(June 13, 1997)

Facing the starkly apocalyptic prospect of nuclear war, citizens across the planet in the 1980s rallied against nuclear weapons, a movement which hugely contributed to the end of the cold war. A similar yet in many ways far more difficult challenge is upon us now.

Unlike nuclear war, this apocalypse is already in progress, but moving in slow motion so it is difficult to see. And unlike nuclear weapons, a horrendous and exotic technology easily divorced from everyday life, the source is this apocalypse is mundane and pervasive.

Our modern conveniences become necessities, our cars and furnaces and electricity, are sending up a cloud into the atmosphere as menacing as the mushroom, but far less visible. The energy that powers our lives is heating up our climate. The crisis is not tomorrow, but today. On a slippery slope well lubricated by fossil fuels, we are sliding into a kind of hell on earth. If we do not perceive it and respond in a way that reaches to the source of the problem, the continuum of catastrophe will slip toward worst case scenarios. We must act now.

Those with any doubt should read Ross Gelbspan's new book, "The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate" (1997, Addison-Wesley). Not only does this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist detail the overwhelming weight of new scientific evidence for climate change, already apparent in weird weather, disease outbreaks and ecosystem changes -- He also uncovers why the biggest story on the planet is not the top story on the evening news, a relentless and unconscionable disinformation campaign waged by the world's fossil fuel industries. Their purposive obfuscation of the facts resembles nothing so much as the tobacco industry's long deception, except it is not just the health of customers at stake, but that of the entire planet.

Gelbspan has a far more drastic solution, but perhaps the only one equal to the crisis -- Phase out fossil fuel burning in 10 years, and replace it with climate-friendly renewable energy. That step is well within our means, the author says. And not only could renewable energy provide all the services we gain today from fossil fuels, Gelbspan says -- It would "create a huge economic boom. In very short order you would see the renewable energy industry eclipse high tech as the central driving engine of growth of the global economy."

I sat down with Gelbspan recently to talk about climate change, the science, solutions and politics. That conversation follows:

M: First I'd like you to briefly detail the emerging information about climate change. What's been coming out the last couple of years?

G: There are five bodies of evidence. When put together, they create a pretty irrefutable case.

First, a panel of the world's 2,000 leading climate scientists who report to the United Nations concluded at the end of 1995 that the planet is heating very rapidly, that statistics are rather staggering. The 10 hottest years in history have occurred since 1980. The five hottest consecutive years were '91-95. '95 is the hottest year on record. And the planet is heating at a faster rate than anytime in the last 10,000 years.=

This panel of scientists concluded that a large part of this heating is definitely due to our emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide from oil and coal. They also indicated an early stage of global warming is a much more unstable climate. The scientific term of choice is climate change. It has already begun. That involves altered rainfall patterns, much more severe precipitation events, more floods, more droughts, rising sea levels and so forth.

Another body of evidence comes, of all places, from the insurance industry. The world's property insurers are getting clobbered by this succession of extreme weather events that's taking place all over the globe. During the 1980s average losses to property insurers for weather-related disasters were $2 billion a year. In the 1990s they're $12 billion a year. The president of the Reinsurance Association of America said recently that unless something is done to stabilize the climate, it could very well bankrupt the industry.

A third body of evidence involves the spread of infectious diseases. This is primarily due to the fact that insects such as mosquitoes are now able to survive at altitudes and latitudes which were only a short time ago too cold to support their survival. As a result they are spreading yellow fever, dengue and malaria to populations that have never previously experienced them. A team of scientists from The Netherlands recently reported that at current rates of warming mosquito-borne diseases will increase tenfold in the tropics in the next century and a hundredfold in the temperate regions where we live, with about 80 million new cases of malaria alone each year.

Another body of evidence which I find very compelling has to do not with computer modeling and atmospheric studies or data analysis, but with actual changes to the planet itself. Let me tick off about seven or eight.

Most of the world's glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. The biggest glacier in the Peruvian Andes was shrinking at a rate of 14 feet a year 20 years ago. It is now retreating at a rate of 99 feet a year. Plants are migrating up the Alps to keep pace with the changing climate. Whole populations of fish, insects and birds are migrating north to seek stable temperatures. In the last three years three ice shelves have broken off of Antarctica as warming has been detected in the deep waters of the oceans around Antarctica. One was something like 50 by 28 miles (about the size of Rhode Island). This is very, very disturbing. Scientists have long said that would be an absolute bellwether benchmark of atmospheric warming.

In the northern forests in Canada the growth of the trees is beginning to flatten. The trees are becoming less robust because of more carbon dioxide and more insect attacks. In parts of southern Europe a desert is spreading through portions of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. Scientists a couple of months ago declared that prolonged drought punctuated by intense soil-eroding rains has become the norm rather than the exception (there).

The tundra in northern Canada and Alaska which has for thousands of years absorbed methane and carbon dioxide is now thawing and releasing those (greenhouse) gases back into the atmosphere. To me the most startling of these discoveries is that we have actually altered the timing of the seasons. Because of the build-up of atmospheric CO2, spring is now arriving a week earlier in the Northern Hemisphere than it did 20 years ago.

Put those bodies of evidence together with all these extreme weather events that have happened all over the world -- I have tracked about 120 in the last two years, more than one a week, all record-setters. You folks in the Northwest had these tremendous floods and ice storms. Bolivia had the worst floods in 30 years that destroyed half its crops. You had record flooding along the Ohio River, hell freezing over and thawing in North Dakota and Manitoba. In my own Boston we had a 60-degree Easter Sunday followed two days later by a 30-inch snowfall, the third biggest in Boston's history. Those are anecdotal. But when you put them together with all these bodies of evidence, the case is absolutely conclusive.

M: There's a point people don't understand. They go, "We've just had this very cold winter over the upper Midwest. We had big snowfalls last year. How could we be in global warming?"

G: It's very simple. As overall warming happens, it increases the evaporation of water. It expands the air to hold more water. Then when a normal atmospheric cycle takes place, if it's in winter it releases much more snow. If it's in warmer times, it releases much more rain. So you're getting much more precipitation in very severe and intense downpours. You're also getting altered patterns of drought. So places that were wet before are now very dry. Places that were dry are now getting much more rain. It's playing havoc with our traditional systems.

One consequence that is very troubling is that the rate of change of our climate vastly exceeds the rate at which ecosystems can adapt. The panel of UN scientists said that most of our ecosystems can adapt to a change of about one degree Celsius per century. In fact, we're looking forward to a change of three to four degrees Celsius in the next century unless we do something very rapidly to limit our greenhouse emissions.

M: And who really can understand the overall consequences of this? I don't think we have a clue.

G: We don't have a clue. They are talking about the potential rise of sea levels up to three feet over the next century. In fact they would continue to rise far beyond that time. It may be easier and far more instructive to think about climate instability, because that's really what's happening. So even if the average global temperature remained the same and summers became 10 degrees hotter and the winters became 10 degrees colder it would absolutely devastate the world's food supplies.

M: Ross, why aren't we seeing this headlined on the CBS Evening News? Why isn't it a banner story in the New York Times? What's going on here?

G: It's a real tough question, Patrick. I think it involves two elements. One is there has been a very effective and sustained disinformation campaign by the oil and coal industry to basically persuade the public that the issue is stuck in the limbo of scientific uncertainty, that it's not proven and there is no basis for us taking any action. That campaign has involved the use, especially by the coal industry, of about a half-dozen scientists who are skeptical about this. They are calling themselves "greenhouse skeptics." They are not particularly well-regarded by the mainstream scientific community. Nevertheless they have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed funding from oil and coal interests, from OPEC, from US, British and German coal, from Cyprus Minerals and so forth. Because of that they have had access to the media, and they have been able to maintain a relentless drumbeat of doubt in the public mind.

There is another reason beyond that, simply the larger human reaction of psychological denial. The prospect of a warmer, wetter world conjures images of storms, disease, heat and discomfort. That is very, very frightening and very threatening. The natural human reaction is to not want to believe it, to try to look away from it. As long as the oil and coal companies had their access to the media, the public was very relieved to hear global warming was a non-event.

M: You have a vignette in your book which is really stunning, about a three-night seminar at Harvard Medical School on the environmental consequences of human activities -- first evening well attended, second evening about half the crowd, third evening just a handful of folks. When the presenter went around to find out why, people said they found this overwhelming. So they went back to what they could deal with. Here you have people who are truly in an elite category, who should probably have the wherewithal to deal with these difficult circumstances. If people in this category can't deal with it, who can?

G: Absolutely, these are concerned, intelligent, public-service-oriented and sensitive people. But the main thing they told the professors was, "You're not giving us anything to do about it. And we can't live with that feeling of helplessness. So our only reaction is not to attend these seminars." It's very important that the general public gets the message there is something we can do about it that would benefit us all in many ways.

M: You've been touring the country talking about your book. What kind of reaction have you been getting?

G: I have been getting reactions that make me very frustrated. They are terrific. I have gotten very, very favorable reactions from the one group of people who I expect to be the harshest critics, journalists. Most of them have been very complimentary about ut the book. When I have given speeches to groups, and this is where my frustration comes in, they all say, "This is really important. Our own intuition confirms it, our recognition of the wacky weather that's been going on. What can we do about it?" And I don't know what to tell them.

M: It seems we've got to look to a political solution. You've already detailed how this major interest is holding back a political solution. You've also detailed how increasing numbers of industries, particularly insurance, are looking at this and saying, "This is bad for our business," and are starting to organize a response.

G: A lot of the banks are now coming on board with the issue. There was a stunning breaking of ranks in the oil industry (in May). The president of the US branch of British Petroleum made a major speech to Stanford University in which he said we are departing ting from the rest of the oil industry. We recognize that climate change is here. We recognize that we must begin to deal with it. And we are beginning to invest in a major solar facility. As a statement from that industry, it was a major breakthrough.

What we really need is this -- some political will and leadership to begin to basically rewire the world and replace all our gasoline-burning cars, oil-burning furnaces and coal-fired generating plants with renewable energy. Hydropower when it's appropriate, but windmills, fuel cells, solar panels, all these technologies can give us all the energy we need. I'm not talking about any decline in our current standard of living. The only thing that keeps them non-competitive is the fact they're still a boutique industry. As soon as they get up to levels of mass production and economies of scale, they will become competitive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis. What we need to do is jumpstart those industries.

The first thing that I would see domestically in the United States as a very manageable legislative mandate is this -- The federal government is right now spending about $25 billion a year to subsidize coal and oil. If those subsidies were diverted to renewables it would provide the lift-off boost to put them into the big league of global industry.

Another dimension is very important, relations between the developing world and the countries of the north. The next big pulse of carbon that's going to accelerate the warming of the planet will not be coming from the US, Japan and Western Europe. It will be coming from China, India, Mexico, Brazil, Eastern Europe and Latin America, all these economies that are struggling to keep ahead of the undertow of poverty. As a result, what has to happen is a transfer of these climate-friendly renewable technologies to these countries.

Unfortunately, most of the business community, which is operating on the free market principles of the global marketplace, sees the climate crisis as yet another opportunity to sell yet another category of goods to poor countries who can barely feed and educate their own poverty-stressed populations. It's not going to work. They cannot afford energy transitions.

Bill Ruckelshaus, who was the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Administration, and is currently CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries, said to me you have to sell this transfer of climate-friendly technologies not as a liberal do-good, give away program, but as a critical investment in our national security. I believe that is very important. There is a great line from an Argentine climate negotiator named Raul Estrada. He said recently, we are all adrift in the same boat and there is no way only half the boat is going to sink.

M: Where's Al Gore been on all this? He wrote a book about it. People had great hopes that he would do something. He supposedly an assistant president with more power than any vice president has had before. Where is he? What's he doing?

G: He has worked behind the scenes at some level with the insurers and with some of the bankers. He has kept a very low profile on the issue. I think the vice president is a very, very politically cautious individual. I personally am, and I know most of the environmental community is, very disappointed, both with Gore's lack of visibility and with the administration's own withdrawal, even from last summer.

Last summer they announced that they accept the science officially, and they were calling for certain emissions reductions by the time that the current climate treaty is concluded in December. Since then they have withdrawn. They have said they will opt for very much lower levels of emissions reductions. They have rolled forward the date at which they should start to the year 2013.

There is a third and most unconscionable retreat -- They have adopted the position of the oil companies and the OPEC nations that any emissions reduction that the US and the OPEC countries undergo must fall equally heavily on China, India, Mexico and Brazil. That is totally a non-starter. That is a strategy the oil interests have pursued throughout these negotiations. It is guaranteed to stalemate them, and is a recipe for failure. Yet the administration of which Vice President Gore is a part has embraced this position. It's very destructive.

M: You have proposed a pretty radical solution yourself, which is to phase out fossil fuel burning in 10 years. Do you think we can possibly do that?

G: The world right now is talking about emissions reductions of 5-10 percent and so forth. The science tells us we must cut our emissions by 60-70 percent if we are to restore the atmosphere to a hospitable state. I do not believe that piecemeal actions will do it. What has to happen has to happen on a very large scale. The solution has to be of the same order of magnitude as the threat itself. Can we do it? Certainly. This is a country that created an atomic bomb in two-and-one-half years and put a man on the moon in 10 years. So if there were political will, of course we could do it. There's no question about it.

What we don't understand is the incredible economic potential of such a move. The oil and coal industries tell us that something like a 50-percent emissions reduction would cost us five percent of our Gross Domestic Product. What they don't tell us is that the kind of energy transition I'm talking about would create a huge economic boom. It would create millions and millions of jobs all over the world. It would close the gap between the north and the south. In very short order you would see the renewable energy industry eclipse high tech as the central driving engine of growth of the global economy. Once we begin to understand we can both have more prosperity and bring our activities in line with limits of the planet, I think it could be accomplished in very short order.

M: I have a question about one of your proposed solutions, hydrogen fuel. The only byproduct of burning hydrogen is water vapor, but isn't water vapor a greenhouse gas?

G: Water vapor at lower levels doesn't go way up in the atmosphere and amplify warming. Hydrogen gas would be able to be made competitive. It could simply replace natural gas. It could be used to power our automobiles and airplanes and so forth. It's one of a variety of very viable energy sources that would not contribute to the warming of the planet.

M: Just to wrap up, you said in your book if we don't respond we are threatened with a major breakdown of systems, not only ecological, but political, and that democracy itself would probably not survive a century of harsh climate change.

G: That was said to me independently by two people, a Nobel laureate from MIT and also Bill Ruckelshaus, who told me that long before the systems of the planet collapse the institutions of democracy will buckle under the pressure of a succession of ecological emergencies. That is very easy to foresee when you see the spread of infectious diseases, disruptions in food supply, tremendous increase in environmental refugees from flooding and newly uninhabitable areas.

Even in the United States, scientists discovered last year that a prolonged drought could turn the wheatfields of Kansas and Nebraska into a desert of sand dunes in a decade. That is not the kind of climate in which democracy flourishes. It's the kind of climate in which you can very easily see the militarization of relief operations to keep social order, in which you can see a black market arising because of food shortages. It's very hard to see how a democracy could maintain itself in any kind of orderly fashion given these kinds of crises

M: What's up to us is to respond, to begin to talk about this and to bring to the foreground of our politics.

(To find out what you can do, contact The Atmosphere Alliance at atmosphere@olywa.net, 360-352-1763, or 2103 Harrison Ave NW #2615, Olympia, WA 98502.)

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