Playing Chicken

There’s an old joke, variously attributed: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Some sources suggest it originated with Mark Twain, or with Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner; it was also notably employed by the great American humorist Will Rogers. It’s a funny joke, or it was, first because it’s true—everyone does talk about the weather—and also because it represented an impossibility masquerading as a challenge to the noisily dissatisfied: You don’t like something? Well change it!

Everyone in Rogers’ time knew that the idea of changing the weather was an absurd one; the weather was something to be lived with, not anything alterable, subject to the intervention of humanity. Now that we know the truth—that the earth’s human inhabitants have been slowly but insistently warming the planet for centuries, since well before Rogers’ time and Twain’s too—the joke has assumed a terribly ironic cast. And at a moment when acknowledgement of the human role in global warming is so widespread that no less a dunderheaded skeptic than George W. Bush broke ideological ranks to affirm as much, the joke has turned tragic. “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” might as well serve as the epitaph for the recent Copenhagen COP negotiations.

Does the world need another climate change Chicken Little? After all, we have such eloquent and erudite bell ringers as James Hansen, Elizabeth Kolbert, Al Gore, and Bill McKibben already. Who in the U.S. doesn’t know that climate change is a problem? Who doesn’t recognize the potentially disastrous consequences of inaction? Who, besides born contrarians, obscurantists, fossil fuel barons, and reactionary ideologues requires convincing? (Even Osama bin Laden, as anti-rational as they come, has signed on to the cause—although his motives for doing so seem solidly anti-American rather than moral.)

Sadly, the answers to each of these questions reflect the stubborn skepticism of the American people—when it comes to matters demanding personal and national sacrifice, we are all Missourians. Volumes of peer-reviewed scientific evidence neither convince nor satisfy us—you’ve got to show us. A recent survey from Yale University and George Mason University confirms that doubt regarding climate change has grown in the U.S. of late: Today, only 57% of Americans believe that global warming is happening, down from 71% two years ago. Similarly, only 47% believe that global warming is caused by human activity (in contrast to 57% two years ago), while 36% believe it is caused by natural changes in the environment. As a result, and despite an ever-growing chorus of alarm, American support for action on climate change is eroding: a recent Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll found that Americans rated global warming last among 21 potential priorities for the President and the Congress in 2010—only 28% identified it as a “top priority,” down from 38% in 2007. Much of this reversion may be attributed to plain old shortsightedness: It’s not enough that we must belie a common human difficulty in acting concretely in the present to obviate problems in the future (delaying gratification), but we’re also staring down the effects of the Great Recession, which ensnares us even further in the temporizing trap. (Our shortsightedness also smacks of infantilism—we have a hard time believing in what we can’t see.)

Misinformation is likewise partially to blame—those seeking to discredit climate change science have been effective in sewing the seeds of doubt (the leaked Climategate e-mails, for example) within a populace all too ready to seize upon whatever scraps of contradiction are shoveled their way. Just last week, a friend of conservative political stripes asked my opinion on the climate change issue, and in response to my avowal of its importance, he replied, “But the world has been cooling for the last decade!” That despite NASA’s recent affirmation that the 2000s were the warmest decade since modern climate records were first kept in 1880. This finding isn’t much subject to debate or revision; it is a fact, as much as anything can be a fact these days. And yet: “The world’s been cooling the last six or seven years, at least.” Some of this is due to popular ignorance regarding what global warming is and isn’t (global warming, of course, doesn’t mean no more cold winters, no more snow), but much of it derives from deliberate obfuscation on the part of those pernicious skeptics with a public platform. People believe what they want to believe, especially when there is pseudoscience and anecdote to buttress it.

All of this is certainly disappointing, frustrating, disturbing even: it would not, however, be cause for despair if not for the cowardice and cynicism of much of the American political class, who evidently understand their duty as public servants to lie exclusively in reflecting, with perfect fidelity, the will of their constituents. This may not, on the face of things, appear to be a problem, but if one considers that a constituency or a polity does not, de facto, know, in all cases, what policy is best pursued on its behalf, and furthermore, that questions of the broader welfare of the nation and the world must be given due consideration in any policy debate, it seems clear that true political leadership sometimes demands that politicians contradict the stated desires of their constituents. Unequivocally, true leadership in Congress is virtually nonexistent these days—acts of conscience and courage on Capitol Hill are rare in an age of an unprecedentedly impatient electorate and an unprecedentedly timorous legislative branch (I am reminded of E.M. Forster’s characterization of the British parliament as “that caucus of cranks and cravens”—do they get any more crackpot at the extremities or more craven through the heart than the 111th Congress?).

Thus, three years following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, which states with the stolid authority of overwhelming scientific evidence, “Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change,” Congress continues to, variously, deny, ignore, doubt, and cavil. It takes no action to diminish that future rate, that future magnitude. Above all, it delays, and the earth alters, ice melts, seas rise, deserts grow, storms punish with an ever more frightening force. The world looks to us to lead, and we, effectively, bury our heads. Do we need another Chicken Little? All of the foregoing, I hope, has served to answer that question. We need a barnyard of Chicken Littles. We need a factory farm of Chicken Littles. We need a great, squawking, flapping, pecking, furious flock of Chicken Littles. Climate change is the defining problem of our age; we will be judged by future generations on our ability to act now to combat its most serious effects. The sky is falling.