The ink on the Montreal Protocol was scarcely dry when ozone science was attacked as corrupt and politically motivated (in much the same way that environmental science is being attacked today). In 1995, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher organized a hearing on "scientific integrity" meant to challenge such science. Representatives of private industry and conservative think tanks began to claim that the science behind the Montreal Protocol was incorrect, that fixing the problem would be devastating to the economy, and that the scientists involved were exaggerating the threat to get more money for their research. Entered into the Congressional Record was the now-familiar claim that there was "no scientific consensus" on ozone depletion, shown to be completely false by the Nobel Prize awarded to Rowland and Molina only a few weeks later.
If one were to strip the names and dates off the record of that hearing, it would be easy enough to imagine that its subject was climate change and that it took place last week. In fact, climate science has been attacked by many of the same individuals and organizations that attacked ozone science, using many of the same arguments, as misguided today as they were then.
Consider what we know about the history and integrity of climate science.
Scientists have known for more than 100 years that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) trap heat in a planet's atmosphere. If you increase their concentration, the planet will get hotter. Venus is incredibly hot -- 864 degrees Fahrenheit -- not primarily because it is closer to the Sun than the Earth, but because it has an atmosphere hundreds of times denser and composed mainly of CO2.
Oceanographer Roger Revelle was the first American scientist to focus attention on the risk of putting increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office and continued to work closely with the Navy throughout his career. In the 1950s, he argued for the importance of scientific research on man-made climate change, calling attention to the threat that sea level rise from melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of the oceans posed to the safety and security of major cities, ports, and naval facilities. In the 1960s, he was joined in his concern by several colleagues, including geochemist Charles David Keeling, who first began to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958, and geophysicist Gordon MacDonald, who served on the first Council on Environmental Quality under Republican President Richard Nixon.
In 1974, the emerging scientific understanding of climate change was summarized by physicist Alvin Weinberg, the head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who explained that the use of fossil fuels was likely to be limited well before we ran out of them by the threat they represented to the Earth's stable and beneficent climate. "Although it is difficult to estimate how soon we shall have to adjust the world's energy policies to take this limit into account," he wrote, "it might well be as little as 30-50 years."
In 1977, Robert M. White, the first administrator of NOAA and later president of the National Academy of Engineering, summarized the scientific findings in the journal Oceanus this way:
"We now understand that industrial wastes, such as carbon dioxide released during the burning of fossil fuels, can have consequences for climate that pose a considerable threat to future society... [E]xperiences of the past decade have demonstrated the consequences of even modest fluctuations in climatic conditions [and] lent a new urgency to the study of climate... The scientific problems are formidable, the technological problems, unprecedented, and the potential economic and social impacts, ominous."
In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences concluded: "If carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible."
These findings led the World Meteorological Organization to join forces with the United Nations and create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The idea was to establish a stable scientific foundation for informed public policies. Just as good science laid the foundation for the Vienna Convention, good science would now lay the foundation for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992 by President Bush.
Since then, the scientific world has affirmed and reaffirmed the validity of the scientific evidence. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and many similar organizations, as well as leading scientific societies and academies abroad, have all given the work of climate science their seals of approval. In 2006, 11 national academies of science, including the oldest in the world, Italy's Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, issued an unusual joint statement noting that the "threat of climate change is clear and increasing," and that "delayed action will... incur a greater cost." That was nearly a decade ago. Today, scientists assure us that the evidence of the reality of human-made climate change is "unequivocal," and the World Bank tells us that its impact and costs are already being felt.
The scientific work that produced this consensus was done by scientists around the globe -- men and women, old and young, and in this country Republicans as well as Democrats. In fact, curiously enough, given recent Republican congressional "hoax" claims, probably more of them were Republicans than Democrats. Gordon MacDonald, for example, was a close advisor to President Nixon and Dave Keeling was awarded the National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush in 2002.
Yet despite the long history of this work and its bipartisan nature, climate science continues to be scurrilously attacked. This past May, the world's most revered climate scientists met with Pope Francis to advise him on the facts of climate change and the threat it represents to the future health, wealth, and well-being of men, women and children, not to mention so many other species with whom we share this unique planet. At that same moment, climate change deniers were meeting near the Vatican in an attempt to prevent the Pope from speaking out on the moral meaning of climate change. Whenever there are signs that the political landscape is shifting and that the world might be getting ready to act on climate change, the forces of denial only redouble their efforts.
The organization responsible for the denialist meeting in Rome was the Heartland Institute, a group with a long history not only of rejecting climate science but science generally. They were, for instance, responsible for the infamous billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. They have a documented history of working with the tobacco industry to raise questions about the scientific evidence of tobacco's harms. As Erik Conway and I demonstrated in our book Merchants of Doubt, many of the groups that now question the reality or significance of human-made climate change previously questioned the scientific evidence of the dangers of tobacco.
Today, we know that millions of people have died from tobacco-related diseases. Do we really have to wait for people to die in similar numbers before we accept the evidence of climate change?
Private Funding Creates a Hole in the Atmosphere
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