in England. We had a memorable conversation, to which he refers in an opinion piece that was published yesterday in the Guardian (UK). I fully agree with Ed’s call for climbers to bear witness to the catastrophic effects of global warming in our beloved mountains. We must also work to debunk the myth being propogated by global warming deniers that anecdotal evidence–i.e., facts that are so obvious that they slap you in the face, such as the present wasting away of the world’s mountain glaciers–is somehow unscientfic and therefore easily ignored.

There is nothing magical about science; it is simply observation of the physical world, coupled with deduction and insight. What is magical thinking is the way some people–both of the leading contenders for the Republican nomination for U.S. President, for example–continue to deny the unassailable evidence for human-induced climate change (links here and here).

Climbers are perfectly placed to make accurate observations of the mountain world. Who better to ask about changes in that world than those whose very lives depend on their ability to observe it?

You will find blog posts related to Ed’s opinion piece here, and here. (The latter is a complete draft of the 2001 article that I wrote for Climbing, which was the subject of an absurd controversy that was manufactured by the denial lobby at the beginning of last year.)

I recommend Ed’s biography of Tenzing Norgay, as well as his most well-known book, Chomolungma Sings The Blues.

Is March the Cruelest Month?

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With apologies to T. S. Eliot, I have to say that in northern Vermont right about now the answer seems to be yes.

Even “real Vermonters” are getting sick of winter at this point; they have been for a few weeks now. We’ve had persistent cold, quite a few mornings below zero — one just this past Thursday when it went down to -15 — and lots of snow. But last Tuesday, March 1st, was Town Meeting Day, always a harbinger of spring, and things really began looking up on Saturday, which was Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and the end of the inauspicious dön season. Yes, it rained, but it was warm, and so was Sunday morning, which brought more rain. The mountain of snow at the back end of our door yard shrunk noticeably and a pile of wood that I never thought we were going to need, but now I’m pretty sure we will, began peaking out from under its white cover in the wood yard.

Chatting with our neighbor, Marilyn, as she was picking up her mail last week, I learned that Town Meeting Day was when they always tapped their trees when she was a kid. Her father would go to town meeting and the rest of the family would go out and tap. She also reminded me that many folks start their seedlings about now, since it is traditional to plant on Memorial Day, although she often delays both the seedlings and the planting for a week or two, as frosts remain a possibility into the second week of June.

And so, on Sunday afternoon, the day we first noticed the red of new buds on the trees around our fields, Wendy and I tapped two sugar maples — in early spring sunlight with that special silvery hue that is unique to New England. What an amazing experience for two city slickers. The sap began dripping before we could hammer the tap in, and those two trees began gushing faster than we could keep up, about ten gallons of clear sugar water between them every day …

That night a storm hit, one of the five snowiest ever to hit the state, according to the newspapers. It raged all day Monday. When I went out to plow with my medium-sized tractor, a 30-hp John Deere 870, at about 11 am, it was coming down so fast I couldn’t keep up. About 18″ fell altogether.

But the trees kept producing. And then, of course, mud season began on Thursday. You have to roll with the punches around here …

Fisher Cat

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Winter is beginning to feel long here in late February, as the temperature dropped below zero for the umpteenth time again last night. Today’s crisp, clear, still weather does elevate the spirit, though. We took a walk in the sunlight to start the day — a good way to fight seasonal affective disorder at this time of year.

I’d guess that the creatures in the woods are having a harder time than we are. We and our neighbors have been seeing more of them lately; they seem to be getting hungry. Last Wednesday, as I was packing a bag for a short trip to Boston, Wendy called from her office, “Mark! Come quick! Come quick!” And there in the back yard was the first fisher cat I have ever seen in broad daylight, jet black against the snow. (I’ve seen them in the headlights before, skulking by the side of the road; they’re generally nocturnal.) He (she?) was healthy and chipper-looking, easily three feet long, a good portion of that length being a strong, shaggy tail, and he seemed to be snooping around for food, which, in a fisher’s case usually means flesh or blood, as I understand it. The first time we visited this property, we hung around admiring the place for a while after the realtor left, and the neighboring dairy farmer and his wife drove up the dirt road (they and their family are the only other inhabitants on this dead end) and stopped for a long chat. I’ll call them Bob and Marilyn. At one point, they began telling us animal stories, and Bob, who pastures a few heifers and grows hay and sweet corn on some of our fields, told one about seeing a fisher the previous spring trying to drown a baby fawn in the stream that runs through our property.

The fisher we saw last Wednesday looked beguilingly friendly, although I wasn’t close enough to see the icy weasel eyes. He was quivering with energy and intelligence as he checked out the empty chicken house in the backyard (where a squirrel and a vole or two are headquartered for the winter) wandered across the small frozen pond next to it and meandered downhill in the strip of woods that follows the stream where the attempted and perhaps successful drowning took place, checking out the trees for living inhabitants. Not finding any, he followed the stream across the road and down toward the Connecticut River.

That same day or the next, a bobcat nabbed a chicken from a neighboring friend’s coop. She happened to be outside when the cat came by the following day, hoping for another treat, and the cat was utterly unconcerned by her presence, even when she called to her roommate, who also came out to watch. The cat turned and stopped, looked them in the eyes for a while, and took its own sweet time wandering away.

It’s nice to know there are such healthy critters in the woods, but Wendy kept the cat inside for a day or two.

An Eloquent Letter About the So-called Debate

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This is the best thing I’ve read lately about the fundamental facts and the fictional “debate” about global warming, the latter of which, as I’ve pointed out before, is actually a public relations war. The letter was written by dozens of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences. They submitted it to a number of news outlets who refused to print it, including the New York Times. It was ultimately published in Science (link).

Please read this.

Thanks,

Mark

=========

Science 7 May 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5979, pp. 689 – 690
DOI: 10.1126/science.328.5979.689

Letters

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That’s what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of “well-established theories” and are often spoken of as “facts.”

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world’s scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business-as-usual practices. We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

P. H. Gleick,* R. M. Adams, R. M. Amasino, E. Anders, D. J. Anderson, W. W. Anderson, L. E. Anselin, M. K. Arroyo, B. Asfaw, F. J. Ayala, A. Bax, A. J. Bebbington, G. Bell, M. V. L. Bennett, J. L. Bennetzen, M. R. Berenbaum, O. B. Berlin, P. J. Bjorkman, E. Blackburn, J. E. Blamont, M. R. Botchan, J. S. Boyer, E. A. Boyle, D. Branton, S. P. Briggs, W. R. Briggs, W. J. Brill, R. J. Britten, W. S. Broecker, J. H. Brown, P. O. Brown, A. T. Brunger, J. Cairns, Jr., D. E. Canfield, S. R. Carpenter, J. C. Carrington, A. R. Cashmore, J. C. Castilla, A. Cazenave, F. S. Chapin, III, A. J. Ciechanover, D. E. Clapham, W. C. Clark, R. N. Clayton, M. D. Coe, E. M. Conwell, E. B. Cowling, R. M Cowling, C. S. Cox, R. B. Croteau, D. M. Crothers, P. J. Crutzen, G. C. Daily, G. B. Dalrymple, J. L. Dangl, S. A. Darst, D. R. Davies, M. B. Davis, P. V. de Camilli, C. Dean, R. S. Defries, J. Deisenhofer, D. P. Delmer, E. F. Delong, D. J. Derosier, T. O. Diener, R. Dirzo, J. E. Dixon, M. J. Donoghue, R. F. Doolittle, T. Dunne, P. R. Ehrlich, S. N. Eisenstadt, T. Eisner, K. A. Emanuel, S. W. Englander, W. G. Ernst, P. G. Falkowski, G. Feher, J. A. Ferejohn, A. Fersht, E. H. Fischer, R. Fischer, K. V. Flannery, J. Frank, P. A. Frey, I. Fridovich, C. Frieden, D. J. Futuyma, W. R. Gardner, C. J. R. Garrett, W. Gilbert, R. B. Goldberg, W. H. Goodenough, C. S. Goodman, M. Goodman, P. Greengard, S. Hake, G. Hammel, S. Hanson, S. C. Harrison, S. R. Hart, D. L. Hartl, R. Haselkorn, K. Hawkes, J. M. Hayes, B. Hille, T. Hökfelt, J. S. House, M. Hout, D. M. Hunten, I. A. Izquierdo, A. T. Jagendorf, D. H. Janzen, R. Jeanloz, C. S. Jencks, W. A. Jury, H. R. Kaback, T. Kailath, P. Kay, S. A. Kay, D. Kennedy, A. Kerr, R. C. Kessler, G. S. Khush, S. W. Kieffer, P. V. Kirch, K. Kirk, M. G. Kivelson, J. P. Klinman, A. Klug, L. Knopoff, H. Kornberg, J. E. Kutzbach, J. C. Lagarias, K. Lambeck, A. Landy, C. H. Langmuir, B. A. Larkins, X. T. Le Pichon, R. E. Lenski, E. B. Leopold, S. A. Levin, M. Levitt, G. E. Likens, J. Lippincott-Schwartz, L. Lorand, C. O. Lovejoy, M. Lynch, A. L. Mabogunje, T. F. Malone, S. Manabe, J. Marcus, D. S. Massey, J. C. McWilliams, E. Medina, H. J. Melosh, D. J. Meltzer, C. D. Michener, E. L. Miles, H. A. Mooney, P. B. Moore, F. M. M. Morel, E. S. Mosley-Thompson, B. Moss, W. H. Munk, N. Myers, G. B. Nair, J. Nathans, E. W. Nester, R. A. Nicoll, R. P. Novick, J. F. O’Connell, P. E. Olsen, N. D. Opdyke, G. F. Oster, E. Ostrom, N. R. Pace, R. T. Paine, R. D. Palmiter, J. Pedlosky, G. A. Petsko, G. H. Pettengill, S. G. Philander, D. R. Piperno, T. D. Pollard, P. B. Price, Jr., P. A. Reichard, B. F. Reskin, R. E. Ricklefs, R. L. Rivest, J. D. Roberts, A. K. Romney, M. G. Rossmann, D. W. Russell, W. J. Rutter, J. A. Sabloff, R. Z. Sagdeev, M. D. Sahlins, A. Salmond, J. R. Sanes, R. Schekman, J. Schellnhuber, D. W. Schindler, J. Schmitt, S. H. Schneider, V. L. Schramm, R. R. Sederoff, C. J. Shatz, F. Sherman, R. L. Sidman, K. Sieh, E. L. Simons, B. H. Singer, M. F. Singer, B. Skyrms, N. H. Sleep, B. D. Smith, S. H. Snyder, R. R. Sokal, C. S. Spencer, T. A. Steitz, K. B. Strier, T. C. Südhof, S. S. Taylor, J. Terborgh, D. H. Thomas, L. G. Thompson, R. T. Tjian, M. G. Turner, S. Uyeda, J. W. Valentine, J. S. Valentine, J. L. van Etten, K. E. van Holde, M. Vaughan, S. Verba, P. H. von Hippel, D. B. Wake, A. Walker, J. E. Walker, E. B. Watson, P. J. Watson, D. Weigel, S. R. Wessler, M. J. West-Eberhard, T. D. White, W. J. Wilson, R. V. Wolfenden, J. A. Wood, G. M. Woodwell, H. E. Wright, Jr., C. Wu, C. Wunsch, M. L. Zoback

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: petergleick@pacinst.org
Notes

1. The signatories are all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences but are not speaking on its behalf.
2. Signatory affiliations are available as supporting material here.

A Storm in a Teacup in the Sunday Telegraph

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As the sparseness of this blog indicates, I’ve been watching the climate policy debate from a distance, lately. (There is no debate about the science.) But I was dragged into it over the weekend by a shoddy bit of reporting in the Sunday Telegraph (UK) — which reminds me yet again why it’s probably best to maintain my silence.

Late last week I received an e-mail from a young man named Richard Gray, who was seeking information about an article I wrote for Climbing magazine a long time ago, in 2001. Innocently, I responded. At his request, I sent him a copy of the text and a minor correction that appeared in the subsequent issue of the magazine (see the previous post on this blog) and agreed to an interview by phone.

Mr. Gray is a “science correspondent” for his newspaper. Unfortunately, the article he proceeded to write, “UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article,” indicates that he failed to understand a simple table in a report by this UN panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. One would prefer to believe that he doesn’t understand the science, but it appears to be something more basic than that: he seems to have difficulty with simple reading comprehension — unless, of course, his true purpose was to misrepresent the report. Furthermore, he manufactured a quote for his article that supposedly came from my mouth. I’m afraid that it did not.

And now his article is creating a stir in both the blogosphere and the more traditional news media. Stories are cropping up in India and New Zealand. Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the IPCC, is being asked questions about it. Even I am getting requests for my point of view (“POV” in journalist jargon). One news outlet is proposing to drive for five hours to interview me in front of a camera.

… But wait a minute. There is no actual story here. Mr. Gray made it up. These Johnny-come-latelys are writing a story about his story, and they haven’t bothered to check on its veracity. Now, any comment about his story is simply a POV, and all POVs are equal. (“[A]n effort should be made to broadcast the different points-of-view in any debate/development,” one journalist assures me.) The next round will bring stories about their stories about his story and produce yet more POVs even farther removed from the facts. Does it matter if a POV is based on false reasoning or conscious ideological blindness? Apparently not. And what if the trigger for the entire fantasy was based on the same?

Thus do global warming deniers dupe the media, and this is why they will always have an upper hand in the fictional “global warming debate.” It’s not a debate; it’s a public relations war. Continue reading →

Canaries in a Coal Mine

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This article appeared in Climbing, No. 208, on December 15, 2001. The magazine did a great job producing it; there were some excellent photos. I recommend getting a hold of a copy if you can … or maybe they’ll post it on their site … ?

I am posting it now because it is playing a role in an odd little tempest in a teapot that was initiated by the Telegraph in England on Sunday. I hope to post another entry about that episode shortly.

I’m still quite happy with the article, even though I wrote it a long time ago. Obviously, the political situation has changed. The science still holds up pretty well, although I do point out a few minor errors below.

Canaries in a Coal Mine

As the Earth warms, its mountain glaciers are disappearing. How will climbers-and life-be affected?

By Mark Bowen

Topher Donahue, 29, has been climbing and hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park since his childhood. He remembers that Mills Glacier, at the base of the east face of Longs Peak, used to be covered in soft white snow year-round. Now, it reverts to hard gray ice every August.

Last September, he and some friends walked in to climb the short ice flows that form near the base of the east face. The climbs were in, but the glacier had changed significantly.

“We walked to the base of the wall without stepping on ice once,” he says. “It used to be that you walked for the last quarter-mile on ice.”

Other formerly permanent snowfields, near Jim’s Grove on the trail to Longs, and on the hills above Trail Ridge Road, now disappear completely for a few weeks every summer.

Gerry Roach of Boulder, Colorado, has climbed El Pico de Orizaba, the highest of Mexico’s three big volcanoes, once in each of the last five decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, he recalls, Orizaba’s south side was covered with soft, sun-cupped snow. Now, you can climb to the summit without stepping on snow once. He says the loss of ice is “dramatic” on all three volcanoes, and says he almost cried 10 years ago when he saw how fast it was going on Iztaccíhuatl, the third highest. “I probably won’t go back to that mountain again, it was such a mess. Everything was dripping. I don’t know whether we’ll live to see [the snow’s] complete disappearance, but it will be mostly gone in our lifetime. That’s sad, because volcanoes look prettier with a snowcap on them.”

In 1970, when Roach first climbed Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador, he followed the route Edward Whymper had used in 1880 on the first ascent. By the time he returned in 1981, however, the snowfields below the prominent “red wall” had retreated to reveal what he calls “a very nasty rock slope” of slabs covered with loose rock. Thus, on about the 100th anniversary of Whymper’s ascent, his route fell out of favor, not only because of the rock slope but also the seracs and crevasses that had opened up on the shriveling glacier above. The hut was moved west to give better access to the Direct Route. Since then, even that route has changed: You used to walk straight up the tongue of the Thielmann Glacier, but it, too, has retreated, and its margin has steepened. Climbers are forced along its edge, with the Scylla of rock cliffs on one side and the Charybdis of hanging seracs on the other. The approach has been changed twice in the last year-and-a-half. Both new lines are more dangerous than the original. Continue reading →

Free Lance-Star Op-ed

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Here’s a piece I wrote for the Sunday “Viewpoints” section of the Fredericksburg, Virginia, Free Lance-Star. It appeared on August 23rd and was picked up by the McClatchy wire service, so it turned up in a few other places as well, the most gratifying to me being the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette, at pretty much ground zero in the fight against Big Coal. This is the draft I originally submitted, with links to provide some background. The draft wasn’t much changed in the editing room. They gave it the pithy title, “Averting Catastrophe: A Tale of Censorship, Civil Disobedience, Greed, and Willful Ignorance.” (As Jim Hansen explains near the end of this piece, he actually prefers the phrase — and the philosophy — of civil resistance to civil disobedience, and he takes this from Gandhi, whom he has been reading lately.)

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Our planet’s preeminent climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, faces the very real threat of spending a year in jail. He and thirty others were arrested in June (see this too), during an act of civil resistance at an elementary school in West Virginia where children learn their lessons at the defenseless edge of the 2,000-acre mountaintop-removal mine on Coal River Mountain, owned by Richmond-based Massey Energy. The school “stands as the prime example of just how far this country has gone to support its addiction to coal, and just how far Massey Energy will go to support its profit margin,” wrote the resisters on the day of the arrests. “The West Virginia Supreme Court has joined Governor Manchin in turning their backs on these children, subjecting them to expanded operations within 300 feet of the school … . According to Massey’s own documents, [the expanded] operations will add over three tons of coal dust to the air the children breathe every school year during their most formative years.”

Hansen’s prospects for a fair trial don’t look good. For Big Coal, and Massey in particular, have undue influence in West Virginia courts. The state supreme court has twice overturned a $50 million jury verdict against Massey, and in each case the deciding vote was cast by a judge with an alarmingly close relationship to the company’s CEO, Don Blankenship. After the first vote, photographs surfaced of justice Elliott Maynard dining with Blankenship on the French Riviera and in Monaco. When the court reconsidered the case, justice Brent Benjamin, who tipped the scales the second time, failed to recuse himself even though Blankenship had spent over $3 million on television advertisements for his election campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled this a violation of the Constitution. The case will be reconsidered again.

The schoolchildren, their parents, and their neighbors near the mine on Coal River Mountain face other dangers from this most destructive form of coal mining: a 2.8 billion-gallon sludge dam stands 400 yards upstream from the school, and Massey has an egregious history of water pollution. In 2000, a break in a dam at a Massey mine in Kentucky released 250 million gallons of coal slurry and killed wildlife as far as sixty miles downstream. Last year the company agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit by the Environmental Protection Agency over more than 4,600 documented cases of illegal dumping into Appalachian waterways.

But it was not only concern for local citizens and ecosystems that took Jim Hansen to West Virginia. For almost three decades, he has been warning of a threat that stands to kill many times the human population of all Appalachia and eliminate perhaps half the other species on Earth: human-induced climate change. Coal represents the single largest component of that threat and the one that could push the planet across the threshold where catastrophic change cascades out of our control. Amazingly, Jim first warned about coal in 1981, when he and some colleagues published a landmark paper in Science that marks the beginning of his still unbroken string of accurate predictions. It is chilling to read the paper today, not only for its prescience, but also because it raises the same difficult issues we now face, which today loom three decades larger, for we’ve done nothing to address them but talk. The scientists pointed out that if humans were to burn all the available oil and natural gas on the planet, we would probably increase the atmospheric abundance of carbon dioxide by less than half the preindustrial amount: to a dangerous, but perhaps not catastrophic level. They added, however, that there is enough coal to double the pre-industrial amount at least. The informed scientific community agrees almost unanimously that this spells catastrophe. The paper suggested, therefore, that the “key fuel choice is between coal and alternatives that do not increase atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Massey Energy has applied for permits to remove more than ten square miles of a ridge on Coal River Mountain that would make a fine location for a wind farm. As the ridge is destroyed, this renewable opportunity disappears with it. Such are the choices we have made for the past twenty-eight years in the face of increasingly undeniable evidence that they will change the face of our planet and burn large holes in the web of life.

Politicians have rarely been comfortable with Jim Hansen’s words. When the 1981 paper led to the first story about global warming ever to appear on the front-page of the New York Times, the Reagan administration cut Jim’s budget and warned other scientists that they would lose funding if they based their work on his computerized climate model. All three Republican administrations since 1981 have censored him, and while Democrats haven’t been quite as bare-knuckled, he and Al Gore enjoyed frosty relations for more than ten years, for example, after Gore, as vice president, pressured him to make the science seem stronger and more dire than it was at the time. (Today’s science shows, incidentally, that Gore was mostly right.)

Now Jim has parted ways with the Obama administration by calling for a ban on mountaintop removal mining and on new coal-fired power plants unless they capture and store the carbon dioxide they emit. He objects strongly, moreover, to the American Clean Energy and Security Act, sponsored by congressmen Waxman and Markey, pointing out that it contains so many concessions to Big Coal and other special interests that its effect on future climates will be nil: it is just more talk.

We should listen when a man of Jim’s impeccable integrity, who has been right for thirty years, is willing to lay his freedom on the line. He knows that we are perilously — perhaps hopelessly — close to the edge. Is coal so important that we will compromise the lives of our children and grandchildren for it? And is this how our democracy should work?

 Comments welcome.