The Blue Voice

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Al Gore's not alone: Tom Brokaw is also ready to tell us about global warming - and he does a good job of it!

Between melting ice, Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore, global warming has forced its way into public consciousness more than ever before. The Discovery Channel has a documentary premiering on July 16 that should help further the process of recognizing the problem. It's called Global Warming: What You Need to Know, narrated by Tom Brokaw.

Based on a preliminary-cut version that I was able to review, which presumably is very close to what the final product will be, the documentary is quite impressive in explaining the global warming phenomenon - and interesting to watch at the same time! Not necessarily an easy combination to achieve.

When I saw that Tom Brokaw was the host, I wondered if he would treat us to the tired and often misleading mainstream press habit of achieving balance by having some industry lobbyist pushing fake claims on as "balance" to the scientists' findings. I was pleasantly surprised to see he did not.

The science was not only well explained for a general audience. Brokaw emphasizes in several places that there is a very broad consensus among scientists in the relevant fields about the reality of global warming and about the fact that human actions are driving the current very rapid increases.

Defining the problem

The first part of the documentary covers much the same ground as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, showing the melting of major ice fields in Patagonia and the Glacier National Park, the collapse of the Larson B ice shelf in Antarctica collapsing in 2002, the fact that unusually and alarming increases in the earth's atomospheric temperature have occurred within the last decade, and the effects of the use of coal and oil.

There is a segment dealing with dramatic climate events, such as the unusually severe summer heat in Australia this year (Australia's southern-hemisphere summer is during the northern hemisphere's winter) with accompanying wildfires. Russell Rees, chief officer of the Victoria Fire service, talks about how he's seen changes in the way fires behave, and the way more sudden shifts in weather conditions are more usual now.

Brokaw says, "Of the 21 hottest years on record, 20 have occurred since 1980." The narrative and the visuals do a good job of establishing that this increased heat is a substantial problem, creating new dangers for people and threatening to materially change the way we live. A later segment on increasing flooding on a South Sea Island also makes the point vividly.

The show does an impressive job of explaining the science in an accessible way, including a long-term chart going back 400,000 years correlating carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere with temperature, similar to the one Gore uses in his film/slideshow. And it explains how the CO2 holds the heat of sunlight in the atmosphere as one of the main "greenhouse gases".

A couple of sections are particularly effective in showing the magnitude of the changes. One is on how the Amazon forest on its own and in combination with other rainforests absorbs much of the CO2 in the atmosphere. As rainforests diminish in size, their ability to absorb CO2 is reduced, helping to accelerate the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.

Another is a segment showing how the polar bears' habitat is melting away and the bears could be looking at extinction not so far in the future. This segment features three hopelessly cute bear cubs, which gives an emotional content to the scientific narrative. This will provoke sneers from the Rush Limbaugh crowd, of course. But what doesn't?

The film points out that we could be in danger of losing half of the existing species of animals, and many species of plants, in what is in geographic time an extremely rapid pace.

At the end of the segment on the forest, Brokaw pulls a rhetorical trick (I won't spoil it here) that made me think, "Oh, no, now we're going to hear how trees cause pollution". But instead, it's an effective segway into the following segment that grabs the viewers attention.

Good science

As I said, I was apprehensive that Tom Brokaw would serve up industry-lobbyist bamboozlement to achieve the pseudo-balance that is so often a feature of what passes for journalism these days. But the film relies on real science.

There is at least a passing mention of the fact that some people vested interests in not recognizing the reality of global warming. I would have preferred to see that point elaborated at greater length. But the documentary's focus was not on the politics of it. Given some of the scientific and superstitious hokum that gushes from the cable TV channels, the fact that the documentary sticks to the science is very impressive in itself.

The only way in which I would fault the film on that score is that it leaves the impression that the current near-general consensus formed only in the last five years, which may be technically the case, but it understates how long the problem has been a generally clear one. The Kyoto Treaty designed to address the problem is years old, after all.

I particularly like the way the documentary describes the way scinetific understanding of the problem developed. Having supercomputers to run long-term simulations made a qualitative leap in how global warming could be understood. It also makes clear that there are a lot of uncertainties in the specifics of the projections because multiple feedback factors are at work. Science thrives on uncertainty. But the film does a good job of stating that the fact of global warming and the reality that it's a serious problem are not an uncertainties in any meaningful sense of the word.

Constructive possibilities

The documentary devotes a significant amount of time to possible solutions. It explains "carbon sequestering" and the possibilities for ethanol. It describes the need to preserve the Amazon and other rainforests, and discusses how the Kyoto system of carbon credits works to create incentives to reduce CO2 emissions.

Brokaw also discusses several green measures being taken in New York City, including the use of hybrid vehicles in the taxi fleet. The segment on green architecture and its possibilities is also informative and good about showing how creative solutions are possible and practical.

At the end, there are several tips on home energy efficiency, which again will invoke sneers from the OxyContin crowd. But let them sneer. Documentaries like this are a valuable contribution to alerting the public to the problem of global warming. And it makes the science sound interesting and even exciting, which is something that's valuable in itself.

The program does not attempt to explore the political conflicts over global warming. And there's nothing wrong with that. We need documentaries like this dealing with the science and the social implications in the broadest sense. There are many years ahead of us in which global warming will be a major challenge for politics and business. Those of us who want to do something about the issue will have plenty of chances to see our side make commercials with cute polar bear cubs and so forth. And the other side will run their ads saying that the people who worry about this are snoobish, Chardonney-drinking, latte-sipping suburbanites or tree-hugging nature freaks who want to bankrupt small businesses by making their gas too expensive.

Billmon, writing about Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, worries that appealing to people's reason and good sense may be inadequate (An Inconvenient Al 07/09/06):

Al's fighting the good fight, and I salute him for it.

But there is something tragic, even a little pathetic, about Gore's stubborn faith in the ability of facts and reasoned argument to save the world. The scenes of him schlepping through airports – alone, laptop in hand, on his way to yet another city to show his slides to another room full of college students or environmental activists – hit the edge of bathos. They make Al look too much like Willy Loman. "Attention must be paid to this man." ...

In that sense, Gore’s project makes him the diametrical opposite – the antithesis – of the unnamed Cheney administration official quoted by Ron Suskind immediately after the 2004 election:

["]We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But I'm not quite so pessimistic as Billmon seems to be in that post. It's true that many people would prefer not to recognize the problem. And those industries that fear discussing global warming will wind up requiring them to spend more on environmental controls than they would prefer will be glad to feed people's illusions and gin up doubts out of thin air.

But something that Sigmund Freud, a notorious pessimist about the prospects for human civilization, wrote in 1928 has stuck with me ever since I read it. It was in his The Future of an Illusion:

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finallly, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet other hopes.

So, yes, there are decades of political battles over global warming ahead of us. But reality does have a way of imposing itself. Devastating hurricanes and rising sea levels will inevitably make their their presence known, as they are doing already. And in the battle against bunk science, whether of the Christian fundamentalist or the industry-lobbyist varieties, factual reporting and real scientific knowledge has a critical role to play. As Bob "The Daily Howler" Somerby wrote in his column of 07/10/06:

On the liberal web, we often brag that we represent the “reality-based” community. In the future, progressives will continue to find themselves at war with well-funded dissemblers - tribunes of powerful upper-class interests. Our view? Aggressive embrace of "reality" - of the traditions of fact and logic - will constitute our best hope for success. It’s always tempting to overstate - and being human, we all end up doing it. But for progressives, it’s a road to defeat. There they go again, we should say, when tribunes of the powerful do it.

An "aggressive embrace of reality": I'm sure Freud would approve.

posted at 1:37:00 AM by Bruce Miller

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