University Times

Raymond Bradley is a university distinguished professor in the Department of Geosciences and director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

In 2010, Raymond Bradley was one of 17 climate scientists whom Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe requested the Department of Justice indict for fraud.

Inhofe, who then chaired the Senate’s environment and public works committee, has called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated [sic] on the American people.” Bradley — university distinguished professor in the Department of Geosciences and director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst — and the other scientists had used federal funds to conduct research that showed humans were to blame for rising temperatures worldwide. By Inhofe’s estimation, that made these climatologists worse than suspect.

“You can dismiss some of these people as fools or charlatans or just very good politicians preaching to the choir,” Bradley said during his Oct. 2 lecture at Carnegie Lecture Hall, “The Science and Politics of Global Warming,” the second installment in the University Honors College’s climate change series. But the force of their words, and the energy-company money behind those sentiments, he said, makes them powerful.

Bradley came to Inhofe’s attention as one of three authors of a 1999 paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which attempted to reconstruct how average temperatures in the northern hemisphere had changed over the last 1,000 years, using evidence contained in tree rings, corals, ice cores and sediment. Its conclusion: Temperatures had started to rise when carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere began to ascend, with the advent of the industrial revolution in about 1780.

“The only way we could explain this was by the rise in greenhouse gases,” Bradley said.

The resultant temperature chart, resembling a hockey stick, was just one reference among many in that year’s review of worldwide climate literature from the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC).

“If the article had not been in the IPCC report, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the conclusion of the report,” Bradley noted. “But it became the symbol of the IPCC report.”

Right-wing climate-change “denialists,” as he termed them, tried to take down the IPCC report and the scientists behind it, led by Inhofe’s committee. “They wanted all of my financial records over my entire career,” Bradley recalled. “It was almost an impossible request and that was the point … If they would make it appear that the science behind the hockey stick and more particularly the scientists look shaky,” then they could discredit the IPCC report.

“I’m not here to say the hockey stick is right,” he added; as a scientific study, it will continue to be debated by scientists. But climate change, and humans’ responsibility for it, Bradley said, no longer are being debated in the scientific community.

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Every major scientific society has endorsed the latest IPCC report’s conclusions, issued two weeks ago, that global warming now is “unequivocal” and “unprecedented,” he said, and that it is “extremely likely” that humans have been the main cause of it.

For millennia, CO2 has been extracted from the atmosphere by living organisms and buried in the earth in geological formations. Today, by burning the fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas, “we’re putting this resource back into the atmosphere at a rate many, many, many times faster than it took for the animals and plants to extract it. We can go anywhere on the planet … and we still see the relentless rise of CO2.”

Our oceans, which have absorbed 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, continue to grow warmer, Bradley noted, causing the gas’s release. Polar ice has been receding rapidly and becoming thinner, reducing its ability to cool the planet. Glaciers also are shrinking worldwide. “That water trapped on land for thousands of years is now being returned to the ocean,” he said. By the end of this century, sea levels could be as much as three feet higher than they are now, and sea waters more acidic, harming sea life. The loss of permafrost also is releasing methane, a highly significant greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

Whether we take action or do nothing, Bradley said, “whichever path we follow, it is clearly outside the experience we have had for the past 1,000 years.”

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“Why has the U.S. government not taken action to reduce carbon emissions?” Bradley asked. “That’s where we arrive at the politics.”

Demonization of climate scientists by the political right wing has included calling them everything from anti-free market to liars and communists, Bradley noted. “It’s only a short step from there to say we are ‘anti-American.’”

He quoted top GOP contenders from the last presidential election campaign. For Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, global warming is “an opportunity for the left to say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life … I’ve never accepted junk science.” Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman, claimed “there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue,” while Texas Gov. Rick Perry asserted that global warming was “flat-out hogwash.”

As a result, “the public, generally speaking, have the impression that scientists still have not come to an agreement. That’s not true,” Bradley said.

“The energy industry and their allies — these politicians who are owned — are winning. There’s a vacuum of leadership in Congress. The politics of extremism has taken center stage.”

Asked whether academics are being bought by grant money, as politicians are purchased by the energy lobby, Bradley responded: “This is a myth propagated by the right and by the denialist community. That’s the biggest stupidity anybody could say. I could make a fortune selling my credentials to the denialist community.

“There are solutions,” he added. “There are lots of solutions. They’re not market solutions. They are government solutions.

“We waste an extraordinary amount of energy in our daily lives … [so] reducing waste is really the most important thing,” followed by the production of renewable energy.

But here again, he said, politics rule, as exemplified by a 2011 statement from presidential candidate Mitt Romney: “They don’t call it American warming, they call it global warming.” Congress looks to China to take action, since that country produces the greatest amount of CO2 emissions today. China blames the U.S. as the top polluter for the last century, while burgeoning energy user India points out that its emissions are low, if measured on a per-capita basis.

“Use of natural gas might be a step in the right direction,” Bradley allowed, since it produces less CO2 than coal or oil. “As an interim solution to a future with renewable resources, it’s a strategy that might be reasonable. We can’t go overnight from all coal and oil to all renewables.”

He added: “I’m not saying anything about the use of fracking. That’s another question.”

Concluded Bradley: “Our challenge as citizens is to confront these [politicians] and demand they take action.” He said we need to ask them, “‘What evidence do you have that this is a hoax?’

“We don’t have time to waste on that issue. We have to act soon.”

Bradley suggested it is time for climate activists to run candidates for political office against climate-action opponents and “force them to explain the issues.

“It’s not a scientific issue anymore, it’s not a technological issue. It’s a political issue. I never expected to be brought into politics, but that’s the way it is.”

—Marty Levine