Eco-Scam / Science Under Siege / Environmental Overkill / Sound and Fury
Bailey, Ronald & Guzzo, Dixy Lee Ray with Lou & Michaels, Patrick J. & Fumento, Michael
They are hardly alone. Butterfly expert Paul Ehrlich has long forecast disaster from resource exhaustion and overpopulation, as did Jay Forrester's Club of Rome. Carl Sagan, Mr. Cosmos himself,...
...And these stories, like those of the environmental doomsayers, typically receive a respectful hearing, as Michael Fumento illustrates in Science Under Siege...
...0 ne of those who has inspired Gore's wrath is University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels, author of Sound and Fury...
...While it may be difficult to ascribe ulterior motives to environmental extremists in each and every case, for some the agenda is quite open...
...Disturbed by the disjunction between the climate-model predictions and the observable data, in 1986 Michaels authored an "Outlook" piece in the Washington Post that would point out the "complicated nature" of the greenhouse phenomenon, and "the apparent inconsistency between observed data and apocalyptic projections...
...Rarely do the media return to survey the apocalyptics' failed predictions...
...The facts are that any anticipated warming should occur primarily at night and during the winter, will increase rainfall, lengthen the growing season, and decrease the severity of tropical storms...
...Notes Bailey, "One reason the apocalypse abusers thrive is that the public has no long-term memory...
...As he recounts, "I began to realize that people were, shall we say, touchy about the issue...
...As PBS producer Ronald Bailey details in Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Doom, Rifkin, Brown, and their fellow "apocalypse abusers" have turned the art of delivering horrendously inaccurate predictions into a cottage industry...
...The average American citizen hardly knows enough about carcinogenicity or atmospheric science to evaluate the competing claims independently...
...Indeed, it seems as if the majority of apocalypse abusers took a page from the anti-nuclear activists—who were responding to a threat that was at least plausible—to advance their causes...
...Dissent and moderation are challenged, in the words of Al Gore, as "irresponsible...
...Michaels noticed that several scientists were promoting the apocalyptic vision with little scientific support for their views...
...Without reliable computer models, one should focus upon the data to assess the impact of increased emissions of so-called "greenhouse gases...
...Brisk book sales and multi-million grants from the Rockefeller or MacArthur foundations soon follow...
...He even proposed creating a fourth branch of government, the "Truth and Consequences Branch" (no joke) that would disseminate propaganda worldwide so that people would "question present value systems and adopt a new political consciousness...
...As Michaels recounts, his entry into the debate over global warming was quite accidental...
...Whether it is the threat of dioxin that prompted the evacuation of Times Beach, Missouri, or the fear that an epidemic of birth defects has been induced by video display terminals, Fumento illustrates how the media, and in turn the public, are routinely snookered...
...Cosmos himself, peddled apocalyptic scenarios of a "nuclear winter" caused by a limited atomic exchange...
...As Fumento discusses in two chapters on the subject (developed from an article he wrote in these pages), Alar never posed a cancer threat to consumers...
...Because such calamities naturally befall thousands of people every year—the "background risk" for cancer is approximately 1 in 4—clusters alone cannot be used to indict some new technology...
...In their broad-based, if occasionally simplistic, overview of the environmental debate, Ray and Gtizzo point out that civil liberties are routinely subjugated to environmental concerns that owe more to ideology than to science...
...One New Yorker writer has even charged utilities with conspiring to hide the terrifying "facts" about power lines and electric blankets causing an epidemic of cancer...
...This is the recipe for a climate akin to that which existed when the majority of existing species originally evolved, not a cataclysm...
...Such statements are not overly controversial within the scientific community, but they are sure to provoke the ire of the vice president...
...Everything from pesticides to power lines has been indicted...
...As the breakfast speaker, Rifkin, the author of Beyond Beef and Algeny, delivered a lesson on the "inverse history of the age of progress," and an indictment of technological advancement as having created an "unparalleled" global crisis...
...As Ronald Bailey points out, the apocalyptic threat may vary, but the proposed solution—centralized government authority—is nearly always the same...
...nothing is safe...
...Moreover, associations do not necessarily imply any causal relationship...
...In a whirlwind tour of major issues, from wetlands and endangered species to ozone depletion and EMF, Ray and Guzzo show the toll taken by the near-religious fervor of leaders within the environmental establishment...
...In fact, the same animal tests used to condemn Alar could be used to condemn natural substances that appear in foods such as peanuts and celery...
...For instance, in epidemiology one expects to find clusters, just as when one repeatedly flips a coin there will be occasional series where the same side lands face-up repeatedly...
...Each year the predicted catastrophes fail to occur, and each year the next round of horrible predictions is eagerly embraced by an environmental press desperate to produce startling stories with enticing headlines...
...You need to keep proselytizing in your reporting," he told the audience of green beat reporters...
...natural chemicals in fruits and vegetable don't...
...CI...
...There is a strong tendency to search for "unnatural" causes for medical tragedies, but journalists are being unscientific when they accept such stories without further evidence...
...In fact, the computer models upon which prognostications are based cannot even accurately predict the present...
...While the protagonists of Bailey's saga always foretell a future threat, there are those apocalyptics who believe it has already arrived...
...Fifteen years later, even though his scientific opinions now directly contradict his earlier ones, Schneider is arguing for more or less the same program...
...In his book, The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival, Schneider endorsed the full panoply of leftist social goals, including wealth redistribution and industrial policy, all in the name of averting an ecological disaster...
...Property has been taken, jobs destroyed, and promising careers threatened...
...And scientists can be rewarded for promoting the proper conclusions: NASA, for instance, has been encouraged to issue apocalyptic press releases to ensure continued funding in an age of tight budgets...
...Yet as Dixy Lee Ray and Lou Guzzo point out in Environmental Overkill, while politicized science may be the source of the greatest distortions, it is not the source of the greatest injustices...
...The federal government controls the purse-strings of much scientific funding, providing ample opportunity for reprisals...
...Notes Fumento: "Mar gives you somebody to get outraged at...
...When David Reynard appeared on "Larry King Live" to accuse a cellular phone of having given his wife a brain tumor after only a few months of use, stocks plunged and Congress ordered hearings...
...As he carefully lays out in Sound and Fury, the data to support an apocalyptic global warming scenario do not exist...
...Indeed, the vice president has been in the forefront of squelching debate...
...To date, they have been fairly successful in imposing their policy prescriptions, if not in fulfilling their predictions...
...As global warming proponent Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research was forced to acknowledge in 1989, "It is going to be another decade or two before we have answers that are credible...
...Thus, the mere fact that three men who ate pepperoni pizzas every week while in college all suffer from testicular cancer means nothing, absent additional information and a potentially causal connection...
...In the 1970s, Schneider was peddling a different cataclysm: global cooling...
...Precipitous action to avert global warming is hardly warranted by the existing evidence...
...Consider the example of Mar, an apple pesticide that "60 Minutes" labeled "the most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply...
...In the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, these fear-mongers warn of a plague of cancers that has been unleashed by twentieth-century technology...
...Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, was promoting the then-soon-to-be-released State of the World 1993—the annual Worldwatch chronicle of impending environmental catastrophe and, one should note, the only book foretelling the end of the world that routinely advertises next year's edition...
...But don't expect the NRDC to call for banning celery any time soon...
...A fter reporting on these issues for several years at Forbes, Bailey told me, he noticed that when the scaremongers were not exaggerating, they were flat-out wrong...
...Thus, it is to be expected that some areas will simply have higher rates of brain cancer or birth defects than others...
...T his past fall, Jeremy Rifkin and Lester Brown held court at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists...
...S peaking out on this issue has not been cost-free for Michaels or other scientists brave enough to challenge the environmental zeitgeist...
...Brown and Rifkin have both predicted environmental disasters for years...
...Many prominent environmentalists seem more interested in restructuring modern civilization than in saving the planet from destruction...
...Whether it is Brown's 1974 prediction that food stocks would be outpaced by population growth, or Rifkin's 1983 pronouncement that biotechnology posed "as serious a threat to the existence of life on this planet as the bomb itself," the two are repeatedly delivering millenarian predictions that never come to pass...
...Michaels was quite surprised at the "nasty" responses his half-page article provoked from both the EPA and then-Senator Gore...
...Consider the aforementioned Stephen Schneider...
...Moreover, their approach is nearly always the same: Adopt my statist visions or die a miserable death...
...The Natural Resources Defense Council orchestrated a successful anti-Mar campaign as part of a larger cmsade against all pesticide use...
...As Michaels points out, such an investigation demonstratesthat any anticipated warming, consistent with the historical record, "is hardly a basis for an apocalyptic vision and, in fact, is more likely the opposite...
...He claimed, for example, the existence of a scientific consensus in 1986 that global warming was already occurring, though surveys by Gallup and Greenpeace could find no such consensus as recently as last year...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
