The Battle of the Bulge - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 134

temporary lull in the yearly parade of successive record-breaking global temperatures. Contrarians
were always ready to exploit such vagaries of natural climate variability and weather to their
rhetorical advantage. The mass media narrative of impending climate change catastrophe in the
preceding few years was an overreach, and it was growing a bit stale. Maybe there was even some
degree of buyer's remorse. Media outfits were receptive to a new narrative, even if it was an old one
retrofitted. The one being served up by the deniers—that a cold spell in Peoria might call into
question the reality of global warming—fit the bill.
Myles O'Brien and the entire science and technology team at CNN, who had done such a fine
job of covering the science of climate change in the past, were now gone. In their place was
weatherman Chad Meyers. I happened to be watching CNN in my hotel room on December 18, 2008,
while attending a conference in San Francisco when Lou Dobbs, in a segment entitled “This Is Global
Warming?” had Chad Meyers on to talk about the heavy snowstorms taking place in the United
States. 4 While it would hardly seem surprising that snowstorms might happen in mid-December,
Meyers apparently thought it was grounds for dismissing the existence of global warming. 5 Promoting
a favorite climate change denier talking point that would make pollster Frank Luntz blush, Meyers
proclaimed: “You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant.”
Meyers was immediately followed by a supposed expert named Jay Lehr, who added: “If we go
back really, in recorded human history, in the 13th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit
warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind.” Whether the thirteenth
century was a “prosperous time for mankind” is a matter for historians to debate. But the claim that
the thirteenth century was warmer than today, let alone seven degrees warmer, was nonsense, with no
support whatsoever in the scientific literature. Lehr didn't stop there, though: “If we go back to the
Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We've been warming out of that cold spell
from the Revolutionary War period and now we're back into a cooling cycle.” What were the
qualifications of the person making these preposterous claims? He was the “science director” for the
Heartland Institute. How far Lou Dobbs's views had devolved from “the debate about the science is
over—let's talk solutions” position he had taken during my appearance on his show less than two
years earlier! Not only was he now using his show as a vehicle for climate change denial
propaganda, but in fact he was promoting it himself. He eventually went so far as to applaud James
Inhofe for being “utterly vindicated” in his denialist views on climate change. 6 To the extent that
Dobbs's transformation was a barometer of the impact of the resurgent climate change denial
campaign, it did not bode well.
Initial Strikes
Meanwhile, the climate change denial machine was fighting new efforts by the Obama administration
to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. On April 17, 2009, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson issued an
initial “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gas emissions posed a threat to human health through
“hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-
level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the
health and welfare of Americans.” 7 She was acting on the authority of a 2007 Supreme Court decision
that found that the George W. Bush administration had failed to observe key provisions of the Clean