CAPITOL IDEAS: The False Alert of Global Warming
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL The False Alert of Global Warming LOBAL WARMING BECAME the environmentalists' cause celebre in the late 1980s. They had turned on a dime, for only a few years...
...They want windmills (whether or not they kill golden eagles...
...I N HIS RECENT BOOK State of Fear, Crichton unexpectedly emerged as a powerful critic of modish conclusions about global warming...
...But whether man-made carbon-dioxide emissions have caused measurable temperature increases over the last 30 years is debated...
...Satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures do not agree, however...
...They can extrapolate from the minor and beneficial warming that we may (or may MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39 CAPITOL IDEAS not) have experienced in the last generation and argue that temperatures will keep on rising until the ice caps melt and cities flood...
...They began only in 1979, and have shown no significant increase over the last quarter century...
...The 1990 date had been carefully chosen...
...Any unusual event is now likely to be linked to climate change...
...They had turned on a dime, for only a few years earlier global cooling had been their mantra...
...LOBAL WARMING BECAME THE FOCUS of activism at the time of the Earth Summit in Rio, in 1992...
...They have become a special interest like any other, with legislative goals and millions spent on lobbying...
...But the chart also aroused suspicions, because for years there had been a broad agreement among climatologists that global temperatures had not been as unvarying as the chart implied...
...They didn't Tknow what had caused that earlier "cooling trend," but its effects were sure to be bad...
...So the Earth warms up...
...Whether intentionally or not, that is exactly what Mann's "hockey stick" did...
...They will have to cook up a new one...
...Mann at first did give him some information, but then cut him off saying he didn't have time to respond to "every frivolous note" from nonscientists...
...Mann had "used flawed methods that yield meaningless results...
...It "provoked a civil war among tree huggers," Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in the New York Times...
...What are the facts...
...Environmentalists have become adept at de-legitimizing their opponents by saying they are "supported by industry," but studies funded by environmentalist organizations are "everybit as biased," Crichton added...
...There was merely that one-time increase, possibly caused by a solar anomaly...
...They can speak freely because they are no longer seeking grants or facing colleagues "whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms...
...After its collapse, in 1991, economic activity fell by about one-third...
...It was immediately used by the United Nations to promote the idea that we have an unprecedented crisis on our hands...
...Myron Ebell, who works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in Washington, D.C., one of the few groups that examines global-warming claims skeptically, says that environmentalism is now a $1.5 billion industry...
...The temperature line is mostly horizontal, perhaps declining slightly for 900 years, then abruptly heading up into a warmer range over the last 100 years...
...But "no one knows how much of the present trend might be natural or how much man-made...
...emissions would have to be cut so much that economic depression would have been the only certain outcome...
...Some environmentalists have begun to echo the complaint that they are a special interest...
...Nominated along with him were Rush Limbaugh and Michael Crichton, the thriller' Titer...
...There may have been some warming as a part of a natural trend, Crichton allows...
...Carbon dioxide is itself a benign and essential substance, incidentally...
...The enviros' problem is that they have "everything going for them except the facts," Ebell says...
...The warm period has been recognized in the climate textbooks for decades, and it was an obvious embarrassment to those claiming that the 20th-century warming was a true anomaly...
...Bush the elder signed a climate-change treaty, with signatories agreeing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels...
...The surface data suggest that man-made carbon dioxide has not in fact increased global temperatures...
...They would prove that warming could occur without human intervention...
...It should be a tree-hugger's delight...
...The problem was that their science was never very good to begin with...
...The resulting famines could be catastrophic...
...Both periods lasted for sever-al hundred years...
...Australia, like the U.S., has refused to ratify...
...Since then we have experienced a slight warming trend...
...The claim that the globe is warming depends on knowing earlier temperatures...
...And if man-made global warming is real, atmospheric as well as surface temperatures should have increased steadily...
...is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Earlier, in a speech at Caltech, he had compared it to the search for extraterrestrials (which he says is based on bogus science...
...Yet the Earth cooled slightly in that time...
...Agricultural yields increased, marshes and swamps—today called wetlands—dried up, removing the breeding grounds of malaria-spreading mosquitoes...
...You can see why the enviros fell in love with the idea...
...Fred Singer, a leading critic of warming scares and founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, says that "the hockey stick is dead...
...Infant mortality fell, the population grew...
...Germany had just absorbed East Germany, then still using inefficient coal-fired plants...
...Citing unnamed "climate experts," Dan Rather intoned: Climate experts warned today that tsunamis could become more common around the world and more dangerous...
...Climate scientists depend on tree rings, bore holes, ice cores, the skeletons of marine organisms...
...McIntyre thinks there may be more errors but still doesn't know how the graph was generated...
...The argument is that their release into the atmosphere wraps the Earth in an invisible shroud...
...Also, the earlier changes occurred when fossil-fuel consumption could hardly have been the culprit...
...Then the hockey stick was challenged by a Tor-onto minerals consultant named Stephen McIntyre, who, remarkably, had no credentials as a climatologist...
...Then the settlements perished...
...But the problem wasn't that the use of science had led them to propose unattractive "technical fixes," when they should have been appealing to something larger in the human spirit...
...They called it "the world's most serious ecological crisis," which "may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century...
...He told the reporter: "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in...
...Deming continues: With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change...
...There had been something called the Medieval Warm Period, which persisted until the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th and 15th centuries...
...Mann has refused to release his secret formula...
...Surface temperature measurements show a global warming period from about 1910 to 1940, followed by a cooling period until 1975...
...Since then, those temperatures have stabilized...
...He spent two years and $5,000 of his own money trying to uncover Mann's methods...
...Balloon readings did show an abrupt, one-time increase in 1976-1977...
...They cite a number of factors, including a creeping rise in sea levels believed to come from global warming and growing populations along coastal areas...
...Environmentalists believe that the 20th-century warming was caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels...
...As for France, most of its electricity comes from nuclear power, which has no global-warming effects but has been demonized for other reasons...
...Tom Bethel...
...Now warming is the specter, with its melting glaciers, inundated cities, and the Gulf Stream reversing course...
...The same was true for the Soviet Union...
...Open and frank discussion" of global warming is being suppressed, he believes...
...Yet CEI, greatly underfunded by comparison with groups like the Sierra Club, tends to be characterized in the media as "industry supported...
...But there are no enforcement mechanisms, the potential for cheating is unlimited, and the principal irritation today is that the main enemy, the United States, slipped the noose...
...But America was the principal tar-get, everyone knew it, and Clinton didn't submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification...
...If the enviros were serious about reducing carbon dioxide they would be urging us to build nuclear power plants, but that is not on their agenda...
...Once doomsayers convince us that we are experiencing something new, they feel free to claim that we face a catastrophe...
...But they haven't...
...In 1995, he published a paper in the journal Science, reviewing the evidence showing that bore hole data showed a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years...
...And as its inadequacies became more apparent, their scare tactics became more apparent, too...
...CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETH E L L The False Alert of Global Warming LOBAL WARMING BECAME the environmentalists' cause celebre in the late 1980s...
...Consider, in this context, the experience of David Deming with the University of Oklahoma's College of Geosciences...
...In effect, it was a cry of anguish: Why have we been unable to win on our top issues, especially global warming...
...Environmentalists always need a crisis...
...So one of them let his guard down...
...A Wall Street Journal reporter doggedly pursued the matter and contacted Mann...
...Without it, plants would not grow, and without plant38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005life animals could not live...
...He studied the subject for a couple of years before writing his recent hook, to which he added an appendix comparing global-warming science to eugenics...
...T O M B E T H E L L Under the Kyoto Protocol, U.S...
...From 1940 to 1975, coal-fired plants emitted fumes with great abandon and without restraint by Greens...
...They began declining in the late 14th century, with the colder weather...
...It looks as though they will have to cook up a new one...
...Such information can only be obtained indirectly...
...The details were worked out in Kyoto, Japan...
...This makes the escape of heat into outer space slightly more difficult than its initial absorption from sunlight...
...After they were modernized, Germany's emissions dropped, so the demand that they be reduced below 1990 levels had already been met and be-came an exercise in painless moralizing...
...The 900 years are the handle, the last hundred are the blade...
...The warmer period, accompanied by a flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art in Europe, seems to have been wholly beneficial...
...That produces carbon dioxide—one of several "greenhouse gases...
...Emissions in Germany and the Soviet Union were still high...
...McIntyre was joined by an-other Canadian, and in 2003 they published a critical article...
...Any increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes plants, trees, and forests to grow more abundantly...
...In Washington, skeptics (like him-self) are outnumbered by global warming advocates perhaps by a margin of 300 to one...
...One indication is that "so many of the outspoken critics of global warming 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 are retired professors...
...p. 1 HE "HOCKEY STICK" was first published in 1998 by the climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, and co-authors...
...The graph that was most effective in persuading policy-makers became known as the hockey stick...
...Thirty-five countries, mostly in Europe, have agreed to reduce emissions...
...Within 24 hours of the tsunami in December, the CBS evening news displayed a graphic that had only the words "global warming" and "tsunamis...
...To keep the money rolling in, environmentalists always need a crisis...
...But I doubt if the enviros can keep on fomenting the scare much longer...
...It had been published in the British journal Nature, which later published a correction...
...In addition, an "urban heat island effect" has been identified...
...They looked back to their golden age in the 1970s–the time when they began "using science to define the problem as 'environmental:" "Using science" is what they were doing, all right, and the rest of us were blinded by it, for about 25 years...
...A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period...
...We were expected to reduce energy use by about 35 percent within ten years, which might have meant eliminating one-third of all cars...
...A few months ago, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus wrote a widely circulated 14,000-word essay called "The Death of Environmentalism...
...The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only in ten years," Newsweek reported in 1975...
...Third World countries are exempt, as are China and India...
...These three periods add up to a surface-temperature increase of perhaps one-degree Fahrenheit for the entire 20th century...
...He was recently nominated by warmists to receive the First Annual Flat Earth Award for being "the year's most prominent global warming denier...
...Greenland was settled by the Vikings, who reached a peak of prosperity in the 12th and 13th centuries...
...It has been based on little more than extrapolated temperatures and spurious charts...
...Michael Mann now concedes it is plausible that past temperature variations may have been larger than thought...
...This is the Green-house Effect...
...They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes...
...Build a tarmac runway near a weather station, and the nearby temperature readings will go up...
...In a rebuttal, Mann revealed new information that had not appeared in his original paper...
Vol. 38 • May 2005 • No. 4
