From Ben Haller
Michael Hanlon complains (17 November, p 20) that hurricane Katrina “was reported across the board as a symbol of climate change” – and so it was. His objection? Such reporting “deliberately links putative future catastrophes with a current event and implies they share a common cause”. In fact, the media repeated, over and over, that Katrina could not be linked to global warming in any sort of cause-and-effect way. The link between putative future catastrophes and current events such as Katrina is not that they share a common cause, but that they share a common effect. Katrina is quite rightly a symbol of climate change, not because it was caused by climate change, but because we can expect many more such events, caused by global warming, in the future.
More bizarrely, Hanlon objects that “pictures of polar bears… are effective visual shorthand for ‘Arctic in peril’, but it is dishonest to show individual bears and claim they are in danger when they are not.” Has anybody done this? Hanlon provides no example or citation. All of the coverage I have seen simply says that we expect polar bears to be extinct in the wild due to global warming in the reasonably near future, and provides a photo of a polar bear to accompany the text. That does not constitute a claim that the particular polar bear depicted is going to die, and given the difficulty of obtaining photos of polar bears from the future that are in fact going to die, it is hard to see what Hanlon would have the media do.
If his concern is that the public be given a fair picture of the risks and current effects of global warming, then he really ought to look to his own prose. When he mentions “evocative scenes of melting glaciers” in one breath, and “the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro (which have been shrinking since the 1880s)” in the next, the careless reader might conclude that there is doubt that any glacial melting is due to global warming at all. Actually, even the Kilimanjaro study recently published in American Scientist states only that Kilimanjaro “has gained and lost ice through processes that bear only indirect connections, if any, to recent trends in global climate”. To imply, as Hanlon does, that because it was observed melting in the 1880s none of its melting today can be linked to global warming in even an indirect fashion is disingenuous and scientifically unfounded. And glacial melting worldwide is not due to sublimation at below-freezing air temperatures, and so has nothing to do with what is happening on Kilimanjaro.
There are a great many aspects of global warming that receive too little publicity, not too much, such as: the ways that blooming and breeding times are already shifting; the difficulty that plants will have in changing their ranges as quickly as they will need to; the ways that coevolution and symbiosis imply that difficulties faced by one species will cascade through whole ecosystems; the rapid melting of the tundra and the consequences that is likely to have; and the ways that warmer temperatures will promote disease. Hanlon doesn’t complain about any of this; it seems that although he has renounced his former position as a global warming sceptic, he would still like the media to talk less about global warming. He warns that reporting on the dangers of global warming risks “pushing the undecided public from a state of concern into one of despair”, but given that politicians still don’t see enough public concern about global warming to propose effective measures to address it, I think Hanlon’s fears in this area are wildly overblown. Now is not the time to put the brakes on.
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A friend recently read Daniel Botkin’s piece “Global Warming Delusions” in The Wall Street Journal, which trots out many of the same arguments as Hanlon. He showed it to me, saying, “Here, look: this is why I don’t believe in global warming.” That is the danger of articles such as Hanlon’s. Global warming is real, and poses an enormous threat to civilisation. Better that people believe in it with some scientific inaccuracies in their understanding of the details, rather than be persuaded that it’s a delusion or a myth by people such as Hanlon and Botkin.
Menlo Park, California, US
