WSJ op-ed affirms climate scientists’ consensus and calls for cost-effective solutions

Last fall a Nature editorial advocated more explicit attribution of extreme weather events to climate change. By this summer, attribution had become a common media subject . Now even the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion editors — longtime climate skeptics, to say the least — have published an op-ed declaring that because ‘more than 26,000 heat records [have been] broken in the last 12 months and pervasive drought [is] turning nearly half of all U.S. counties into federal disaster areas,’ it’s time for conservatives ‘to compete with liberals to devise’ economically sensible responses.

This development suggests a shift in influential WSJ opinion editors’ outlook and demonstrates the rise of media attention to what Nature‘s editors characterized as attribution science.

The WSJ op-ed’s author, Fred Krupp, leads the Environmental Defense Fund , a group calling themselves ‘passionate environmental advocates’ who believe in both prosperity and stewardship. His opening line implicitly denies the validity of weather-to-climate-change attribution: ‘One scorching summer doesn’t confirm that climate change is real any more than a white Christmas proves it’s a hoax.’ He stipulates, however, that what ‘matters is the trend — a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather.’

And indeed his op-ed argues that this summer’s hotter and wilder weather requires fundamental change in conservatives’ scientific, political and economic outlooks. ‘Dramatic alterations to the climate are here and likely to get worse,’ he announces, ‘with profound damage to the economy — unless sustained action is taken.’ He cautions the WSJ‘s readers: ‘One of the hallmarks of modern conservatism is to try to see the world as it is, not as one hopes it would be.’

The world as it is? In recent weeks, readers of the New York Times and Washington Post have been presented a world with extreme weather events, and the events have been attributed to climate change. The Times columnist Tom Friedman voiced a common sentiment when he asserted on 5 August that this ‘year’s global extremes of droughts and floods are totally consistent with models of disruptive, nonlinear climate change.’

Most recently and maybe most notably, both papers have written about the NASA climatologist James E. Hansen’s publication of his attribution views in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Times‘s 7 August article ‘Study Finds More of Earth Is Hotter and Says Global Warming Is at Work ’ reports, ‘The change is so drastic, [Hansen’s] paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.’

For a similar article, the Post‘s 7 August bottom-of-the-front-page teaser announced — with red ink and an illustration — ‘New extreme category: The record U.S. heat wave and drought are likely the result of global warming, a top scientist said. P. A2.’ The 4 August Post op-ed page had run Hansen’s own commentary ‘Climate change is here — and worse than we thought .’ Concerning attribution, Hansen wrote, ‘Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.’

Here’s a sampling of other recent high-visibility discussions of, or allusions to, the attribution principle in the Times and the Post:

* ‘Is It Hot Enough for Ya? ’ in the 5 August Times Sunday Review declared, ‘For the moment, we have an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the way our country deals with the environment, changes that would lock in public acceptance of climate change. But we have to act quickly — not only because the crisis is urgent, but because one good blizzard could change a lot of minds.’

* ‘There’s Still Hope for the Planet ’ appeared on the 22 July Times Sunday Review front page from David Leonhardt, the Times‘s Washington bureau chief. His opening line declared, ‘You don’t have to be a climate scientist these days to know that the climate has problems. You just have to step outside.’

* ‘Not so fast on blaming global warming ,’ an 18 July Post editorial, began ‘Can you blame the scorching weather on climate change? Not really. Or at least not yet.’ It drew two letters , however, arguing for general attribution even if it’s tricky to isolate and attribute specific weather events.

* ‘Loading the Climate Dice ’ was a 22 July Paul Krugman column in the Times. Krugman asked, ‘How should we think about the relationship between climate change and day-to-day experience?’ He answered by discussing Hansen’s view: ‘As documented in a new paper by Dr. Hansen and others, cold summers by historical standards still happen, but rarely, while hot summers have in fact become roughly twice as prevalent. And 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.’

* ‘Searching for Clues to Calamity ,’ a 21 July Times op-ed by Fred Guterl, the executive editor of Scientific American, didn’t explicitly address attribution, but did go further. It asked, ‘So far 2012 is on pace to be the hottest year on record. But does this mean that we’ve reached a threshold — a tipping point that signals a climate disaster?’

* ‘The Endless Summer ’ was a Mark Bittman blog posting that appeared in print as a 19 July Times column lamenting, ‘We may look back upon this year as the one in which climate change began to wreak serious havoc, yet we hear almost no conversation about changing policy or behavior.’ Bittman alerted readers to a long Rolling Stone piece by Bill McKibben with attribution built into its theme and with alarm built into its headline: ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math .’

Last month, the opening paragraphs of the Nature commentary ‘Wildfires ignite debate on global warming ,’ by Max A. Moritz of the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department at the University of California, Berkeley, illustrated the rise of attribution as a media concern:

Moritz’s ending paragraph merits quoting too:

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.