Washington Post front page: “The hot politics of global warming”

Updated 8/24/2011

In a long article that began above the fold on the front page of the Saturday, 20 August, Washington Post, science writers Joel Achenbach and Juliet Eilperin argued that the ‘political discussion about global warming has lurched dramatically in four years—even as the scientific consensus has changed little.’

The 2012 presidential election framed the piece. Achenbach and Eilperin began by quoting the 2008 climate-science view of John McCain, then seeking the Republican nomination: ‘I do agree with the majority of scientific opinion, that climate change is taking place and it’s a result of human activity, which generates greenhouse gases.’ They observed that McCain affirmed the climate consensus regularly in stump speeches.

Then they contrasted McCain’s 2008 position with recent words from present Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. The latter, they wrote, suggested last week that “‘manufactured science’ underpins what a questioner called the ‘man-made climate-change myth.’”

They quoted Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado, known for his observations on the climate debate: “Climate change has become a wedge issue. It’s today’s flag-burning or today’s partial-birth-abortion issue.” The article said that in recent years, ‘Americans—particularly conservative Republicans—became less convinced about global-warming science.’

It referred to errors by climate scientists and to the controversy stemming from e-mail messages famously stolen from computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK in 2009. But it reported that ‘multiple investigations in both the United States and Britain cleared the researchers of scientific misconduct, concluding that there was no evidence they tried to cook the books, as critics had alleged.’

The article also noted support for the climate consensus by ‘multiple scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA.’ It quoted Richard B. Alley, a geophysicist at Penn State University: “Ultimately, we go back to physics. If you burn fossil fuel, you make CO₂. You can do this with bookkeeping. How much did we burn? How much CO₂ does that make? Where is it? There it is.”

Achenbach and Eilperin ended by quoting Rush Limbaugh and Marc Morano, who represents the skeptical website Climate Depot. Concerning Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s recent affirmation of the climate consensus, Limbaugh reportedly smirked, “Bye-bye, nomination. Another one down.” Morano reportedly called climate change “a litmus test, pure and simple, for the presidential race.”

Addendum: It seems worth adding a copy of something that Republican candidate Jon Huntsman said on ABC on Sunday morning: ‘The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party—the anti-science party—we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science—Sciences—has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.’

UPDATE

The Washington Post‘s presidential-primary-focused front-page coverage of the politics of climate disruption has drawn a set of four letters —three that adopt the Post‘s general view, and one from a skeptic.

One makes a comparison: “We should all be very worried about the condition of our democracy when major American politicians disagree with essentially the entire American scientific community’s assessment that humans are contributing to global warming. This seems rather like the political powers in Italy in 1632 disagreeing with Galileo that the Earth revolved around the sun.”

Another offers a thought about immediate action: “One idea is a tax break for companies that show progress in reducing emissions. If the GOP is really opposed to raising taxes, surely it wouldn’t object to this or any similar proposal.” Another calls for a Works Progress Administration or a Marshall Plan on sustainable energy.”

One of the letters speaks for skepticism, noting that the original article “quoted several people who said human activity is causing global warming and recounted data on global temperature statistics (as if that proves anything about human causation)” and that it “also cited two well-known skeptics of this claim.” The writer asks:

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. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ 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.