Dreams of Earth and Sky (13 page)

The Zedillo book covers a much wider range of topics and opinions than the Nordhaus book, and is addressed to a wider circle of readers. It includes “Is the Global Warming Alarm Founded on Fact?” by Richard Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, answering that question with a resounding no. Lindzen does not deny the existence of global warming, but considers the predictions of its harmful effects to be grossly exaggerated. He writes:

Answering Lindzen in the next chapter, “Anthropogenic Climate Change: Revisiting the Facts,” is Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University in Germany. Rahmstorf sums up his opinion of Lindzen’s arguments in one sentence: “All this seems completely out of touch with the world of climate science as I know it and, to be frank, simply ludicrous.” These two chapters give the reader a sad picture of climate science. Rahmstorf represents the majority of scientists who believe fervently that global warming is a grave danger. Lindzen represents the small minority who are skeptical. Their conversation is a dialogue of the deaf. The majority responds to the minority with open contempt.

In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right. It may—or may not—be that the present is such a time. The great virtue of Nordhaus’s economic analysis is that it remains valid whether the majority view is right or wrong. Nordhaus’s optimum policy takes both possibilities into account. Zedillo in his introduction summarizes the arguments of each contributor in turn. He maintains the neutrality appropriate to a conference chairman and gives equal space to Lindzen and to Rahmstorf. He betrays his own opinion only in a single sentence with a short parenthesis: “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”

The last five chapters of the Zedillo book are by writers from five of the countries most concerned with the politics of global warming: Russia, Britain, Canada, India, and China. Each of the five authors has been responsible for giving technical advice to a government, and each of them gives us a statement of that government’s policy. Howard Dalton, spokesman for the British government, is the most dogmatic. His final paragraph begins:

The United Kingdom has made up its mind and takes the view that any individuals who disagree with government policy should be ignored. This dogmatic tone is also adopted by the Royal Society, the British equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences. The Royal Society recently published a pamphlet addressed to the general public with the title “Climate Change Controversies: A Simple Guide.” The pamphlet says:

In other words, if you disagree with the majority opinion about global warming, you are an enemy of science. The authors of the pamphlet appear to have forgotten the ancient motto of the Royal Society,
Nullius in Verba
, which means, “Nobody’s word is final.”

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion that we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of
environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

Note added in 2014: This review stimulated a flow of letters and responses, too voluminous to be summarized here. The most useful
exchange was with Lord May, who is one of the most influential scientists in the United Kingdom, having been the chief scientific adviser to the British government (1995–2000) and president of the Royal Society (2000–2005). Here are extracts from his letter and my reply:

THE MOST DRAMATIC
moment of our trip to the Galápagos Islands in May 2008 was on the last day. My wife and I were leaning over the railing on the deck of the tourist boat
Integrity
, watching an orca whale. The orca swam close to the boat, almost directly underneath us. Then, just ahead of the orca, a large sea turtle appeared. This was not one of the giant tortoises for which the islands are famous but an equally massive marine turtle. The females of the species come to the islands to lay their eggs under the sand on the beaches.

My wife had met this turtle earlier in the day, when she was swimming in the ocean with a snorkel. Only a second after we saw the turtle from the boat, the orca snapped, biting through the turtle shell as if it were a pie crust. Immediately the sea turned red and fifty frigate birds appeared from nowhere to pick up the larger remaining scraps of flesh. After the frigate birds were done, flocks of smaller birds came to pick up the smaller scraps. The red sea rapidly faded. In less than a minute it was all over. It was like a scene from
National Geographic
on television, but real.

Perhaps we were partly responsible for the turtle’s death, since the turtle and the orca were both attracted to the boat. If we had not come to disturb the normal rhythm of her life, the turtle might now
be out of harm’s way, mother to a new batch of hatchlings. But in the ordinary course of nature, without boats and tourists, such a death is not unusual. We had seen nature doing her daily work, holding the balance impartially between predator and prey. Only in our eyes is nature beautiful and cruel.

Galápagos: The Islands That Changed the World
is a combination of four books in one.
*
It is first a picture book, second a guidebook, third a history book, and fourth a political manifesto. I will describe the four components in turn and then reflect upon their message. The picture book is a gallery of magnificent photographs of the islands and their nonhuman inhabitants, taken over many years by Tui De Roy and others. De Roy is a professional photographer who arrived on the islands with her family at the age of two and spent much of her life there. About fifty of the pictures are hers, including two portraits: of Darwin’s finches and of blue-footed boobies.

Darwin’s finches are inconspicuous little birds that Darwin observed when he visited the islands in 1835. They later provided crucial evidence for his theory of the origin of species. Blue-footed boobies are big seabirds that walk around the islands on bright blue duck-feet. These two images exemplify the clash of cultures that compete in historic places around the world: the culture of preservation and the culture of exploitation. Scholars and scientists try to preserve historic sites, while local entrepreneurs try to exploit them. Darwin’s finches are the chief attraction of the Galápagos for professional biologists and historians of science. Blue-footed boobies are the chief attraction for sellers of souvenirs in tourist shops.

Other photographs in the book were taken by Daniel Fitter, who was our guide on the island of Santa Cruz. All visitors to the national park must be accompanied by a licensed guide. He walked with us
into the farmland to find giant tortoises, who choose to live comfortably in the small irrigated area open to human settlement rather than in the more austere environment of the national park. One of Fitter’s photographs shows the small island Daphne Major, an uninhabited volcanic crater, silhouetted against a threatening sky. Daphne Major is famous as the worksite of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who camped there for several months every year for twenty years, laboriously studying the birds and incidentally raising two daughters.

The island is small and the birds are tame enough so that the Grants could catch and label every finch that lived there and record its individual life history, from hatching and mating to parenting and mortality. They assigned each finch to one of the thirteen endemic species by measuring the size and shape of its beak. “Endemic” means a species that breeds in the islands and nowhere else. They discovered an astonishing fact that Darwin missed: evolution by natural selection sometimes moves fast. Darwin imagined that evolution must be slower than any possible human observation, requiring thousands or millions of years to form new species. The Grants observed hybridization and segregation of species happening within a few years, fast enough to be seen and accurately measured by humans.

The reason why evolution in the Galápagos is fast is that climate and vegetation change abruptly from year to year, and natural selection is brutal. Wet and dry years unpredictably produce lush and sparse vegetation. In lush years, there are plenty of small, soft seeds, and birds with smaller beaks and quicker reproduction have an advantage. In drought years, soft seeds are scarce, and birds with larger beaks specialized to deal with unusually large, tough seeds have an advantage. Selection is fast because populations of birds with the wrong kind of beak to split seeds that happen to be abundant may be wiped out in a single season.

The life and work of the Grants is described in an excellent book,
The Beak of the Finch
, by Jonathan Weiner (1994), with hand-drawn illustrations by Thalia Grant and Charles Darwin.
†
Both of them are gifted artists. Thalia is one of the two Grant daughters who were raised on Daphne Major. Before we came to the Galápagos in 2008, we met the Grants by chance at a lunch party in Princeton. They told us that May was the best time to visit, at the transition between the wet and dry seasons. It was clearly understood that we were coming as tourists, not as scientists, and that we were not coming to Daphne Major.