Turning up the heat

IN 1998, an American Petroleum Institute memo ambitiously titled “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan” envisioned a day when promoters of curbs on fossil fuel emissions will be seen as “out of touch with reality.” “Victory will be achieved,” advised the memo leaked to the New York Times, “when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom for average citizens.” In 2003, GOP political consultant Frank Luntz, coauthor of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America,” issued a 16-page memo on the environment that seemed taken directly from the institute’s playbook. One section, “Winning the Global Warming Debate,” described how fellow Republicans could effectively distract U.S. citizens from the overwhelming juggernaut of scientific evidence that global warming is human-caused, or anthropogenic. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue,” Luntz urged.

Call it whatever you want -- “A Contract on the Earth” springs to mind -- but the campaign of misinformation about the science underpinning global warming is breathtaking in the extent and degree of its excesses. As the New York Times recently reported, Bush administration political appointees, former energy industry lobbyists and others with no scientific credentials have censored, screened, bowdlerized or delayed the publication of climate change research that runs contrary to the stance of skepticism. “The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed,” James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a speech at the University of Iowa in 2004. “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now.”

Against this backdrop, two new books, “The Weather Makers” and “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” make global warming and its causes virtually impossible to doubt. In “The Weather Makers,” respected Australian biologist Tim Flannery, who admits having been something of a global warming skeptic, casts his considerable weight in support of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, a highly contentious and competitive group of individuals who, nevertheless, have come to agreement. In documents published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and many other organizations, Flannery writes, these scientists report that global warming is real, that it’s probably getting worse and that humans are directly responsible for a significant portion of the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and other byproducts of fossil fuels, that are warming the planet.

“The Weather Makers” is written in 35 short chapters of the sort that make for good subway or bus reading. each addressing a different aspect of global warming, which is, to put it mildly, a complex issue. Flannery also displays a gift for analogy. In explaining a theory that humankind probably began changing the Earth’s climate much earlier than generally supposed (as long as 8,000 years ago, when the human population was minuscule) by dramatically increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he writes that “as humans cut and burned forests around the globe, their activities acted like a hand casting feathers on a set of scales: Eventually, enough feathers piled up to tip the balance.” In discussing the runaway effect of climate change -- how something as thin as the atmosphere can set something as dense as the ocean into thermal overdrive -- he writes, “[W]e must imagine something like a VW Beetle pushing a tank down a slope. It takes effort to get the monster moving, but when it shifts there’s little the Beetle can do to alter the tank’s trajectory.”

Similarly, Flannery has a keen eye for details, choosing some that illuminate the immense role that global warming has played, and will continue to play, in geopolitical affairs -- how the ongoing tragic struggle in Darfur, for instance, has as its root cause ever-increasing CO2 emissions, which have ushered in a permanently dry climate, prompting migration and subsequent competition, resentment and now genocidal conflict between ethnic groups in western Sudan.

He calls global warming the preeminent issue of our time, trumping all others, and he is quick to flatten as fallacy the uncertainty embraced by the only two governments not to sign the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions -- the United States and Australia. He addresses with optimism the changes that must be undertaken but acknowledges that the greatest challenge is how we think about the problem. The battle, as the petroleum institute, Luntz and others shrewdly anticipated years ago, is for the minds of Americans. In fact, he notes, “one of the biggest obstacles to making a start on climate change is that it has become a cliche before it has even been understood.”

Exactly so. But our thinking isn’t going to change if our hearts aren’t changed, and our hearts won’t be changed, I’m afraid, by the often jumpy and scattershot chapters of Flannery’s book. This is not just a quibble -- like deducting style points for the manner in which someone shouts “Fire!” in a burning building. For example, the chapter “Model Worlds” jumps from the science of computer modeling to skepticism about global warming without providing proper emphasis. His points about skepticism thus appear as mere asides and a crucial idea gets lost -- that skeptics have long used modeling as a bogey man, overemphasizing its limitations and downplaying its strengths, which are as robust as those of any other tool in science.

The book is full of information about such exotica as “Gobiodon species C,” a coral-dwelling fish whose habitat is disappearing so quickly that it may become extinct before it can properly be named, or the rare, male New Zealand tuatara, “the only reptile to lack a penis (tuataras mate by placing their cloacas together).” Against the rattle of clacking cloacae, some of the signal is lost. Don’t get me wrong: Reading “The Weather Makers” is like hearing a terrific and powerfully absorbing lecturer on a topic that concerns us all. The moments of confusion, however, tend to undermine Flannery’s cause, which, if we are to take what he says in earnest, is too important not to have gotten just right.

By contrast, Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” is a small miracle of concision, gaining by its brevity and its plan of attack a rhetorical power that elucidates, rises to meet and deftly answers the historic crisis in which we find ourselves. Each chapter is part of a larger narrative, a loose travelogue that includes the Alaskan interior, Iceland and the Greenland ice sheet, but, more important, these narrative elements, while drawing us in, always keep a larger purpose in sight -- to offer the clearest view yet of the biggest catastrophe we have ever faced.

In the first half of the book, which grew out of her three-part series in the New Yorker last spring, Kolbert summons the facts about global warming, visiting researchers at the far ends of the Earth who have direct, immediate expertise in climate science and profiling some of the people affected by the vanishing ice pack, such as the residents of Shishmaref, Alaska, or Dutch architects who have built “amphibious homes” in anticipation of rising sea levels. She marshals details to reveal the signal amid the noise of climatic variability, showing how the right tool -- the study of permafrost, for instance -- makes the fact of global warming as clear as day. The second half is organized around a single thematic goal: to gently but firmly dislodge us from our sense of historical exceptionalism. The hubris of current policymakers, Kolbert suggests, will be revealed, if not utterly laid low.

She reminds us that from a paleoclimatologist’s perspective, we owe all human civilization to a relatively brief and stable moment in the sun, during which time (the last 10,000 years) ice retreated and we crawled out of caves, invented agriculture and writing, and started building cities. The classic Mayan civilization and Egypt’s Old Kingdom are among those that rose and fell because of drastic climate changes. The difference now is that we understand that we are at a turning point. Kolbert places us squarely upon that threshold. Will we be lauded by future generations for heeding the advice of our best scientific minds, or remembered hereafter as counterexamples -- as paragons of hubris, of a colossal failure of the imagination?