“There are many true things that are not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things, which although they are false it is expedient for the people

to believe otherwise.”

- Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 426 A.D.

Car salesmen and burger tycoons have sabotaged the most important decision of our generation.

As the highly-anticipated Copenhagen climate summit limps toward indecision, the largest money-making corporations on the planet privately celebrate their ability to undermine science and hijack the international political process.

The US – the greatest historic source of greenhouse gases – set the tone of duplicity in Copenhagen by offering “provisional targets” (translation: fantasy targets) and “politically binding” agreements (translation: non-binding) and by replacing the 1990 greenhouse gas baseline with a 2005 baseline (to make the non-binding, fantasy “targets” sound more impressive.) China played along with this deception by offering to “cut emissions … relative to economic growth,” known as “carbon intensity reductions.” (Translation: no reduction at all). China’s actual emissions, and the world’s emissions, will continue to increase through the next decade.

A year ago – as research data showed rates of melting ice and rising methane accelerating faster than the most extreme International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections – it appeared that Copenhagen represented humanity’s last chance to reverse global warming. Now, decisive action appears to be melting with the ice sheets. Apologists for business-as-usual have forged scientific rigor into “uncertainty,” spun lies into doctrine, offered frivolous quibbling for serious debate, masqueraded corruption as compromise, and finally delivered double-talk for real commitment.

Like Augustine – who sixteen centuries ago rationalized war and torture for his bosses in the Roman state religion – our own modern sophists spin truth, rationalize crime, and scorn genuine science. Like ancient patricians, modern corporate royalty devise evermore extravagant comforts for themselves while banishing dispossessed multitudes to the evaporating elements. And how did the wealthiest captains of industry sabotage the climate action that might have saved our progeny from a century of chaos? As history has taught us: follow the money.

Crime of the Epoch

“ Ecology… if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind, would endanger the assumptions and practices accepted

by modern societies.

Paul Sears (1964)

Four years ago, in December 2005, the IPCC published an upbeat “Report on demonstrable progress under the Kyoto Protocol,” showing European nations on course, as promised, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by eight percent from the 1990 baseline levels.

Meanwhile, in the United States, polls conducted by the University of Maryland and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that over 70 percent of US citizens supported the Kyoto Treaty and carbon emission reductions. The developed nations, responsible for the scale of global warming, appeared ready to act.

However, behind the scenes, in private board rooms and industry front groups, a powerful cadre of fossil fuel executives had a different and darker plan: Sabotage Kyoto and undermine the best scientific minds of our era. Like any other corporate project, these executives began by striking a budget.

In 2008, the U.S. oil and gas industry added $46 million to its existing $82 million lobby budget, specifically to undermine climate action leading up to Copenhagen. This massive crusade – $128 million, 770 companies, and 2,340 lobbyists – set out to control the U.S. Congress and confuse the unsuspecting public. Meanwhile, American coal companies invested $40 million to sell the illusion of “clean coal,” while failing to install sequestration technology in even one single power plant.

The campaign to deny human-based global warming and spread misinformation about climate science has been documented by hundreds of journalists, including David Adam and George Monbiot at the UK Guardian, Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker magazine, and Andrew Revkin at The New York Times. Internet sites such as The Royal Society, OpenSecrets, PR Watch, DeSmogBlog, and Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets have exposed the denialist tricks and tracked money back to the corporations that funded them. A new book by DeSmogBlog writers James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, Climate Cover Up, documents the historic facts of this dark crusade.

The campaign to sow confusion about global warming has been funded by ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, BP, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Fuels Association, coal companies, and automobile companies such as General Motors, DaimlerChryler, and Ford. According to records kept by Bob Ward at the London School of Economics, Exxon has continued to subsidize lies about global warming for three years since promising to stop.

The attack on modern science resembles Seventeenth Century attempts to deny the cosmological observations of Copernicus and Galileo, and Nineteenth Century attempts to deny the biological observations of Lamarck and Darwin. Whereas the status quo once burned annoying scientists at the stake, they now bury them under a tsunami of public relations hype. 

Science by slogan

“… one of the most disgusting stories ever hidden about corporate disinformation …proof of an intergenerational crime.”

Dr. David Suzuki, geneticist, ecologist on Climate Cover-Up

Rather than use their resources to support data collection, the denial campaign invested in advertising slogans and public relations pitch artists. They created phony “citizens” groups, fake “green” astroturf organizations such as the Greening Earth Society (Western Fuels); the Global Climate Coalition (Exxon, Shell, GM); and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (Canadian Gas Association) with the stated goal to “counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes.” They hired anyone who could pass as a “scientist” or “environmentalist,” as long as they repeated the industry talking points.

Frank Luntz – a U.S. public relations mercenary, who once concocted slogans for embattled pharmaceutical companies, fast food chains, and the U.S. Republican Party – became one of the chief script writers in the crusade against global warming science. In 2007, after being accused of being “Orwellian,” Luntz told Terry Gross on National Public Radio that “to be Orwellian is to speak with absolute clarity,” a lie typical of Orwell’s “doublespeak.” Luntz advised the fossil fuel industry that the term “global warming … connotes catastrophic consequences,” and he taught spokespersons to say “climate change,” which presented “less of an emotional challenge.” He tutored them to call oil drilling “energy exploration” and to exploit common scientific dialogue as “uncertainty,” and to “portray the scientific community as divided.”

Key early denialist sloganeers – S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, and industry front groups Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute – had previously worked in tobacco industry campaigns to help conceal the health effects of cigarettes. There, they pioneered the tactics of creating phony “citizen” groups, avoiding real science journals, and sowing public confusion by parading hired “scientists” before sympathetic journalists.

Certain media began to restate oil industry slogans to cast doubt on global warming. On February 15, 2009, Washington Post columnist George Will repeated in print the falsehood that global sea ice was expanding. In Canada, Lawrence Solomon – in the National Post on January 12, 2007 – misrepresented the views of Cambridge University scientist Dr. Nigel Weiss, a past president of the UK Royal Society. Even Burger King fast-food restaurants got into the act. In the state of Tennessee in the U.S., a dozen Burger King restaurants displayed signs proclaiming, “Global warming is baloney.” In this crusade, science appeared unnecessary wherever slogans could confuse the gullible public.

Real science

For almost two centuries, human scientists have known that carbon-dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere warm the earth. Joseph Fourier hypothesized the effect in 1824, John Tyndall proved it true thirty years later, and Svante Arrhenius predicted global warming from industrial carbon emissions in 1894, during the coal era.

In the 1950s, Roger Revelle and James Lovelock possessed the data about human carbon heating the atmosphere. Greenpeace had the data in the 1970s, when we first raised the issue. Science demonstrates that the current impact, or “forcing,” caused by human greenhouse gases is equal to about two and a half watts of energy per square-metre of Earth’s surface. James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies compares this heat force to stringing six 0.4-watt coloured light bulbs over every square meter of the earth’s surface, 3-million-billion bulbs burning year around, giving off heat, 24 hours a day. This represents the heat generated by human carbon in the atmosphere, melting the ice sheets, releasing methane, and generating forest loss, drought, and increased fire.

The November Scientific American provides a special issue on climate science, including “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense,” as “evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate.”

A report this year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows:

1. Global greenhouse gas emissions rising faster than previously expected

2. Ocean and forest absorption of carbon dioxide is weaker than hoped

3. Self-reinforcing warming from methane, deteriorating forests, and other feedback effects is now occurring.

The World Meteorological Organization reports that in 2008, human CO₂ levels in the atmosphere grew at a record pace, 2 parts per million (ppm) over 2007 reaching 385.2 ppm.

The Standing Committee on Antarctic Research – comprised of over 100 scientists from 13 countries – has issued their 2009 report, showing CO₂ and Methane levels higher and increasing faster than at any time in the last 800,000 years. The loss of Antarctic sea ice is directly affecting krill and penguin populations.

Meanwhile, 26 of the world’s most imminent scientists from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, U.S., and Australia – including Dr. Robert Bindschadler at NASA; Dr. Hans J. Schellnhuber from Germany’s Potsdam Institute; Dr. Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Dr. Konrad Steffen, director of the Swiss Institute of Technology; and 22 other impeccable, senior world scientists – released the Copenhagen Diagnosis: An update of the latest climate science. The report shows that ice is melting faster than previously predicted and that claims of recent global cooling are wrong. These scientists warn humanity:

1. Surging greenhouse gas emissions: CO₂ emissions in 2008 are nearly 40% higher than 1990.

2. Recent warming trends demonstrate human-based warming: The temperature increase rate over the last 25 years is 0.19°C / decade, matching predictions. Despite a recent decrease in solar forcing, the warming trend continues and short-term fluctuations do not change this underlying trend.

3. Accelerated melting of ice sheets, polar caps, and glaciers: Satellite measurements show “beyond doubt” that the Greenland & Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate.

4. Rapid sea-ice decline: Summer melt of arctic ice has accelerated to 40% beyond the average of predictions from IPCC climate models.

5. Sea level rise greater than expected: The global average sea rise of 3.4 mm/yr over 15 years is 80% above previous IPCC predictions. The scientists now expect at least 1-2 meters of sea rise this century. (A complete runaway ice melt would raise sea level by over 75 meters.)

6. Action delay risks additional deterioration of ice sheets, forest, and rain patterns. A business-as-usual scenario increases the risk of runaway global heating.

7. Turning point needed soon: To avoid catastrophic heating, average annual per-capita emissions must shrink 80-95% below developed nations emissions in 2000.

Human industrial fossil fuel burning has already triggered hotter global temperatures, forest die-off, drought, fires, and methane releases. These and future disasters remain the legacy of the denial crusaders. Future generations living with the consequences will judge these anti-science miscreants as we now judge those who once denied that the earth orbited the sun or those who argued that slavery was necessary for the economy. The climate deniers will go down in history as traitors to the planet.

In the 1970s, during the early years of Greenpeace, we used to light-heartedly describe the emerging environmental movement as “a 2000-year post-industrial mop up operation.” That now sounds like optimism.

The average global temperature increase of human

industrialism, caused primarily by the burning of

coal and oil and secondly by the destruction of the

world’s carbon capturing forests.

Note that short term fluctuations — up or down —

do not significantly change the modern warming trend.

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This cycle of forest collapse represents a critical feedback loop that will likely drive warming for centuries and usher in a sweeping transformation of human civilization.  

Worldwide forest destruction – due to logging, human habitat sprawl, and clearing for crops such as soybeans and palm oil – continues at a net loss of about 13 million hectares each year. Many cleared forests are burned on the site. Meanwhile, trees die or grow slower due to global warming. Declining forests absorb less CO₂ and release more carbon.

Guarani activists Noemi Cruz in Argentina forest, homeland of the Wichi and Guarani indigenous people, destroyed for soya agribusiness. 

Drought, heat, and fires

Drought and heat are making forests more susceptible to insects and fire. David Gilbert, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia will publish a study this year that shows forests have less biomass and increased mortality in warmer earth conditions.

Due to warmer temperatures, bark beetles have attacked boreal forests in the US, Canada and Russia. In western Canada, where I live, over nine million hectares of pine forest have been decimated by beetles, due to warmer conditions. Stands of simply dryer trees make forests more vulnerable to fire. Carbon, sequestered by forests over centuries, can be released in a few days by wildfires, as experienced in southern Australia in recent years. Fires are increasing worldwide and now contribute about a third as much atmospheric carbon as burning fossil fuels.

Previous climate projection models expected forests and oceans to absorb much of humanity’s carbon pollution. The data now shows, however, that oceans and forests are less effective than the models predicted. The oceans’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide has weakened since 1981, due to increased warmth and carbonic acid buildup. Research published this year shows that forests absorb less carbon due to industrial deforestation and forest death caused by the warming.

Deforestation is already responsible for 20 percent of global warming, and some boreal forests are now transforming from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Dr. J. Michael Waddington at McMaster University in Canada says, “Forests we once hoped would sequester carbon, now appear to be a ticking carbon bomb.”

Biofuels and soybeans

Climate scientists emphasize the importance of preserving tropical forests, the world’s most efficient storehouses of carbon. Unfortunately, tropical forests are being cleared daily to grow biofuels, palm oil, and soybeans. Peter Frumhoff, head of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate program equates replacing tropical forests with biofuel plantations to “weatherizing your house while keeping your windows open.”

In Brazil, soybean cropland has been doubling every five years. In Argentina, I have witnessed bulldozers operating like Panzer divisions, leveling and burning forests at the rate of about 200,000 hectares each year. In Indonesia, palm oil production tripled during the 1990’s and has tripled again in the last decade. In all cases, forests are destroyed, species go extinct, and indigenous forest communities are displaced into urban slums, all to supply cattle feed, food, and biofuels to rich consumers in industrialized countries.

Holly Gibbs, at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment has analyzed satellite images to track deforestation and climate change. Gibbs’ data show that between 1980 and 2000, over 80 percent of new cropland came from rainforests, most from intact forests, “contrary to what some biofuel proponents have suggested. This is a major concern,” Gibbs said.

“If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics,” says Gibbs; “we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks.” She believes that environmental disaster looms “just around the corner without more thoughtful energy policies that consider the ripple effects on tropical forests.” Tropical forests and their soils harbor over 340 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to more than 40 years worth of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Tipping points

The world’s leading climatologists met in Copenhagen in March and urged governments to act decisively next December, when they attempt to replace the Kyoto climate treaty. Scientists have observed that global warming and ice melting are proceeding faster than the most extreme scenarios had predicted. The scientists expressed concern that deforestation and shrinking forests could aggravate this trend and lead to runaway global warming.

Climatologists, who once warned that humanity must limit global warming to 2°C to avoid risk of runaway feedback cycles, now believe that such hope is a lost cause. The average earth climate has warmed by 0.75°C already, and climatologists expect we will reach the 2° threshold by 2050. According to Chris Jones at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, that increase could result in a loss of 20 to 40 % of the Amazon rainforest.

Furthermore, research shows that the impact of climate change is non-linear. After the 2°C threshold, we will experience not a steady decline, but a dramatic shift in ecosystem damage, forest dieback, species loss, and permafrost melt, releasing CO₂ and methane. A 5°C warming would likely trigger ecosystem collapse and conditions uninhabitable by present human civilization.

A recent scientific paper, shows that this non-linear response is due to the perilous interaction between tipping point elements. The climatologists predict that when one element tips – forest die-off or methane release, for example – other critical factors can be pushed beyond their tipping points. Scientists in Copenhagen also revealed that drying peat bogs add to the problem by increasing respiration, oxidising the peat, producing heat, and releasing CO₂, another dangerous tipping point and feedback loop. 

Fragmentation

Janet Cotter, with the Greenpeace Science Unit at Exeter University attended the meetings and reported that climate models still do not adequately link human deforestation with forests dying from fires, heat, and drought. Researchers are attempting to put these factors into their models now, and to make educated predictions. Keep in mind, past predictions have been too conservative, underestimating the rates of climate change.

Some forestry scientists expressed the opinion that there may be no point in conserving forests destined to disappear with climate change. This view suggests we might be better off to concentrate on protecting forests that are climate resilient.

“The forest science community is still dominated by foresters rather than ecologists,” says Cotter, “and the opinion of not protecting forests may be biased in favour of logging these regions.” On the other hand, forest ecosystem science shows that fragmentation by logging makes forests more vulnerable to drought. “Preserving healthy forest ecosystems,” says Cotter, “regardless of their decline due to warming, makes these forests less vulnerable. The analysis of abandoning certain forests was challenged.”

A scientific paper from the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences (Malhi, et. al. 2009) examines the likelihood of an Amazon forest die back and conversion to grassland, a scenario that may be averted by preventing deforestation and associated fire.

“The dieback of the forests of E. Amazonia in the 21st century is far from inevitable but remains a distinct possibility,” the authors report. They suggest that reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions represents the first priority to minimize this risk, but add, “Just as human activity and the spread of fire may be critical in triggering a breakdown of forest resilience and consequent dieback, direct intervention to maintain forest area and limit the spread of fire offers the potential to maintain forest resilience and avoid any such tipping point. … Such intervention may be enough to navigate E. Amazonia away from a possible tipping point, beyond which extensive rainforest would become unsustainable.”

The report concludes, “Maintaining forest cover would not only be a strategy for climate-change mitigation, regional development, and biodiversity conservation but also a potential strategy for adaptation,” as the Amazon climate inevitably changes.

This is it

Forests represent vast stores of carbon. Forest destruction releases that carbon, increases global warming, and leads to forest dieback, a vicious cycle. Deforestation magnifies climate change impacts by fragmenting forests, making them drier and more vulnerable to drought-induced fire. The ultimate risk is runaway climate change, leading to loss of biodiversity and vital ecosystem services.

Last fall, Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev, in a European study on ecosystems, reported that deforestation reduces the value of Earth’s natural capital – carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water filtration, and so forth – by up to $5 trillion every year. That’s five thousand billion dollars of value lost every year, compared to the recent global financial crash that eroded about $1.5 trillion in paper wealth.

Intact primary forests require priority protection at the UN Climate Summit in December. This meeting in Copenhagen may be humanity’s last chance to take climate change seriously. Human civilization is teetering on the brink of the greatest natural disaster in our history: runaway global warming. Seventeen years of Kyoto drafts, conferences, dithering, and handshakes has produced zero net decrease in human carbon emissions. Even with some notable successes in Europe, humanity as a whole has not yet even reduced the growth rate of emissions or forest destruction. We can’t afford another dud or more climate change denial.

It is already too late to avoid some chaos caused by our reckless consumption of Earth’s biophysical systems. We may avoid absolute disaster, but only if we are absolutely serious. Our decisions now must be wise and courageous. We must drastically reduce carbon emissions immediately, and we must preserve every square centimetre of our planet’s forests.

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Climate & Forests: Research links:

Hadley Centre research presented at the Copenhagen Science conference.

Report of the Copenhagen Science Congress including threats to Amazon forest: Kintisch, E. 2009. Global warming: Projections of climate change go from bad to worse, scientists report Science: 1546-1547. 20 March. [Science website requires subscription or fee per article].

Abstracts from the Copenhagen Science Congress