DISTORTING the message is nothing new. Politicians and their communications directors – now universally known as spin doctors – have been bending the truth for years. Occasionally, someone gets caught out, there’s a media flap for a week or two, maybe a senior official takes the rap, perhaps someone is forced to resign … but the show goes on.
So does the manipulation. While the administration of US President George W. Bush ducks and dives in the storm over misrepresentation of the need for war in Iraq, it continues to fudge – and censor – the facts as far as the environment and particularly global warming are concerned. The press in the US recently reported, in a desultory sort of way, that the Bush White House had doctored a government report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Any suggestions that human activities, notably industrial and vehicle admissions, were at least partly responsible for climate change were eliminated. As were references to a widely accepted study showing how sharply temperatures had risen in a decade. Instead, the environmental report took on a new slant, based on a controversial study that disputed mounting evidence of the risks posed by global warming. That study, as the green lobby immediately pointed out, was partly financed by the oil industry, Bush’s old buddies.
So the environmental message was ordered to be rewritten to fit neatly into the Bush policy on global warming, a policy whose big business credentials were laid out when the US, the world’s biggest polluter, pulled out of the Kyoto pact which sought to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by at least five per cent by 2008-12.
The problem with the ongoing debate on climate change is that the phenomenon is perceived as being gradual. But it isn’t; the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) this month published a breakdown of weather patterns which indicate that it’s happening and is producing extremes and anomalies. In Geneva, where the WMO is based, daytime temperatures have not fallen below 25C since late May; in the US, May brought a record of 562 tornadoes (the previous record was 399); in India, a heatwave caused at least 1,400 deaths; most glaciers, from Alaska to the Himalayas are melting, and sea levels will rise.
These statistics have fuelled the public debate for years, but examination of ice-cores in Greenland which provide evidence of weather changes over a quarter of a million years suggest that global warming will trigger a sudden cooling that could drop average temperatures by 5C in ten years, seriously damaging the agricultural system which sustains most of us.
The situation was summed up by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN’s main panel on climate change: “We are disrupting the entire climate system,” he said. By ‘we’ he means us, the human factor. The mess is of our making, and our representatives made a minimal effort to do something about it at Kyoto — an effort which was then made virtually meaningless by Bush’s about-turn.
If global warming – and the flipside weather pattern which it could activate – is to be tackled, the need for world leadership is paramount. Sadly, while the commitment of many industrialised countries and indeed of previous US administrations has also been so lacking, the Bush approach veers pointedly in the wrong direction, and there is no evidence at all that the short-term thinking of a mistrusted politician will give way to the vision of a statesman.
