Inconvenient truths

PINOY KASI


Inconvenient truths
By Michael Tan
Inquirer

Last updated 01:00am (Mla time) 02/28/2007

AN Oscar award for a former US vice president? That’s what happened the other night, when “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Oscar for the best documentary. Technically, it was director Davis Guggenheim who won, but he handed the Oscar to Al Gore, the former vice president, who first produced the documentary. The film also won a best song award for Melissa Etheridge, who sang the film’s musical theme, “I Need to Wake Up.”

The documentary has reached the Philippines, and it has been shown in theaters and schools. I hear pirated copies are already circulating. But we probably have a long way to go yet to get more people aware of what climate change is. The Inquirer has produced some excellent materials on climate change, but I thought of adding more, and focusing on a less known issue: the politics behind climate change and how ideology was able to suppress science for many years.

Climate change

To understand what’s going on, let me try to translate the scientific jargon around climate change.

Just last month, the United Nations convened an international meeting and announced that the scientific evidence for climate change was unequivocal. The announcement made the front pages throughout the world, together with dire warnings on what Gore has called a “planetary emergency.”

Yet, somehow, I think climate change is still a problematic term because it seems so lame. After all, the weather changes constantly, and from our high school science subjects, we all know that the planet has gone through major climate changes in the past, several Ice Ages for example. So what’s the big deal about another climate change?

What’s alarming is that the current climate change is anthropogenic, a fancy word that means “made by humans.” This is the first anthropogenic climate change that has happened and it is on a scale that has already triggered a series of adverse consequences.

Life on the planet is possible because of the way we interact with the sun. Solar energy enters the atmosphere and heats up the earth, and some of this energy is eventually radiated back into space. There’s a delicate balance here: if we reradiate too much energy back into space, it would be too cold to sustain life; if we keep too much of the solar radiation, it would be too hot.

Human activities, especially in the last 200 years or so, have thickened the atmosphere, mainly by accumulating gases that we spew out -- mainly carbon dioxide from our burning of fossil fuels from our homes, cars and factories, as well as other gases such as methane (from activities like livestock farming and fossil fuel burning) and nitrous oxide (from fertilizers, fossil fuels and burning of forests and crop residues).

The results of global warming are already visible, the most obvious ones being heat waves and droughts. But there are other long-term consequences that interact with each other. For example, as oceans become warmer, the top layer sets off more energy, resulting in more frequent storms. Warmer water also holds more moisture, so the storms are more powerful, and more likely to cause flooding. We’ve certainly seen this in our part of the world, while the ferocity of hurricane “Katrina” in New Orleans helped make Americans realize what could happen in the future.

Global warming has its paradoxes. While some parts of the world see more flooding, others suffer from drought and desertification because rainfall patterns are disrupted and high temperatures result in more soil moisture evaporation.

Scientists have warned about many other problems resulting from global warming, from the bleaching and death of coral reefs to the emergence of “tropical” diseases in cold countries.

Denial river

When the experts declared last month that climate change was real, they cited evidence from voluminous studies that pored over everything, from historical records in China to weather bureau measurements of rainfall and temperature throughout the world. Yet conservatives, like the American Enterprise Institute, continued to argue that all this is alarmist. One British commentator called it “climate porn.”

Gore, in his book, pokes fun at these conservatives by quoting Mark Twain: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” a play on the way American southerners pronounce “denial” like “The Nile.”

But yes, denial from the likes of George W. Bush can be as powerful as the Nile. Gore minces no words when he writes: “One prominent source of disinformation on global warming has been the Bush-Cheney White House.” He goes on to describe how the US government tried to silence scientists who were warning about climate change. In 2001, Bush put lawyer Phillip Cooney in charge of environmental policy in the White House. Before he took that job, Cooney had worked for the American Petroleum Institute, taking care of an industry-funded campaign to discredit the global warming arguments.

On June 21, 2004, 48 Nobel Prize winners signed a statement accusing the Bush administration of distorting science to avoid facing up to climate change.

Why are conservatives so riled up about global warming? Mainly because they see the climate change issue as an attack on capitalism. After all, it is in the last two centuries, as capitalism developed, that we did so much harm to the atmosphere. And even for those who accept that there have been some undesirable consequences, capitalism will provide the answers. It’s a line Bush subscribes to, and the reason the US government did not sign the Kyoto Protocol a few years back, an international agreement where countries pledged to cut back on gas emissions. A statement from Bush in 2002 captures his sentiment with his suggestions on how climate change could be dealt with: “harness the power of markets, the creativity of entrepreneurs, and draw upon the best scientific research.”

It’s not surprising that these same conservatives often argue that there is no population problem. People are seen as resources, as consumers that allow malls and shopping centers to flourish. Locally, a variation we hear is that people are exportable, bringing in valuable foreign exchange. Let people reproduce as they wish and capitalism will take care of all of them.

This extreme ideological view of capitalism is prone to denial and to distorting science. When faced with figures linking population growth to poverty, poor health and environmental degradation, we get arguments like: “Did you know we can fit the entire population of the Philippines into Bohol?” or “But we will run out of people if we practice family planning. Who will then take care of our elderly?”

Whether climate change or population problem (and the two are so closely related), those who refuse to see, will not see. What’s so horrifying is knowing that entire countries, like the United States and the Philippines, are (mis)governed by leaders who prefer to live in denial when it’s more convenient than facing up to the truth.

Visit www.climatecrisis.net for more teaching and learning resources around climate change.