There has been massive industry intervention to stop or modify the global warming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It will be out today and will report that global warming indeed has human causes and will lead to significant higher temperatures and sea levels.
This will necessitate massive migration of people from desertificating and flooding areas into other places. Poorly managed, as it will likely be, such migration will result in further conflicts like the one in Darfur – only bigger.
The Guardian reports that ExxonMobil, through the American Enterprise Institute, has offered scientists $10,000 plus expenses for writings that attack the report:
The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".
[…]
The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.
(The Guardian is very late in reporting this. The AEI letter was written in July and has been public at least since early November.)
The attempt to deny global warming has failed, but it is already visible what the new strategy of former global warming deniers will be.
In September Kenneth Green came up with this:
If the president simply acknowledges that humans are probably causing some climate change, that warming will likely continue, and that warming might pose serious challenges for human societies and ecosystems, his epiphany will be a bit late, but at least reasonable.
[…]
The main reason focusing on greenhouse gas reduction is bad policy is that intractable economic dynamics make preventing greenhouse gas emissions in the near future virtually impossible and guarantee the waste of most resources invested in the attempt.
There are no facts that support Green’s assumption of bad policy. Of course the intractable economic dynamics can be changed – that is exactly what Kyoto, higher gas taxes and stricter mileage limits would do.
The base of the new fudge Green is mixing is the unfounded "virtually impossible" attribute. If global warming is happening, and he now admits that, there is nothing we can do about it. It is "unstoppable" so why should we care, he says.
The Associated Press has already jumped onto that propaganda wagon. The headline of their current piece on the UN report is: Warming ‘likely’ man-made, unstoppable. The LA Times titles the same way: U.N. says there’s no stopping global warming.
This is an attempt to depict global warming as a pure yes or no binary decision that has now been decided on. Earlier they said there is no global warming, so why care about it. Now they admit there is global warming and tell us that there is nothing we can do about it.
But like most things in life, global warming is a gradual. The newest (conservative) estimates given by the IPCC predict a temperature rise of 2-11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 and a sea level rise of 7-23 inches by the end of the century.
The ranges given are partly related to uncertainties in the prediction models. But they also express the uncertainty in estimating the outcome on the political side. How much human will and money will be invested to slow down global warming? How effective will the economic and technical measures be?
Global warming will be with us for our lifetime, but we can affect the size of the consequences it brings with it. Will 20 million in Bangladesh have to flee from rising sea levels or 80 million? Will this happen through 30 years, allowing a smoother adoption, or within a shorter, more chaotic time frame? In case you don’t care about Bangladesh, will all of Manhatten or New Orleans be flooded, or only parts of it?
We can slow down global warming by lowering our energy footprint in this world and by using renewable energies for the footprint we believe we need to have. But Mr. Green and his donors from ExxonMobile only care about the profits they make through fossil fuels. By painting global warming as an on/off issue they try to avoid any of the needed attempts to reduce their use.
Describing global warming as unstoppable is semantically correct. But it is also their trick to make people believe nothing can be done to make it less severe. Instead they want money to develop technical solutions to soften the effects of the catastrophe.
We are sitting in a fast driving bus and we see that we will crash the wall in front of us. Sensible passengers ask the driver to push the brakes for a slower, less severe impact. But Mr. Green urges the driver to speed up. He turns to the passengers and offers to sell them pillows so the crash will not hurt them so much.
For the passengers, there is nothing unstoppable about this.