Advertisement

Has the new U.N. report turned Bill O’Reilly into an environmentalist?

Share

Don’t expect a wholesale rush on the part of climate change skeptics or deniers to embrace the idea that human beings are responsible for global warming. Expect instead a slow melting of resistance as scientists turn up the heat.

You’d like to think the new, alarming U.N. report on global climate change might provide a wake-up call to skeptics such as Republican Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, who once concluded a report attributing the existence of global warming to normal climate fluctuations by wondering whether “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

But no. On Monday, he dismissed the report as “another effort to scare people into believing in man-made global warming.”

Advertisement

Thankfully, Americans don’t buy his extreme take. They do believe global warming is a thing, but they aren’t persuaded just yet that it’s a critical problem.

One study found that that is partly attributable to conservative media’s dismissive coverage of the phenomenon. The Gallup Poll finds that 81% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans think the seriousness of global warming has either been correct or underestimated, while 68% of Republicans and only 18% of Democrats think the problem has been exaggerated.

The new U.N. report, released Monday in Yokohama, Japan, is a major compilation and analysis of scientific studies. Nearly 800 scientists from 70 countries contributed. But what do they know?

A lot.

It is not an easy slog, but what jumps out are the easy-to-grasp claims: Much damage has already been done. Polar ice is melting, sea levels are rising, oceans are more acidic, storms are more destructive, crop yields have already been depressed by rising temperatures. As my colleague Tony Barboza reported, “One of the panel’s most striking new conclusions is that rising temperatures are already depressing crop yields, including those of corn and wheat. In the coming decades, farmers may not be able to grow enough food to meet the demands of the world’s growing population.”

And there’s no getting around something else: Industrialized nations, with their reliance on fossil fuels and disproportionate greenhouse gas emissions, are inflicting unprecedented damage on non-industrialized poor nations, which have contributed little or nothing to the problem.

The report’s chapter on “Livelihoods and Poverty” spells out some of the challenges that poor people face thanks to messes other countries have made. (The top carbon-dioxide producing countries include China, the U.S., India and Russia.)

Advertisement

People who are poor and marginalized usually have the least buffer to face even modest climate hazards and suffer most from successive events with little time for recovery. … Climate change is an additional burden to people in poverty, and it will force poor people from transient into chronic poverty and create new poor.

The most extreme form of erosion of natural assets is the complete disappearance of people’s land on islands and in coastal regions. ... Densely populated coastal cities with high poverty such as Alexandria and Port Said in Egypt, Cotonou in Benin and Lagos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria are already affected by floods and at risk of submersion ... and small island states may become uninhabitable.

Yet, upper middle- and high-income households living in flood-prone areas or high-risk slopes frequently can afford insurance and lobby for protective policies, in contrast to poor residents. Loss of physical assets in poor areas after disasters is often followed by displacement due to loss of property.

How will the climate change deniers, the frackers, the fossil-fuel defenders grapple with the idea that some of the world’s richest nations are wreaking climatic havoc on poor ones?

By ignoring it, apparently.

I was prepared for conservative sites such as Drudge and Breitbart to trumpet the findings as a new form of “class warfare.” But they didn’t seem much interested in the report at all. Drudge posted a Guardian story based on a leaked version of the report a couple of weeks ago but didn’t seem to find the actual release on Monday newsworthy. I found no mention of the new report on Breitbart, either, but did come across an angry screed about taxpayer dollars being used to produce a climate change musical.

Would Fox News host Bill O’Reilly at least go after the report as an alarmist overreach?

Maybe a little. He did rap the report (starting at 2:36 in the video below) as “some kind of phantom global warming theory even if that theory might some day be valid.” (Love the locution.) And he insulted environmentalists as “self-righteous, arrogant and dumb.”

Advertisement

But unlike many “drill baby, drill” conservatives, O’Reilly has accepted the idea that the country might be better off losing its dependence on traditional energy sources, even if only as a way to undermine “villains like Putin” who “blackmail people with his fossil fuels.”

I wasn’t expecting him to criticize fellow conservatives for their defense of fossil fuels. “Everybody on the planet should be rooting for Tesla,” O’Reilly said, calling Elon Musk’s electric car “a game changer.”

“If Tesla can make a clean car, the entire automotive industry can,” O’Reilly said. “The air would be cleaner everywhere and our wallets thicker. … Many conservatives don’t believe in global warming and oppose alternative energy. I hope you guys rethink the energy part.”

You guys? That just melts my polar icecaps.

More from Robin Abcarian

robin.abcarian@latimes.com

Twitter: @robinabcarian

Advertisement
Advertisement