Doomsday’s Skeptic

Global-warming skeptic and ASU Professor Robert Balling feels the heat as the greenies become meanies.

Robert Balling has the answer to all your global-warming fears, pal, and it’s right here in his shorts.

Or rather, it is his shorts, a peculiar choice of apparel on this brisk January morning, but one that goes hand in hand with the controversial ASU climatologist’s stand on global warming. While a student with a “More Trees, Less Bush” sticker on his backpack huddles at the bus stop on University and Mill in Tempe and a silver Prius idles in traffic with its windows rolled up tight, Balling walks his bike through the Arizona State University campus wearing light khaki shorts and a blue short-sleeve polo shirt.

“At our house, we’ve got energy-efficient insulation; we use our bikes more than cars; we shop at Whole Foods exclusively,” says Balling, who, at 54, looks more like a fit football coach than a geeky geology professor. “But I have to laugh when I see that sign in Whole Foods: ‘Eat organic. Stop global warming.’ I mean, does anybody believe that?”

The ASU director of MAS-GIS, a professional-degree program in geographic information systems, whose 1992 book, The Heated Debate: Greenhouse Predictions Versus Climate Reality, laid out the complicated contradictions in the global-warming debate and unintentionally made him a darling of the skeptics club, says he’s never denied global warming is happening – at least at the present point in time. He just thinks there are more effective ways to react to the change than buying CFL bulbs and Priuses. And wearing shorts in January is a start.

“I went to an agriculture meeting in Las Vegas, and the issue there was what’s going to happen in Colorado,” says Balling. “Basically, it was a lot of farmers. And they generally agreed, yeah, the land’s probably going to get dryer. But these guys weren’t saying, ‘Oh, the climate’s changing – let’s all change our light bulbs and drive hybrid cars.’ They were saying, ‘Okay, you tell us how much water we’re gonna have in 50 years, and what kind of crop yield you want, and we’ll get working on it.’ Another guy stood up and talked about advances in cloud seeding. They’re already getting on with the show!”

Balling’s basic message – that all the compact fluorescent light bulbs in the world won’t fight off the coming climate change, so let’s just deal with it – has made him the enemy of many green activists, who, Balling believes, have vested interests in promoting the idea that climate change can be affected by human activity (the $40-billion-a-year lighting industry alone stands to gain a windfall from people switching to CFLs). But the former head of the ASU Office of Climatology, who’s been studying climate change since the mid ‘70s, stands by his data.

“Even if you did all the things they tell you to do, a scientist has to ask: ‘How will it show up at Mauna Loa?’” he says, referring to the observatory in Hawaii that serves as the global measuring point for CO2 emissions. “They don’t have an instrument delicate enough to detect the change.”

Better, Balling says, to take that Prius fund and put the money toward something that’ll really help us deal with global warming – like a new a/c unit.

“I tell ya, the smartest thing we did was, about five years ago, we took our 1960’s air conditioner and replaced it with a new one,” he says. “It’s unbelievable! That thing fired up, and it was like ice-cold air coming out of those vents – and it uses about half the electricity as the old unit. So suddenly, my house became very livable again.

“I don’t go around thinking Phoenix is gonna be uninhabitable in 50 years,” he adds, optimistically. “But then, anything’s possible.”

Rushing Debate

Balling says he knew he was in trouble when conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh started to take a shine to him.

“By 1990, everybody was talking about global warming,” he explains. “But I was reading things in professional journals every day that was at odds with what I was seeing as the popular vision. So in 1992, I wrote a book entitled The Heated Debate, that basically said, ‘Hold it. There’s a lot more behind these popular claims than you think.’ And, for whatever reason, Limbaugh got a hold of it. And it did really well, it sold a lot of copies. But I was instantly branded as ‘the skeptic.’”

Almost immediately, Balling got placed in a camp of respected scholars and professionals all the skeptics cited as proof that global warming was a hoax – something Balling himself never intended to posit.

“There’s definitely a culture out there that’s anti-global warming,” Balling says. “Comedians make jokes about it on late-night TV. Talk radio hosts make fun of it. And they’re always looking for authoritative voices to back up their views. When the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, said it was a scam, they embraced that. When [ Jurassic Park author] Michael Crichton said it was a hoax, a lot of people came on board.”

Similarly, when Balling, who had by then also served as climate consultant to the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), came out with a book contrasting measured warming with the models suggested by greenhouse-effect proponents, everyone hesitant to request “renewable energy certificates” from their power provider or maintain proper air pressure in their tires embraced the professor as their official out.

For his part, Balling says he was only trying to point out the issue is not as black-and-white as everyone thinks.

“People always want you to say there’s no question about global warming today,” Balling says. “But there is a question about it. Even the simple question, ‘Is the world warming?’ requires a very complicated answer.”

To illustrate, Balling, married with no children, re-enacts a recurring nightmare: having to explain climate change to an elementary-school class.

“You start by looking at the last 100 years,” he says. “Well, yeah, the Earth’s warmed for sure. A hundred and fifty years ago, we were in the middle of a little ice age. So of course we warmed – and good thing we did! How about the last 30 years? Well, yes, the lunar record, the surface record all point to warming. But then you hear someone from Harvard astrophysics say, ‘Yeah, but the solar output has increased.’ So then you think, ‘Oh, there may be reasons the Earth is warming beyond what we’re doing.’ Then you look at the past decade: satellites don’t show any warming for the last 10 years. So even a simple question like that becomes impossible to answer for sure.”

Comically, it’s also become the question university science departments are most often called to weigh in on today, and ASU, based on Balling’s notoriety in the climate-change debate, has fallen squarely on the outer fringe of the popular vibe. Jonathan Fink, director of the university’s Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS), admits he wishes the college had a pro-global-warming professor with as much cred as Balling to balance the school’s perceived outsider standing.

“Because ASU has not had other climate scientists who are as well known as Balling, his views are what most people associate with our institution as far as climate research goes,” Fink says. “This in turn means that ASU climate scientists – as opposed to those from University of Arizona, for instance – don’t get invited to participate in the IPCC process and other global fora.”

Ironically, of the top detractors he’s most often lumped in with – MIT climatology professor Richard Lindzen, Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, former space scientist and government scientific administrator S. Fred Singer – Balling is regarded as the most objective numbers cruncher of the bunch.

“He has concentrated on analysis of climate data – not really controversial,” says Singer, who today runs the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP). “Almost all agree with him – including me.”

Nevertheless, Balling’s exposure of a wide range of climate data has been cherry-picked by those anxious to make a case for staying the course.

“The problem with Balling making the statements he does,” Fink says, “is that they can immediately be grabbed by companies that have a vested short-term interest in maintaining the status quo in energy production.”

Balling got in notable hot water when he accepted a research grant from Exxon, something he claims raised few eyebrows in the scientific community. “Every university has projects funded by Exxon. Of course I was at their door,” he says, but it tainted his research to the casual observer. Even today, Balling says he hears from students claiming other ASU professors dis him as a quack.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, that guy has been so discredited. Nobody believes a word he says.’ I always tell them, ‘Have me over for a debate.’”

They never challenge him, says Balling, who’s made a side career out of debating global warming in forums all around the world, from the U.K. to New Zealand. In every debate, he says, he kills.

“I’m like the guy who knows the Bible inside and out,” Balling says, noting his penchant for quoting verified IPCC data at every turn. “Those are the guys you want to stay away from.”

Doomsday Is Cancelled

For Balling, global warming is just the latest scary ride in the big, wild amusement park we call Earth.

“When I got my PhD in climatology in 1979 from the University of Oklahoma, my dissertation was on global cooling,” Balling says, emphasizing the irony. “At the time, people were absolutely convinced we were about to enter the next ice age, and we had to get ready for it. Cities were worried they’d have to dig up all their water lines and make them 15 feet deeper.”

That movement eventually lost steam, Balling recalls, “and then Carl Sagan and his crew got everyone worked up about ‘nuclear winter.’ Of course, the acid rain group was always in there.”

For a while, the world’s attention then turned to the ozone layer, and consumers were warned to ban their Ban aerosol deodorants in favor of anemic pump sprays. Finally, “the global-warming guys grabbed center stage,” Balling says, bringing us up to the present. But he’s convinced they’re not the last prophets we’ll hear from.

“The day will probably come when they lose steam, too,” Balling predicts. “I had a guy from the U.N. tell me, ‘Ah, don’t worry about global warming. Biodiversity is the next big thing.’”

Whatever comes next, Bob Balling will take it all with a grain of salt.

“I used to have a poster,” he says, motioning to a wall in his sparsely appointed office on the fifth floor of Lattie F. Coor Hall on the university campus. “It showed a picture of the Earth from space, and above it, the words, ‘Doomsday is cancelled.’ And then at the bottom it read, ‘Again.’”

Balling laughs. “There’s a skeptic in all of us. There has to be. Otherwise, how would any of us make plans to get married, buy a house, have a family? If you push people, you find they really don’t believe in these big calamities.”