Last week Bill Moyers’ interviewed Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. It was the most informative discussion of the issue I have ever heard. If you didn’t see it, I urge you to go to billmoyers.com and watch it. You will come away feeling like the planet is in serious trouble and also that we can do something about it.
Leiserowitz is the kind of expert who uses understatement to make crucial points. With calm and ease he spoke of the crisis we are facing. The best science, he says, knows that if we keep going the way we are going, by 2050 global temperatures will rise between four and six degrees Celsius. To understand how serious that is he says to think of this rise, not in terms of weather temperatures, but of the temperature of the human body. Normal oral temperature is 98.6, He says if that rises a degree we feel bad, but we will still get up and go to work. If it rises two degrees we begin to feel really bad and will probably stay home. An increase of three degree and we begin to feel seriously ill, and anything beyond that can put us in the hospital.
That is how we should think about rising global temperatures. A degree makes a difference. Two degrees or more and things become very serious, the consequence of which is that our planet’s “sickness” manifests itself more and more in major natural catastrophe’s. In 2011, for example, there were eleven natural disasters that cost our economy a billion dollars in damage each, not to mention the loss of lives. And that was all before Hurricane Sandy last fall.
Leiserowitz also noted that his Project has found that there are “six” American publics with whom he and his colleagues are trying to communicate, from people who accept the crisis for what it is to people who still refuse to believe it exists. One encouraging fact is that the latter group is quite small, only about eight percent of the population. The real challenge is the large group in the middle who believe in climate change, but are apathetic about what can be done about it, or who choose not to think about it.
Some major players are not waiting for the public to get serious about the crisis, however. U.S. military leaders have concluded that climate change is now a national security issue. In response, to cite one example, the Navy launched the Great Green Fleet initiative, an effort to begin using bio-fuel for ships and jets on aircraft carriers, rather than pure petroleum based fuels. This effort is expected to spawn major private industries that will supply the Navy’s needs. You would think our political leaders would applaud this effort to reduce our nation’s dependency on foreign oil and reduce carbon emissions at the same time, but in the summer of 2012 Republican Senators John McCain and James Inhofe slipped in an amendment into the defense budget that blocked the Navy from spending money on bio-fuel as a rebuke to President Obama. Thankfully, after his re-election, the Senate revolted against this petty political gamesmanship and killed the amendment, with eleven Republicans voting with Democrats to do so.
This story tell us what can be done, what forces are at work to stop efforts to do something about the crisis, and also underscores a critical role we the public can play. We can let our representatives know we will not tolerate inexcusable childish behavior (think McCain and Inhofe) regarding this crisis. As Leiserowitz pointed out to Bill Moyers, storms don’t care about political affiliation. They destroy Republican and Democratic homes alike. We can also reject efforts by the fossil fuel industry to promote the lie that the science on climate change is uncertain. Leiserowitz said that this campaign is exactly the tactic the tobacco industry used for years to fight research that was uncovering the harmful effects of smoking. There is no debate about climate change, he says. What remains is to predict as best we can the consequences of climate change, where the worst effects will be, and what steps can be taken to lessen their impact.
Because groups like the U.S. military are actively working to save the planet, I think it is time all of us seriously think about ways we can waste less, use less, conserve more, and make purchases such as cars and homes that show we want to stop the careless ways we have inflicted harm upon the earth. Watch Bill Moyers interview Anthony Leiserwotz. I promise it will inspire you to want to do your part. And the truth is, we simply must, if we care at all about the earth and its resources.
