Climate denial has led to paralysis in leadership

Sir, Whatever human nature is, it is certainly not proactive. Historically and cross-culturally, our species seems hard-wired to respond to danger only when it is “in our faces”, and rarely when it is in a latent stage of development as merely a possibility. So it is with climate change, even though global warming has clearly crossed the threshold separating the potential from the actual. Coming on top of extreme weather events – storms and droughts – and wildfires with significant impact on lives, economies, and the environment, plus record-breaking developments in climate science (eg the recording of January-June 2012 as the hottest six months in the US), we now have a report from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that the level of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has been recorded at 400 parts per million – the highest level in 3m-5m years (“CO2 at level not seen for 4m years”, FT.com, May 10).

Despite these developments and the overwhelming evidence “that the strong growth of global carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is driving the acceleration”, the leadership of one of the two major political parties in the US, one of the planet’s top emitters of carbon dioxide, still denies either the phenomenon itself, the science, evidence of human agency or “all of the above”. The result is that the world’s “indispensable nation” has been, and continues to be paralysed with regard to demonstrating global leadership on the development of sensible measures necessary to contain and undermine current trends, which, if left unchecked, will surely lead to a rise in the average daily level of carbon dioxide from 400 to 450 ppm, beyond which we will have reached the point of no return.

It would be in the best interests of all nations, therefore, to collaborate and co-ordinate on this issue prior to the Copenhagen-esque UN climate talks scheduled to take place in Paris in 2015. In the meantime, as one prerequisite to a successful meeting, it would be optimal if somehow global warming could be framed by a new dominant narrative that even members of the Republican party in the US found acceptable, agreeing finally that global warming is the nearest thing there is to William James’ notion of the “moral equivalent of war”, first publicised a little more than 100 ago; ie an alternative to lethal combat as a source of the visceral appeal, cohesion, mobilisation and discipline normally associated with war and “the higher ranges of [our] spiritual energy” that it typically awakens.

So, the question arises, how much more empirical evidence would it take for Republican Senator James Inhofe to declare that “man-made global warming denial is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”?

Dennis J.D. Sandole, Professor of Conflict Resolution and International Relations, George Mason University, Arlington, VA, US