The Origins of Denial - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 51

whose book Silent Spring 73 in the early 1960s exposed the environmental threats from widespread
use of the pesticide DDT, was the first to experience the wrath of industry-funded smear campaigns.
The president of Monsanto Corporation, the largest producer of DDT, for example, called her “a
fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” 74 Despite the fact that her scientific findings
have stood the test of time, attacks against Carson continue to this day. The Competitive Enterprise
Institute boasts a Web site, rachelwaswrong.org , aimed solely at discrediting Carson's legacy. The
thinking seems to be, if they can bring down Rachel Carson, they can bring down the entire
environmental movement.
Then there was Paul Ehrlich, with his The Population Bomb in the late 1960s, which introduced
the public to the notion that our patterns of consumption and population increase were on a collision
course with environmental sustainability. Among the many others who denounced Ehrlich as an
alarmist purveyor of doom and gloom was Julian Simon of the Cato Institute, who accused Ehrlich of
having led a “juggernaut of environmentalist hysteria.” 75 Yet Ehrlich's early warning has ultimately
proven prophetic. In the 1990s, a group of more than fifteen hundred of the world's leading scientists,
including half of the living Nobel Prize winners at the time, concluded that “Human beings and the
natural world are on a collision course,” inflicting “harsh and often irreversible damage on the
environment and on critical resources.” 76 The major national academies of the world have issued
similar joint statements. 77
A similar story holds for Herbert Needleman—like Rachel Carson, a fellow Pennsylvanian.
Needleman's research in the 1970s identified a link between environmental lead contamination and
the impairment of childhood brain development. Lead industry-funded scientists accused him of
misconduct in his analysis of data. 78 He was ultimately exonerated after a thorough investigation by
the National Institutes of Health, and his research findings have been validated by numerous
independent studies over the decades.
Each of these scientists helped instill a wider recognition of the dangers posed by
unprecedented, uncontrolled, and unchecked human alteration—be it biological, chemical, or physical
—of our environment. Carson, Ehrlich, and Needleman were the forerunners of the climate scientists
who would be similarly denounced for their inconvenient findings.
Stanford University's Stephen Schneider was among the most articulate scientific voices in the
climate change debate from the 1970s through his untimely passing in 2010. He was particularly
effective in the way he confronted specious claims by climate change deniers with humor and his own
brand of pithy witticisms. 79 A respected scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences,
Schneider made seminal early contributions to the science of modeling Earth's climate system and
performed some of the key early climate change experiments. Later in his career, he spearheaded
efforts in interdisciplinary climate science, such as integrated assessment—coupling projections of
climate change and its potential effects with economic models in order to inform real-world decision
making. He was a leading voice in the public discourse over what actions we must take to mitigate
potentially devastating future changes in our climate.
Needless to say, Schneider was a target. In the early 1970s, when it was still unclear 80 as to
whether the warming effect of human-generated greenhouse gases or the cooling effect of sulfate
aerosols would predominate, S. Ichtiaque Rasool and Schneider speculated, quite reasonably, that the
latter might indeed win out if emissions of aerosols continued to accelerate. 81 As it turns out, the
world's nations chose to follow a scenario in which the greenhouse warming would instead win out,