Op-Ed: Climate change is a moral issue

In June 2012, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. In this speech, he famously referred to climate change as “an engineering problem.”He went on to say, “The fact remains, there are uncertainties around climate, climate change, why it’s changing, what the principal drivers of climate change are.”Dr. Bruce Everett seemed to be echoing these sentiments in his Dec. 12 Tufts Daily op-ed, “The university’s climate responsibility.” It is not surprising that a man who worked for ExxonMobil for many years would attempt to pass off the same old climate-denying sound bites that his former colleague has been using for so long. What is surprising is that Dr. Everett would claim the mantel and authority of climate science to justify his point that “catastrophic climate change remains a predication, not a reality.”

In his op-ed, Dr. Everett criticized the decision of former University President Jean Mayer to sign the Talloires Declaration in 1990. Dr. Everett writes that, in doing so, the president “changed the university from a center of learning and dialogue to a political advocacy organization.” This sounds eerily reminiscent of what happened at ExxonMobil.

In the late 1970s, ExxonMobil’s own scientists had determined that the burning of fossil fuels was causing anthropogenic climate change. As early as 1977, a senior company scientist, James F. Black, delivered to the company’s management committee an assessment that stated “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels.” Rather than fund this groundbreaking research, ExxonMobil executives decided to bury it and continued to fund public relations campaigns that denied climate change for the next 27 years.

Rex Tillerson is President-elect Trump's nominee for secretary of state, and Dr. Everett continues to play the old company whistle. First as tragedy, then as farce.

Dr. Everett takes us on a whirlwind tour of current climate science. He claims that carbon dioxide is a miracle chemical compound of sorts, increasing yields and improving the drought resistance of crops. In fact, the science and reality proves otherwise. Every major national and international research body, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the U.N., has shown that anthropogenically-induced climate change will cause wide and drastic shifts in crop yields, growing patterns and rainfall, globally. The 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the same one Dr. Everett cites in his piece, states that “for wheat, rice, and maize in tropical and temperate regions, climate change without adaptation is projected to negatively impact production.”

Dr. Everett writes that the IPCC is “agnostic” on whether global mean temperatures will rise between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius. In fact, the IPCC report states that warming is "likely" (66 to 100 percent probability) to exceed 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and "more likely than not" to exceed that by 2050. This year, 2016, will be remembered for many things, but one thing that it is not likely to be remembered long for is as the hottest year on record. 2017 will surely claim that trophy, continuing the trend as the last 10 hottest years have just within the previous decade and a half.

A favorite trope of climate deniers is to question the “sensitivity” of the models that climate scientists use. Deniers like to shroud uncertainty behind a veil of complex computer modeling and long-term forecasting, but again they are proven negligent. Climate sensitivity models are limited in their ability to incorporate the cascading positive feedback loops that result from a changing climate. For example, a recent study published in Nature Geoscience reports that methane stored in the northern reaches of the world is beginning to be released at a faster rate than previously seen due to a rapidly warming permafrost (the extreme latitudes are seeing much faster temperature increases than other areas, on the order of 4 to 6 degrees Celsius by mid-century).Methane, molecule per molecule, is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

Dr. Everett attempts to subvert international and national policies to tackle climate change. He writes that the Paris Agreement is “nothing more than a set of promises to make promises.” In fact, the Paris Agreement is a legally-binding document signed by 194 parties, representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. To meet its Paris goals, China is installing close to 50 wind turbines a day. Today, wind energy is the cheapest source of energy in one-quarter of all counties in the United States.

Finally, Dr. Everett dismisses the claim that climate change is the most crucial global moral issue of the 21st century. He glibly writes that “slavery is a moral issue, but climate change is a scientific problem.” Climate change is both. The effects of 150 years of unending resource extraction have destroyed indigenous communities all across the world and this country. One need only look to the recent struggle at Standing Rock, where thousands successfully protested an oil-pipeline that would have pumped millions of barrels of oil and could have resulted in many lives lost to extreme storms, communities erased due to water scarcity or sea-level rise and future generations scarified by our conceit.

We learned years ago not to trust the tobacco industry’s word. We saw that their research was flawed and their methods for undermining those who wished to shed light on the health and safety effects of smoking were immoral, if not criminal. Let us not fall into this pattern of negligence again with sloppy science and climate change.

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