{"id":9812,"date":"2006-03-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-21T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/drowning-polar-bears"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:08:09","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:08:09","slug":"drowning-polar-bears","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/drowning-polar-bears","title":{"rendered":"Drowning Polar Bears"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are in the midst of a major effort by environmental activists, sympathetic scientists, and supporters in the media to hammer home to the American public the reality and dangers of global warming. The extent and intensity of this campaign is breathtaking, with just about every major print and broadcast news outlet running stories on climate change. Time<\/em> magazine offered up a \u201cSpecial Report on Global Warming\u201d; the cover featured a forlorn polar bear surrounded by melting ice and the words \u201cBe Worried. Be Very<\/em> Worried.\u201d Vanity Fair<\/em> put celebrities like Julia Roberts and George Clooney on its cover in goofy green outfits to show how it\u2019s oh-so trendy to be eco-friendly. \u201cGreen is the new black,\u201d the magazine tells us, while its ads try to sell us SUVs.<\/p>\n

Vanity Fair<\/em> paid a special tribute \u2014 as did Time<\/em>, 60 Minutes<\/em>, and others \u2014 to James Hansen, the NASA climate researcher who complained to the New York Times<\/em> that the Bush administration was muzzling him. (See \u201cCensoring Scientists?\u201d on page 109.) Three years ago, Hansen revealingly wrote that it \u201cmay have been appropriate at one time,\u201d \u201cwhen the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue,\u201d for scientists to emphasize \u201cextreme scenarios,\u201d but that now \u201cthe need is for demonstrably objective\u201d climate scenarios. Translation: If you want to get people\u2019s attention, it\u2019s okay to scare them by going beyond objective science, at least for a while. Environmental activists understand this, like the one who recently told the New York Times<\/em> that his group is actively looking for \u201cpictures of drowning polar bears\u201d to rile up the public. And politically-active scientists understand this, too \u2014 like Donald Kennedy, editor of the journal Science<\/em>, who recently wrote the following about last year\u2019s devastating Hurricane Katrina: \u201cNot only is the New Orleans damage not an act of God; it shouldn\u2019t even be called a \u2018natural\u2019 disaster,\u201d because it was so clearly the result of man-made global warming. Scientific research does not conclusively support that assertion, but that doesn\u2019t matter to those who have tried for decades to pin so-called \u201cextreme weather\u201d on global warming.<\/p>\n

It seems unlikely that the current global warming publicity-push was formally coordinated. And it isn\u2019t clear what political impact, if any, it will have on the 2006 congressional elections or the 2008 presidential election. One thing that is clear, though, is that the eco-apocalyptic browbeating will continue for months. An Inconvenient Truth<\/em>, the new documentary featuring Al Gore (tagged as \u201cthe most terrifying film you will ever see\u201d) will be in theaters in May; the former vice president, who likely still harbors presidential ambitions, will no doubt squeeze it for every possible ounce of publicity.<\/p>\n

Global-warming skeptics are surely not innocent of twisting science. But those of us who hope for sensible environmental reforms \u2014 who take the dangers of ecological degradation seriously, but also seek to safeguard against extreme solutions to speculative problems \u2014 should lament the distortions and scaremongering that are less likely to stir the public to action than to make people just tune out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are in the midst of a major effort by environmental activists, sympathetic scientists, and supporters in the media to hammer home to the American public the reality and dangers of global warming. The extent and intensity of this campaign is breathtaking, with just about every major print and broadcast news outlet running stories on climate change. Time magazine offered up a \u201cSpecial Report on Global Warming\u201d; the cover featured a forlorn polar bear surrounded by melting ice and the words \u201cBe Worried. Be Very Worried.\u201d Vanity Fair put celebrities like Julia Roberts and George Clooney on its cover in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[4645],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5017],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=9812"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=9812"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=9812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}