On her Thursday CNN International show, host Christiane Amanpour
relayed President Obama's call for a "global compact" to fight climate
change and asked what could be done to "follow" Obama's plea. The White
House must be pleased to have such faithful minions in the media.
"You just heard what we played from President Obama, his speech in Berlin yesterday, talked about how we must make sure that we avert a final climate disaster," Amanpour told paleoclimatologist Richard Alley. "So how much, in your mind, is it due to us? And what can one do to follow what President Obama says, basically make it better?"
In
rather biased fashion, Amanpour emphasized "man-made" environmental
problems at the beginning of the segment. "We all know about the
environmental crisis plaguing our planet. But this smoky crisis shows
how often the problems facing us are indeed man-made," she said of
forest fires in Indonesia.
And she touted Obama's call to fight climate change. "Just yesterday
President Obama used a major speech in Berlin to call on all nations to
take bold action to slow down climate change."
Amanpour has shown her trademark liberal arrogance before on this issue. During the GOP presidential campaign in 2011, she whacked [1] candidate Jon Huntsman for daring to backtrack to the right on global warming.
"It appears that you are reversing some of your own eminently sensible
positions," she told Huntsman. "You’ve been tweeting about the sort of
rightward swing, you’ve been jabbing at the base. And yet, in the last
week, you sort of rolled that bit back on climate change. You sort of
said that there isn’t enough science. I mean, what are you doing?"
Below is a transcript of the segment, which aired on Amanpour on June 20:
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: We all know about the environmental crisis
plaguing our planet. But this smoky crisis shows how often the problems
facing us are indeed man-made. Just yesterday President Obama used a
major speech in Berlin to call on all nations to take bold action to
slow down climate change.
(Video Clip)
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: Peace with justice means
refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet.
This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time.
And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward
a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late.
(End Video Clip)
AMANPOUR: And joining me to discuss this scourge is Professor Richard
Alley. He's a Nobel Prize winning paleoclimatologist, who's devoted his
life's work to battling this, and he joins me now from Pennsylvania.
Professor, thank you very much indeed for joining me. I know –
Professor RICHARD ALLEY, Nobel Prize-winning climatologist: It's a pleasure to be here.
AMANPOUR: Thank you. I know that what happened in Singapore is man-made
and it's come from a neighboring country. But tell me how these
man-made climate disturbances are effective.
ALLEY: Right. So it is very clear that climate change itself does not
cause a lot of problems but it sometimes makes them worse. We've always
had heat waves with a warming climate. We get bigger, longer ones. These
particular fires in Singapore probably only have a little tiny bit to
do with climate change. This is mostly people trying to get their land
cleared so that they can grow their crops. But very clearly, climate
change is contributing to fires in parts of the globe and the smoke from
those fires does circle on to other countries.
AMANPOUR: Well, exactly. So tell me, you're a paleoclimatologist. So
that means you are into the history of our planet and the history of the
climate. I was struck by an article that came out a few weeks ago,
saying that a critical level has been passed. For the first time in
history, the concentration of carbon dioxide has passed the milestone
level, it says, of 400 parts. What will be the consequence of this? How
bad is it?
ALLEY: So the 400 is mostly a psychological line for us. But we have
moved to a higher level now than human civilization has experienced
before. What that does ultimately is turn up the thermostat on the
planet. It is pushing us to a warmer level. And that has a number of
consequences.
There's easy ones to see. The average temperature of the globe is
warmer. We have more heat waves, fewer cold snaps. We have more moisture
in the air, so when it's right to rain, the rains tend to be more
intense. And that favors flooding.
But warmer temperatures can dry things out more rapidly and the
circulations are changing in ways that are probably increasing droughts
in some places. And we see that the snow and ice that care about
temperature are showing melting in much of the world. Clearly -50 in the
middle of East Antarctica has not warmed up the melting, but the
seasonal snow in the spring, the mountain glaciers and others, we see
melting.
AMANPOUR: You did just talk about flooding a moment ago, and obviously
we've seen a lot of flooding in Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe,
it's been very, very bad. How much of that do you attribute to the
issues with the climate?
ALLEY: It's probably at least a little with a huge asterisk that this
is ongoing. So science is working very, very hard to try to attribute
events. What we know at this point is if you think about playing a game
with dice, you always can come up double sixes. But if the dice are
loaded, double sixes come up more likely.
(Crosstalk)
ALLEY: (Inaudible) playing the game with someone and they kept coming
up with double sixes, and then you found that the dice were loaded, you
would raise an eyebrow at least.
AMANPOUR: Yes, indeed.
ALLEY: We've loaded the dice in some directions and really the
scientific front here in much of this has been how much is due to us,
what is really controlling these very odd-looking events that seem to be
becoming more common.
AMANPOUR: Well, then, of course, that is the perennial question and
there's still people who insist that man has very little to do with
this. You just heard what we played from President Obama, his speech in
Berlin yesterday, talked about how we must make sure that we avert a
final climate disaster. So how much, in your mind, is it due to us? And
what can one do to follow what President Obama says, basically make it
better?
ALLEY: Right, so the warming that we've been seeing is -- the best
science says it's mostly due to us. Nature is actually the sun has
dimmed just a little over the satellite era, the last 30 years or so. We
have put up particles, including some from fires, that are blocking the
sun, which tend to cool us. And we have cut dark forests and replaced
them with more reflective grasslands that tend to cool us.
And yet the temperature is going up. And so the influence of our
greenhouse gases on the temperature, there's a fingerprint there which
is very clear. And the scholarship shows with high confidence that most
or all or even more than that of the warming is due to us. The floods,
the record heat, probably you could see the human fingerprint on that.
But there's more work to be done. But in general, what you're seeing is
that we've seen enough change that it validates the fundamental science
that we've known for a very long time.
AMANPOUR: Let me ask --
ALLEY: The warming influence --
AMANPOUR: No, no, I fully understand what you're saying, and I want to
ask you something. You said that in terms of it being visible, the rich
are likely to see this and notice this less than the poor. What do you
mean by that?
ALLEY: In general, if you live in a cold place, and you have an air
conditioner, you can work in the summer. You see fewer closures of your
airport in the winter. And in the short term, you're not hurting very
much. If you are a poor person living in a hot place and you don't have
an air conditioner and you don't have winter, making your world warmer
is not doing much good for you.
The first degree of warming for much of the world's economy gives you
winners and losers. The first degree of warming for many of the world's
people is not helping anything. As the changes become bigger and bigger,
then who is losing from the climate change spreads to encompass more
and more of the world's population.
AMANPOUR: And finally, you know, everybody's trying to game the system.
How long do we have in order to turn this around and save our planet?
How long do we have?
ALLEY: I think the best analogy would be saving for retirement in that
all delay is costly. If you don't start when you're 30, you're going to
have a harder time saving. But whenever you do start, it helps you. And
that's what the scholarship on climate change shows, is that all delay
is costly, but we can help ourselves whenever we start.
AMANPOUR: Professor Alley, that is a very clear way to put it, and I get it. And I appreciate your insights.
-- Matt Hadro is a News Analyst at the Media Research Center