The Birth of Climate Denial
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Regina: It's Notes from America with Kai Wright. I'm Regina and I'm a producer on the show. Every Sunday, we make our show from our studios in New York City. This week in NYC, it's Climate Week. To honor this important week here, we decided to revisit a segment that originally aired back in 2017 as part of our show when we were at the United States of Anxiety. It takes us through the history of when we, as a society, began to doubt the whole idea of climate change. The year is 1925 and it's a trial of the century, the Scopes trial.
The Scopes trial reminds us that science has often upset the establishment. Our host, Kai Wright explores the legacy of that trial, and how those in power have tried to convince us that science gets it wrong. Here's Kai.
Kai: If you stepped into a courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee on a July day in 1925, you could have heard this testimony.
William Jennings Bryan: Your name is Howard Morgan?
Howard Morgan: Yes, sir.
William Jennings Bryan: You're Luke Morgan's son?
Howard Morgan: Yes, sir.
Kai: A teacher, John Scopes was on trial for teaching young Howard and his classmates Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
Howard Morgan: Yes sir.
William Jennings Bryan: How old are you, Morgan?
Howard Morgan: 14 years.
William Jennings Bryan: Did you attend school--?
Kai: There are lots of reasons. This was called the trial of the century. You had two great attorneys, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan going head to head over science and religion. The gist of it was, are we God's creations or are we descendant from monkeys? One of the reasons that this case became so famous is that you didn't need to be in Tennessee to follow it.
WGN Presenter: This is WGN, the voice of the people of Chicago.
Kai: This newfangled thing called radio had pretty much just been introduced and WGN laid cables and set up microphones in the courthouse in order to bring the first live broadcast of a trial into thousands of homes. Broadcast media had arrived, and it wasn't just the radio, newspapermen and movie camera operators flocked to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee to cover the carnival atmosphere. Monkeys dressed in suits with bow ties were brought in, allegedly they were set to testify. It was a big deal. Songs were written and sung by choirs.
MUSIC - The Gentry Family: You Can't Make A Monkey Out Of Me
William Jennings Bryan: Just explain to the jury here, now these gentlemen here in front of you, how he taught the books to you?
Howard Morgan: Well, sometimes he would ask us questions and then he would lecture to us on different subjects in the book.
William Jennings Bryan: Did he ever undertake to teach you anything about evolution?
Howard Morgan: Yes, sir.
William Jennings Bryan: Just state--
Kai: Now to be sure, Darwin's Theory of Evolution introduced a radical idea. Here's how it trickled down to one high school boy in 1925.
Howard Morgan: He said that the Earth was once a hot molten mass, too hot for planet or animal life to exist upon it. In the sea, the Earth cooled off. There was a little germ of one cell organism formed, and this organism kept evolving until it got to be a pretty good-sized animal. It came on to be a land animal and it kept on evolving, and from this was man.
William Jennings Bryan: Let me repeat that--
Kai: Science trumps religion. The image of Adam and Eve as the mother and father of humankind was in danger of being obliterated from young minds.
William Jennings Bryan: What did he say about them?
Howard Morgan: Well, the book-- and he both classified man along with cats and dogs, cows, horses, monkeys--
Kai: In this week, we're looking at the long battle between science or the effort to understand our world and political culture, which is to say our debate over how we can live in this world together. Darwin's an even better example of that than most of us realize. We've been negotiating with his science for more than 150 years from the moment The Origin of the Species dropped. In fact, historian Randall Fuller says even Darwin started negotiating with himself as he wrote the thing.
Randall Fuller: Darwin was very canny and cagey about the discussions of evolution as it applied to human beings and he mentions the word human ones in On the Origin of Species, precisely because he knew that he was likely to stir up all kinds of religious and racial debates.
Kai: Religious and racial debates. It was a twofer, because in addition to challenging the Bible, Darwin was challenging the conventional wisdom that white people evolved from a totally different and superior species than other people, so immediately after he published in 1859, the powerful and the established of that era scrambled trying to square what the science said about our world with the way they wanted us to live in it.
Randall Fuller: After the Emancipation Proclamation, Darwin's idea actually becomes embraced by Southerners who use that notion of adaptability and survival of the fittest to suggest that white people are inherently more fit in the United States to rule and to dominate than are Black people.
Kai: This is what happens, scientific breakthroughs upset conventional wisdom, which then starts a fight to make the science support a new conventional wisdom, so what's the science we're debating today? Climate science was not up for debate back when the standard bearer of the Republican Party was George H W Bush.
George H W Bush: We cannot allow a question like climate change to be characterized as a debate between economists versus environmentalists. To say that this issue has sides is about as productive as saying that the Earth is flat.
Kai: Now, we are very much in negotiation with that same science. The standard bearer of the Republican Party now actually dismisses it altogether.
Donald Trump: Well, first of all, I'm not a believer in global warming. I'm not a believer in man-made global warming. It could be warming and it's going to start to cool at some point.
Kai: How did that happen? How did we go from clarity on climate science to, well, confusion. Amanda Aronczyk says this particular culture war began inside the Republican Party.
Amanda Aronczyk: We're going to start in 1986. Picture this, there is a group of scientists and senators and they're assembled for a hearing. A climatologist from NASA is making a presentation. He puts up some maps and he puts up some graphs and he explains that there's this thing underway called global warming. The man running the session is a Republican senator from Rhode Island, his name is John Chafee and he's clearly alarmed.
John Chafee: We certainly had some powerful and graphic and clearly disturbing testimony from several distinguished scientists about the nature of the problems including the like--
Amanda Aronczyk: Chafee tells the crowd that he's convinced, he says, "This is not chicken little telling us the sky is falling."
John Chafee: I think if any of you were here, you'd certainly found it a sobering experience.
Amanda Aronczyk: This hearing leads to a couple of newspaper articles, but that's it. The next year, the same NASA climatologist goes back and his second hearing, it gets even less attention than the first, so the following year, 1988, same NASA climatologist, James Hansen, and he's back again with the same message, but now, he's determined to not be ignored and there's a difference this time, the weather. 1988 is hot.
Presenter 1: Forecasters are predicting no relief from the haze or the heat this weekend as temperatures will graze the water--
Amanda Aronczyk: That summer, the country is in one of the longest and hottest droughts on record. The fields of North Dakota are so dry and cracked, it looks like the moon, Yellowstone is on fire. There's a haze over the cities.
Presenter 2: Two things, we know we probably won't be doing this weekend. One of them is watering the lawn and the other one could be breathing, at least health officials are advising that breathing--
Amanda Aronczyk: Hansen supporters see the heat as an opportunity. They call the weather service in Washington DC and ask what day is going to be the hottest, the prediction, June 23rd. On that day in 1988, James Hansen makes his third presentation.
Speaker 11: Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here, Dr. Hansen, if you'd start us off, we'd appreciate it.
Amanda Aronczyk: Not only is it nearly 100 degrees outside, but the organizers went into the hearing room the night before and they left all the windows open. The air conditioning does not come on and the room is hot.
Speaker 11: We're going to have to talk right into the microphone as there are--
Amanda Aronczyk: When Hansen makes his case, his forehead is shiny with sweat.
James Hansen: The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
Amanda Aronczyk: In short, Hansen declares global warming has begun.
Kai: And this time, did anybody pay attention?
Amanda Aronczyk: Yes. This is climate change's big coming out moment. It's front page news, it's in the New York Times, it's in the Washington Post, and Hansen gets invited on all of these TV shows. At this point in time, Americans are learning about climate change. They get the message, it's bad, and everybody believes the sweaty scientist from NASA because why wouldn't you?
Kai: I believe him.
Amanda Aronczyk: Politically, climate change is just not up for debate. That same year, George H W Bush, Bush Sr., has just finished up two terms as Ronald Reagan's vice president. Now, when Reagan was president, he had so little regard for conserving energy. He had the solar panels removed from the roof of the White House. Bush Sr., he wants to be different, he wants to be the environmental president. To prove his commitment, he hires a man who is both an environmentalist and a Republican to run the EPA. I called him at his home in California a few weeks ago. Hi there, Mr. Reilly.
Mr. Reilly: How are you?
Amanda Aronczyk: His name is William Reilly.
Mr. Reilly: Former Administrator 1989 to '93 of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Amanda Aronczyk: Reilly says one of the reasons Bush Sr. appoints him is because of suburban moms.
Mr. Reilly: There is number one issue is the abortion, but their second issue is the environment.
Amanda Aronczyk: Now, Bush wants to win the election, but Reilly believes he was also sincere.
Mr. Reilly: Bush was an outdoorsman. He loved the environment. He was comfortable in the mountains, in the forest. He hunted quail in the wilds of Texas. This was a man who had regretted the Reagan administration's low priority for the environment.
Amanda Aronczyk: That November, George H W Bush wins the election, in part because he took the issue of the environment from the Democrats.
Kai: It's Notes from America. We'll be right back.
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Amanda Aronczyk: It's four years later, it's 1992 and climate change is back in the news.
Tom Brokaw: Now to the global environment at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro today, the United States indicated that it might be--
Amanda Aronczyk: This time, it's because world leaders are preparing for the United Nations Conference on environment and development, better known as the Earth Summit in Rio. Time Magazine calls it The Summit to Save the World. It takes two years of planning. It's the largest and most elaborate conference ever. There are 170 governments going more than 100 heads of state. Now, at this time, the country is not worrying about a heatwave because there is a recession underway. The fear with Rio is that if limits are put on industry by say, requiring a reduction in CO2 emissions, people will lose jobs, not good in an election year.
Behind the scenes, Bush Sr. staff fight, some tell him that going to Rio will be humiliating and others tell him that not going to Rio will be worse. For months, it is unclear what Bush is going to do. Now, William Reilly, the Republican who's running the EPA, he wants Bush to go, but he fears the protestors.
Mr. Reilly: We were very concerned about the organization of the conference and its concentration of press. Likely many of them hostiles to the United States.
Amanda Aronczyk: Before the summit begins, Reilly visits Rio on his own.
Mr. Reilly: I was invited by Prince Charles to sail up the Amazon on his yacht. The Britannia.
Amanda Aronczyk: Reilly goes on the yacht because he knows that all of Brazil's bigwigs, including their president will be there too. He's like, "Look, the president of the United States cannot show up to some disorganized mess."
Mr. Reilly: Any kind of highly embarrassing, poorly organized affair or disruption and the rest was a particular concern during that time.
Amanda Aronczyk: Holding an international conference to address climate change without the United States. That's not going to work, and President Collor de Mello of Brazil, he knows it too.
Mr. Reilly: I remember President Collor looked me in the eye and said, "I promise you that if President Bush comes, we will not embarrass him. We will be extremely sensitive to his situation." He said, "But you have to know there are more than 60 heads of state waiting to find out whether the President of the United States is attending this conference, and they are withholding their own decision until they find out what his is."
Amanda Aronczyk: With just one month before Rio, George Herbert Walker Bush finally agrees to go.
Tom Brokaw: President Bush left Andrew's Air Force base near Washington DC today bound for South America. He scheduled to attend--
Amanda Aronczyk: It is a massive event. Along with all the UN people, there are 10,000 journalists, 17,000 activists, and outside, there are demonstrations in the streets as Reilly feared, but there's also lots of hubbub. Celebrities turn up, there's Jane Fonda, Ted Turner, Shirley MacLaine, The Dalai Lama Sting, Olivia Newton-John, and John Denver performs at the opening ceremony.
Tom Brokaw: John Denver has been celebrating nature in his songs for years, long before the word environment became a household word.
Amanda Aronczyk: Denver's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he's singing in front of the flags of the world. Behind him, there is also a small screen with images of the sea, flocks of birds, sunsets, and children.
MUSIC - John Denver: Windsong
The wind is the whisper of our mother the Earth
The wind is the hand of our father the sky
Amanda Aronczyk: By the end of the Earth Summit, 154 countries, including the United States sign the First Climate Treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It becomes the framework for Kyoto and Paris and all the climate change treaties. One attendee said the history books will refer back to this day as a landmark and a process that will save the planet from deterioration.
Kai: 25 years ago, it looked like a moment of consensus.
Amanda Aronczyk: Right. It seemed like everybody agreed, they signed this treaty and while it didn't have teeth, it didn't force countries to reduce emissions. It did acknowledge, yes, there is a problem and yes, the countries of the world agreed we are going to have to work together to solve it.
Kai: Is the science of this up for debate yet?
Amanda Aronczyk: Barely, just a little tiny bit, but I found some seeds of it in some news clips and I'm going to walk you through one of them. This is from NBC, remember Tom Brokaw?
Kai: Yes, indeed.
Tom Brokaw: Turning now to the global environment at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro today, the United States indicated that it might be willing to accept--
Amanda Aronczyk: This is from the very start of the Earth Summit. This is from June 4th, 1992. In this clip, Tom Brokaw sets up the whole thing and then he turns to his chief science correspondent who explains the science behind climate change.
Speaker 12: Every time we drive a car, turn on a light manufacturer product, we use energy and most of our energy comes from coal oil or natural gas.
Amanda Aronczyk: Then there's an animation and it shows little bubbles of CO2 floating around the Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 13: When these burn, they release carbon dioxide, which is invisible and odorless, but carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere where some scientists believe it can act like the windows of a greenhouse trapping more and more of the sun's heat.
Amanda Aronczyk: Next, there's a scientist.
Speaker 14: The world is facing the potential for record heat, record drought, forests going up in flames.
Amanda Aronczyk: Here's the pivot, the next interview is with an owner of a coal mine.
Speaker 15: If there's anything this country needs now, it's jobs and precipitous action in form of legislation or international commitments will eliminate jobs in this country and thousands of them.
Kai: Okay. We're watching a story that is like a science report. You're talking to a scientist, we're hearing about science, and then, all of a sudden there's coal miners.
Amanda Aronczyk: All of a sudden, there's coal miners and they set it up like here's the other side of the debate.
Kai: But it's not the other side of the debate because we were talking about science, and then here comes a political conversation, which isn't the other side of a science debate. It's not like it's more science, it's now economics.
Amanda Aronczyk: Kai, this is about money, right? An industry gets it. The coal, oil, gas industries, they understand the implications, people will lose jobs and these industries will certainly lose money. They start to bankroll, think tanks, and conferences, and scientists all to spread the same message that the science behind climate change is wrong. Economics start to appear in science stories, and even weirder still scientists appear in stories about economics.
S Fred Singer: Greenhouse warming is essentially a non-problem for all practical purposes.
Speaker 16: S Fred Singer is a scientist who often defends industries like coal and oil, which are less concerned about the climate that about drastic economic measures being proposed to protect it.
S Fred Singer: Anytime you try to limit the use of energy, you are really limiting economic growth.
Amanda Aronczyk: He is a scientist who has been used for more than one thing before. This is not his first time at the rodeo. I found old newspaper clips from Singer of quotes, from his letters that he'd written to the editor where he calls into question all sorts of things. He calls into question acid rain, he calls into question ozone depletion, he calls into question the Clean Air Act, he's basically a hired scientist contrarian who they pull out at any moment to just disagree with an issue that usually has to do with government regulation and government involvement.
Kai: To just heckle the media, to heckle the debate.
Amanda Aronczyk: To call and to question the debate. Some of these scientists, they worked for the tobacco industry back when the big companies were still claiming that secondhand smoke was not bad for you.
Kai: Wow, and so they went and got the same people.
Amanda Aronczyk: Right. The same people return for the climate change debate. Here's this guy, he is a biochemist and he runs "scientific affairs" for Philip Morris tobacco back in 1992.
Speaker 17: Based on a careful review of the science, we believe that environmental tobacco smoke has not been shown to be a risk factor in the development of lung cancer, respiratory disease in children, or heart disease.
Amanda Aronczyk: In 2010, this is what the same man, Tom Borelli, has to say about climate change.
Tom Borelli: What happens when it becomes more popularly known that a lot of the science of climate change was faked?
Amanda Aronczyk: These early climate change deniers, they have learned their tricks from the tobacco industry. You don't have to refute all the science.
Kai: But if you can just plant a little doubt or sow a little confusion, it will take root and grow like weeds.
Amanda Aronczyk: That is exactly what happened. Okay. Is that Marc Morano?
Marc Morano: Yes, it is. Hi.
Amanda Aronczyk: Hi, how are you?
Marc Morano: Very good--
Amanda Aronczyk: Meet Marc Morano, aka King of the skeptics, aka Climate Killer, and yes, he enjoys these titles. He is in the media all the time.
Speaker 18: Explain to me.
Marc Morano: Well, CO2 is rising. No one's disputing that. What Bill Nye just did was waste everyone's time explaining that CO2 is rising. The question is what impact--
Amanda Aronczyk: I called him because he is a big player in the climate change denial movement. Tell me, where were you back in 1992? What were you doing?
Marc Morano: Very good question. In 1992, I had been managing campaigns. I was actually working for Rush Limbaugh, the television show. I was his Washington, DC correspondent. That was the first year of Rush Limbaugh--
Amanda Aronczyk: Morano learned a lot working with Limbaugh. It's around this time that he starts to question the environmental movement. To him, the Earth Summit was a disaster.
Marc Morano: I do remember that period in time well. I was actually upset at George H W Bush for legitimizing the United Nations process and actually signing that Rio Earth Summit treaty and actually getting it ratified.
Amanda Aronczyk: He sees the United Nations as controlling the message. They decide how bad climate change is and then they put themselves in charge of fixing it.
Marc Morano: This is a United Nations racket.
Amanda Aronczyk: He says that signing at Rio locked the United States into decades of bad UN treaties.
Marc Morano: George H W Bush handed it all to him, and from the point of view of a climate skeptic was a disastrous president when it came to this. He set up the framework, he capitulated, he was weak, and frankly, his son, George W Bush, was not much better.
Amanda Aronczyk: Whoever is president at any given time has a surprising amount of impact on what is a scientific question, what do we do about climate change? Then September 11th overshadows everything. Climate change all but disappears from political discourse until 2006. That year, Marc Morano, he goes to work for Senator Jim Inhofe, the senator from Oklahoma famous for claiming that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. It's at this moment that climate change embodies all these things that Republicans hate, government regulation, globalism, and perhaps worst of all, Al Gore.
Al Gore: If you look at that river gently flowing by, you notice the leaves rustling with the wind.
Amanda Aronczyk: This is from An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's slideshow turned documentary.
?Al Gore: A new scientific study shows that for the first time they're finding polar bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find the ice.
Amanda Aronczyk: Not to be outdone, Marc Morano also releases his own documentary. It's called Climate Hustle. It also has a scene about polar bears and sea ice.
?Marc Morano: Are polar bears disappearing? In 1960, as few as 5,000 polar bears roamed the Earth. Fast forward five decades, their population has only grown.
Amanda Aronczyk: Why does everybody bring up the polar bears? Where did this come from?
Marc Morano: Well, that's a good question. In my film, we talk about how it's the poster child because they're an iconic animal and it appeals to kids, it appeals to everyone, and you get the ooh, aah, especially, a mother polar bear with their cubs.
Amanda Aronczyk: Polar bears are a good example of how climate change skepticism works. Yes, they are iconic animals, and both sides use their story for political gain.
Marc Morano: Global activists, they all talk about the future. They won't talk about the fact that there are now more polar bears ever counted in the history of polar bear counting. US Geological Survey said that they're at or near historic population high. We're now over 30,000 with the latest estimate. They just keep going up and up as people worry about them 50 to 75 years from now.
Amanda Aronczyk: Now, what Morano just said seems plausible, he's got the US Geological Survey in there.
Kai: I guess, but how does anybody know how many polar bears there are?
Amanda Aronczyk: Exactly. I called up the chief scientist at Polar Bears International, and he basically said the same thing that 5,000 number, nobody really knows where it comes from. They figure it might be a WAG, which is a scientific term for a Wild Ass Guess because it's very hard to count polar bears. Let's say you've got this polar bear story and you want to repeat it. How would you best go about that?
Kai: Let me guess, the media.
Amanda Aronczyk: Sadly, the media does not do well in the story of climate change denial. I spoke with Naomi Oreskes about this. She wrote that book, Merchants of Doubt. She's a historian at Harvard and she reviewed thousands of papers on the subject. She's the one who figured out there's consensus among scientists, climate change is happening. 97% of researchers agree. The media, we have portrayed it as a scientific debate.
Naomi Oreskes: This is a deliberate strategy that skeptics and deniers use. If they can get the media to present skepticism as equal and opposite to science and scientific evidence, then they have won.
Amanda Aronczyk: I haven't done a climate change story before but I can see that the reason why someone like me in public radio would have gone and interviewed someone from the other side is because I would have seen it as a partisan issue.
Naomi Oreskes: Bingo, proof they've won, you see it as a partisan issue and that's exactly they want. If you saw it as a scientific story, think about it. If there were some new breaking news of a cure for AIDS, you would not feel compelled to then have the equal and opposite side of some random person at the Cato Institute who is not a scientist telling you, "Oh, no, they don't believe that." Yet, climate change has been consistently reported, not as a science story, but as a partisan political story.
Amanda Aronczyk: This isn't just a liberal talking point. William Reilly, the former administrator from the EPA and a Republican, he summed it up like this.
Mr. Reilly: There was a need to sow confusion, to question the validity of the science to say that it hasn't yet gelled and the press went along with that so that almost all of the stories about climate, and included the pros and the cons of scientific opinion, when in fact there was no significant scientific opinion questioning climate change.
Amanda Aronczyk: Perhaps the most telling thing about the skeptics is that their views have shifted over the years. That is according to Riley Dunlap. He is an environmental sociologist. He works at Oklahoma State University and he's watched the story adapt.
Riley Dunlap: If you go back like I did in the '90s, what you find from the denial community, and now, the conservative community writ large is, it's not warming. Then it's, well, it might be warming but it's not humans. Well, it might be warming and we might doing a little bit but it won't be bad. The storyline varies. As the science emerges gets stronger, they come up with new specifics to attack it.
Amanda Aronczyk: Now, the line is climate change is happening, but the models, the data, the calculations, the predictions, all wrong.
Riley Dunlap: While the story line changes, the bottom line always stays the same, there's no need for regulations. Any regulations would do much more harm than global warming.
Amanda Aronczyk: This tactic works so well, it becomes part of the Republican Party platform. In fact, there's only one major political party in the world that denies climate change and it's the Republican Party. Within the party, it has become gospel.
Riley Dunlap: Global warming has become part of both Republican and conservative identity. It's right up there with God, gays, guns, abortion, and nowadays, anti-immigration, and anti-taxes. If you're a good Republican, you just have to deny global warming.
Amanda Aronczyk: Even though the number of Republicans who believe that climate change is real has been going up, it's still not a priority.
Speaker 19: The truth of this is so alarming that it's difficult to talk about it in a way that doesn't sound hysterical. We're always grappling with how do you make it clear to people how serious this really is without people dismissing you as insane and being an alarmist. Honestly, I think it's rational to be alarmed about something that is alarming. If the house was burning down, we would pull the fire alarm, and we would consider that rational. Well, the fact is, our house kind of is burning down, but it's in this slow burn which is the burn of climate change.
Kai: As the house burns, we negotiate with the science. Just as we did when Darwin told us humans were all of the same species. Scientific understanding of our world has once again challenged the way the established powers want us to live in it. Notes from America is a production of WNYC studios, we love to hear from you, so if you heard anything that sparks a thought or a question, do hit us up. Go to notesfromamerica.org. Look for the little green record button. You can leave us a voice note right there. Just be sure to include it at least your first name and where you're located.
Amanda Aronczyk reported this story with help from Jillian Weinberger and Elaine Chen, and a special thanks to Kofi Bonastia and WNYC's Sean Carlson for recreating the scopes trial and Stella Klein for reporting in Baltimore. Theme music by Jared Paul. Special thanks to Casey Mings who mixed the original version of this story. The Notes From America team also includes Karen Frillmann, Regina de Heer, Rahima Nasa, Kousha Navidar, David Norville, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. Andre Robert Lee is our executive producer, and I am Kai Wright. Thanks for listening.
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