I admire scientists enormously but let’s face it, they’re not the most captivating of storytellers, even with their nifty color graphs. Darwin has a lot to say but when it comes to our heritage, he loses most of the country, the polls say, and no matter how many times anthropologists and National Geographic explain that no, we weren’t descended from apes, but from a common ancestor to both apes and humans; well, never mind. Too complicated and/or thorny for prime time, apparently.

So when the fall issue of the great English literary magazine Granta arrived, complete with brief letters from writers around the world on global warming, I perked up. At last a way to offer human truths on what many (including Andrew Revkin of the NYTimes) call "the biggest story in the world."

I’m sure Granta won’t mind if I quote from some of these wonderful pieces over the next few days. Note: I’m deliberately not going to quote the Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, because her piece on the Artic is jolting, and for now I want to bring to light other–gentler, but no less memorable–visions of the change that is now sweeping the globe.

From The Weather Where We Are:

Urvashi Butali: INDIA

"…the weather has always been cruel in India, but it was at least more predictable. You knew the summer would be hot, and the winter cold. March, and the harvest festival of Holi, brought a hint of summer, and by April the heat had begun to kick in, rising until the monsoon broke in June or July. November, and the festival of Diwali brought a hint of winter and by December the warm clothes were out. Now you’re guessing much of the time: will the winter be cold, the summer hot? WIll the heat come early, the cold late? Nobody, not even the Met department, seems to be able to say for sure."

"Perhaps we can adjust to this new uncertainty–people are adapatable and so, up to a point, are the crops they grow. But if the monsoon were to become equally capricious–and its arrival and duration have never been completely dependable–then India would face a very different future. The monsoon is the most essential and cherished of our seaons. The harvest relies on a good monsoon, and therefore the economy relies on a good monsoon. It directly affects our well-being; it can influence the outcome of elections; it’s the only season that merits a whole raga to itself in Hindustani music. The story goes that in the court of the Mughal king Akbar, courtiers jealous of the poet Tansen persuaded the ruler to ask the poet to sing the raga Deepak, the music that is dedicated to fire, to a flame. They knew that once he began, he would become so absorbed in his music, that not only would everything else burn with the fire, but he would die too."

"But Tansen was cleverer. He agreed to sing, he had little choice. But he spoke to his young daughter, and warned her of what would happen, telling her that as he began to sing, she should take up the raga Malhar, the raga that welcomes the monsoon rains. He sang, and she sang. His music ignited a fire, everything began to burn, her music brought the rain, everything was blessed. A song that everyone across India will recognize is a song that asks for rain

Allah, give us clouds, give us rain, give us shade… Allah, give us clouds…."                                                                                       

The Brookings Institute, Goldman Sachs, the Wharton School of Business, and quite a few other prestigious institutions allied to host a conference of economists in New York last month on the top ten risks facing the global economy.

Among those risks was global warming (although it was considered far less threatening than the rise in oil prices or deficits, according to a poll of over 300 economists taken for the conference).

The panel on global warming was hosted by Carol Browner, who headed the EPA for the Clinton Administration. On the right hand side of the political dial was David Henderson, an economist at the Naval Postgraduate School; on the left was Warwick McKibben, who directs an economic research institute in Australia.

Both agreed that the world’s climate is warming. Both agreed that the laboriously-negotiated Kyoto Protocol is not going to help.

But Henderson sees global warming as not a problem, and likely to bring more benefits than costs. "Examples [he cited] include lower transportation costs, more tourism, longer growing seasons for agriculture, and slightly decreased mortality."

(I wish the summary bothered to mention how global warming is going to lower transportation costs; on the face of it, that sounds ludicrous.)

Henderson said that the Kyoto Protocol, even if implemented, could not reduce warming, and argued for reducing tariffs to give third world nations incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

McKibben agreed that Kyoto is not likely to work, not for technical reasons, but for political reasons–because it’s too centralized.

He outlined a decentralized strategy with the following features: [that it] be
driven by national rather than global policies, especially in developing countries, where
emissions are projected to grow rapidly and where the costs of abatement are low; have long-run
objectives; and be market-based with markets in both annual and long-run emission permits. The
“McKibbin Solution”, developed with his colleague Peter Wilcoxen, is analogous to the U.S.
government bond market, where securities with short and long run maturities are actively traded.

Hmmm…sounds worth investigation.

Most noteworthy to yours truly, however, is that fact that even Prof. Henderson, who saw mostly benefits from global warming, admitted that there is likely to be "costs such as air pollution in some areas,
an increase in the sea level, and increased frequency of hurricanes."

Since Hurricane Katrina has already cost more than the 9/11 attacks, and is estimated by one reinsurance group to be "the biggest single disaster in insurance history" how much less will transporation costs have to be to compensate? A fraction? 

Carol Browner concluded along these lines, "arguing that in many cases, costs of
environmental regulation turn out to be less and the benefits greater than initially envisioned."

Amen. It’s worth recalling how in the l960’s the auto industry forecast economic gloom and doom if air pollution controls were implemented; in fact, such regulations have hugely improved the air in places like Los Angeles since those smoggy times, despite massive increases in traffic.

Why do we take such improvements for granted? We give politicians like Rudolph Giuliani credit for reducing crime, and see him as a hero, and polential presidential candidate. I can understand that. But why can’t we give environmental regulators and their supporters, almost all of whom are liberal Democrats–such as Henry Waxman and George Miller and Carol Browner–credit for clean air and clean water? Don’t they deserve some applause as well?

People far more famous than I have called Rush Limbaugh a big fat liar, but what shocks me is not just the fact that he shades the truth, or that he blames the Clintons for everything under the sun, or even that he misleads. Everyone has a point of view, and everyone is going to frame an issue in his or her way, but few people calculate their lies as thoroughly as does Limbaugh. At least when it comes to climate, his are big lies, in the classic Orwellian sense.

An example from a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Media Matters. Here’s what he said on his radio broadcast on September 21st:

LIMBAUGH: A story from the UK Telegraph today:

    "The Truth About Global Warming.

Global warming has finally been explained: the earth is getting hotter because the sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

"A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

    "

Dr. Sami Solanki, Director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who led the research, said, ‘The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.’ "

   

Has to be the case, because there’s global warming on Mars.

All this came from an article in the United Kingdom’s Telegraph.  Limbaugh falsely claimed it was published the morning he read the opening sentences, but otherwise quoted it accurately. But what he didn’t say was what Solanki went on to say:

He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.

The article then quoted three other researchers who made similar points. Bill Burrows, a  climatologist and member of the Royal Metereological Society, who said the matter deserves further study; David Viner; who said that the effects of deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels had come to dominate natural factors over the last twenty years; and Gareth Jones, who criticized the study for not taking into account greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols, and volcano activity.

Further, the Max Planck Institute, the research organization for which Solanki works, went on to specifically refute his interpretation a month later in a press release:

These scientific results therefore bring the influence of the Sun on the terrestrial climate, and in particular its contribution to the global warming of the 20th century, into the forefront of current interest. However, researchers at the MPS have shown that the Sun can be responsible for, at most, only a small part of the warming over the last 20-30 years. They took the measured and calculated variations in the solar brightness over the last 150 years and compared them to the temperature of the Earth. Although the changes in the two values tend to follow each other for roughly the first 120 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen dramatically in the last 30 years while the solar brightness has not appreciably increased in this time.

Now, it’s true that these are complex questions, and, as the above discussion indicates, attributing cause and effect when it comes to a change in the global climate is never going to be a "no-brainer." But the very fact that Limbaugh chooses to ignore all the complexity, and to attribute the change in our climate to a single cause, and to imply in fact that it is a "no-brainer"…shows that he’s not interested in the truth of the matter, only in the big lie most convenient to his position.