Columnist’s attack on Obama climate plan attracts media rebuttals
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2507
On 19 June in Berlin, President Obama delivered a foretaste of the climate plan that he announced a week later. On Fox News, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer charged that the Berlin comments didn’t ‘even reach the level of mush .’ Then in a 25 June speech at Georgetown University, the president fully outlined his plan. On Fox News and in a Post column, Krauthammer called the plan ‘nuts.’ That column, ‘Obama’s global-warming folly ,’ is drawing media attention.
Krauthammer , a psychiatrist educated at Oxford and Harvard, has served as Post columnist since 1984. In 1987 he won a Pulitzer Prize. By 2009 Matthew Nisbet , a scholar of the climate wars and climate-science communication, was observing that Krauthammer regularly frames the climate issue in the terms seen in that 2013 column: scientific uncertainty and economic consequences. Unlike the most severe climate skeptics, Krauthammer doesn’t rule out human causes for planetary climate disruption.
The controversial column argues that Americans’ lack of interest in climate change makes the president’s plan ‘either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic.’ Krauthammer chooses the latter, on grounds starting with the commonly heard (and widely refuted ) objection that global warming stalled in 1998. He alleges that the president oversimplifies contradictory scientific findings. He labels Obama a ‘flat-earther'—an ironic reference to a quip from the Georgetown speech—for seeing ‘perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.’
Krauthammer once again concedes that humans could be disrupting the planet’s climate, but asks: ‘What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program—which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras—going to do about it?’ After all, he writes, the US has already been cutting emissions, and it’s ‘sheer fantasy’ to hope to limit those of other countries. He predicts ‘tens of thousands of jobs killed’ and ‘entire states impoverished.’ His conclusion requires quoting:
I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one—and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future—there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.
For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.
In an online posting at the Guardian, environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli responds to Krauthammer’s column in part by linking to his own earlier posting arguing that although ‘global surface air warming has slowed’ in 16 years, ‘overall warming of the Earth’s climate has sped up,’ given the involvement of the oceans. Nuccitelli also says that ‘recent research has shown that Australian heat waves and record-breaking monthly temperature records in general are now five times more likely to occur due to global warming, with much more to come. Papers have concluded that several individual heat records, like those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, would not have been broken if not for human-caused global warming.’
At the Huffington Post, ‘Krauthammer’s climate crack-up ’ begins by pointing out a contrast: Krauthammer’s 2009 Weekly Standard op-ed in support of a net-zero gas tax. That measure, Krauthammer had written, would have ‘the collateral environmental effect of reducing pollution and CO2 emissions, an important benefit for those who believe in man-made global warming and a painless bonus for agnostics (like me) who nonetheless believe that the endless pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing.’ The Huffington Post writer, D. R. Tucker, pronounces the stalled-since-1998 claim simply false and declares that ‘the assertion that President Obama actually wishes to inflict economic harm is self-refuting.’ Tucker cites a posting from the liberal Climate Progress blog in support of the belief that China will indeed seek to reduce carbon emissions. He wonders why Krauthammer, a non-denier, ‘chose to fill his column with both climate distortions and unmitigated scorn for President Obama’s actions’ instead of offering an alternative vision.
Also at the Huffington Post, Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, disputes the Krauthammer column. Krupp notes that ‘Krauthammer admits two important facts: climate change is real, and an international treaty to reduce the pollution that causes it is an important goal.’ He adds that those ‘are significant points of common ground from which to begin a discussion about solutions'—even if Krauthammer himself ‘seems more interested in attacking the president than dealing seriously with this global threat.’ He laments that although ‘Krauthammer is a dedicated internationalist who has spent decades writing about the necessity of American leadership,’ suddenly, on this issue with ‘enormous economic and humanitarian costs, [Krauthammer] decides America does not need to lead.’
Krupp focuses on that world-leadership question:
[Krauthammer] points to China’s growing pollution as an excuse for the United States to act passively. Is there any other critical issue on which he would counsel to do nothing but wait for international talks? And his claims of global inaction are obsolete. He fails to mention that much of the world is actually moving forward—Europe limits greenhouse gas pollution, as does California. Even China is launching seven pilot cap and trade projects covering more than 200 million people. In all, one-third of the world’s GDP is produced in areas that are addressing this problem.
William Pentland, who writes about energy and the environment at Forbes.com, criticizes by analogy in the posting ‘Krauthammer proposes ‘Munich Pact’ for global warming.’ He accuses Krauthammer of repeating the 1938 appeasement error of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, an enormity that proved to multiply the costs of a conflagration that was already inevitable anyway.
At the Washington Post itself, two letters to the editor appeared. Excerpts from the letter of Bill Cutler, of Palo Alto, California, show vociferous disagreement with Krauthammer. As to the stalled-since-1998 claim, Cutler writes:
This often-repeated myth is supported by careful but fallacious cherry-picking of the data. Sixteen years ago, in 1998, there was an unusual upward spike in the record of global temperatures. Draw a straight line from the tip of that spike to today’s temperatures and, sure enough, the line is flat. Yet a line that averages out the annual temperature variations over that time—both upward and downward—results in a trend line that definitely angles upward.
Cutler also defends climate models while granting that they disagree. He concludes, ‘Their range of disagreement in their estimation of climate futures is between pretty awful and unspeakably horrible. None estimates a pleasant future.’ But that’s a range of possibilities that Krauthammer’s column leaves unaddressed.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.