CAPITOL IDEAS: Truth Be Told
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS Truth Be Told A1 Gore and the Revolt Against the Masses ( " ' ~ LOBAL-WARMING ALARMISTS have recently done their best to concoct a perfect storm. By the i time you read this, it...
...Warmists will say that that time interval is too short to draw any conclusions...
...And for years, they have held enough senators hostage to prevent the opening of the oil fields of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to drilling...
...But as Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, the Kyoto treaty includes no enforcement mechanism, and those countries do not nurture activist groups so well funded that they can devote decades to protesting against their own government...
...JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...Bob Carter, an Australian geologist engaged in paleoclimate research, now reports that temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at a British university reveal that the average global temperature actually decreased, if only slightly, over the years 1998-2005...
...Satellite data from the upper atmosphere has been available for little more than 30 years...
...There was an over-the-top editorial by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who is normally more sensible...
...natural environment is improving...
...Climate models may differ by a tenth of a degree centigrade, yielding quite different conclusions in the long run...
...I agree with Bill Tucker that environmentalism is "at root an upper class phenomenon...
...Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis...
...Hollywood ~ ! I has been much involved...
...It's the same story offshore, on both East and West coasts...
...C ONSIDER JUST THIS POINT...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing...
...A Bush official said recently that the administration requested a record $1.7 billion for"climate change science...
...After all, who puts money into science-whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming...
...The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's "budget for climate change research increased 12 percent from last year's request," he added...
...Squeaky wheels get the grease...
...He added: Contrary to popular opinion, the U.S...
...I i Gore has also been on the road with his slide show...
...By the i time you read this, it may have blown over, per[ ~ haps obscured by the gas-price flap...
...There is a movie about A1 Gore, and a book, An Inconvenient Truth...
...Perhaps the enviros have been preaching disaster for too long...
...Maybe, but they rely on just such brief periods to claim (for example) that the ice of Antarctica has been shrinking of late...
...It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies...
...The Greens care more about the extent of Alaskan caribou herds than about the price at the pump...
...If they raise prices for the rest of us, thereby keeping cars off the highways and forcing people to ride the bus, well, they see that as a good day's work...
...Most Americans are more concerned about the price of gas than about the possibility that human activity caused temperatures to rise...
...The U.S...
...As for vulnerable countries of the European Union that did ratify the treaty--the U.S...
...Spain, Italy, and Portugal and others are far over their limits...
...And Time i magazine instructs us, unconvincingly: "Be Worried...
...environment is getting healthier...
...The uncertainties overwhelm the science and anyone who embraces a doomsday scenario is more enamored of politics than science...
...The success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today...
...A prominent Vanity i Fair article lets us knowthat global warming is a fashi ionable cause (in case we didn't know...
...The United States is the true target...
...And it makes a lot of difference exactly where a temperature is recorded...
...Be Very Worried...
...All the moral indignation is focused here...
...It is striking that no political pressure has been exerted on any country except for the United States...
...Measurements of major air pollutants-sulfur, suspended particulates, and carbon monoxide-have registered declines of 15 to 75 percent...
...There are exceptions to this positive trend, but the overall direction is unmistakable: The U.S...
...If President Bush had his priorities straight, he would have been pointing the finger of blame at environmentalists, not oil companies...
...Tucker first made his case in his 1982 book, Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism...
...In fact, the Greens are behind the rising gas prices, too...
...Is it near tarmac, and therefore over-reading...
...In the whole 20th century, global temperatures supposedly increased by one degree...
...Our Earth is in extremis," says the Washington Post's Richard Cohen...
...He was on target, but I don't agree with him today that man-made global warming is real...
...Likewise, the number of healthy rivers and lakes has roughly doubled since the first Earth Day, and Lake Erie, declared "dead" in the 197Os, now supports a healthy fishing industry...
...Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, says that ambiguous statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes...
...Why do I get the feeling that most of us are no longer paying attention...
...We should never forget that Gore and the Hollywood producers who want to frighten us and thereby gain control of industrial life have lots ofmoneyin their own bank accounts...
...Government grants more readily flow to scientists who foresee disasters than to those who say all is right with the world...
...Yes, you read that right," he adds...
...The NASA-funded doomsayer James Hansen has been all over the air waves complaining of censorship and posing as the new Galileo...
...On the 37th anniversary of Earth Day," Piotr Brzezinski wrote in the Harvard Crimson, "the environmental movement is looking increasingly long in the tooth...
...James Hansen's alarmism has done wonders for his colleagues' budgets and I'm sure they are grateful to him for that...
...Charles Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph on April 1 that frightened rich men with uneasy consciences "who, in the Middle Ages, 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 TOM BETHELL would have endowed monasteries, today spend fortunes on sacrifices to the goddess Gala...
...All this has been accompanied by the usual agitation from the newspapers...
...The fastest growing economies, committing the greatest "sins of emission," are China and India...
...wisely did not-some will unavoidably exceed the carbon dioxide limits they are supposed to reach by 2012...
...In the supposedly neutral journals, especially Science itself, there has been a concerted attempt to magnifythe climate scares, just as there has been with other issues such as bird flu...
...I HBO produced a documentary...
...They pretend to be concerned about the little guy but actually they couldn't care less about him...
...A "sophisticated scientific brainwashing" has been inflicted on public and politicians alike, Carter concludes...
...Hostility to industrial progress "has characterized aristocracies the world over," he said recently...
...For almost all historical data, we rely on markers as imprecise as tree rings and ice cores...
...The Crimson is published by undergraduates, so perhaps the young these days have a better understanding of these things than old-timers like Gore...
...His A1 Gore promotion lamented our "current darkness...
...Yet because they are defined as developing countries, they are not bound by the Kyoto agreement...
...Before the 1860s, surface temperatures scarcely existed at all...
...Notice it's climate change, not climate stasis...
...Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse...
...But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy...
...population has more than doubled since 1970, yet forest coverage has increased...
...Carefully timed deadlines took Russia and Germany off the hook...
...The underlying science involves so many uncertainties, buried assumptions, hypotheticals, and guesses that the climate modelers who are the unseen drivers of this campaign can make their scenarios come out any way they want...
Vol. 39 • June 2006 • No. 5
