by Fred Singer

o the average American, the greatest threat facing the United States in the twenty-first century is probably something on the order of a new Cold War with China as the chief opponent, nuclear missiles launched by rogue nations, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorists releasing appalling new biological weapons, or cyberwarfare against the nation’s banks, air-traffic control systems, and other economic targets. But to the federal government, the greatest threat is something far different. As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher assured his audience in May 1996 at Stanford University, the main threat is climate change produced by the burning of fuels that keep us warm, light our homes, and run our cars. Tens of thousands of global-warming promoters jet around the world annually to attend UN conferences in exotic locales while preaching the gospel of “renewable energy” based on solar and wind power, both of which are currently impracticable and unlikely to be usable for many years.

But after logging thousands of miles and burning millions of gallons of fuel, these promoters have yet to present convincing evidence that global warming poses any environmental threat.

The theory of global warming, which is actually a century old, is that increased levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere cause net increases in global temperatures. Though the doomsday scenarios generated by proponents of this theory have not been verified by climatologists, the political community of Washington, D.C., has made the alleged phenomenon a national priority; and the UN has made it a global one. The chief U.S. protagonist is certainly Vice President Al Gore, the author of Earth in the Balance, which has become the bible of environmental extremism. (A popular pastime inside the Beltway has been to compare quotes from the book with the published manifesto of convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.) Gore’s disciples are everywhere in the Clinton administration, chiefly in Carol Browner’s Environmental Protection Agency but also in the Departments of Interior and State.

Political Jostling

Congress appears to be squarely opposed to Gore’s radical brand of environmentalism. In July 1997, the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which opposes any global-warming mitigation scheme that would damage the U.S. economy or let other nations off the hook. The White House promptly reinterpreted this bipartisan rejection of mandatory cutbacks in the use of fuels as allowing it to agree to “meaningful reductions” by “key nations,” with the definitions to be supplied later. In December 1997, at the Kyoto conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Treaty, the U.S. delegation ignored the Senate resolutions altogether and accepted a 7 percent reduction of fossil fuel use, which works out to a whopping 35 percent cut by the year 2010. A year later, a minor State Department official quietly signed the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the United States, though it will not be submitted to the Senate for ratification until after President Clinton leaves the White House.

In the meantime, the Clinton administration and Congress have been playing a cat-and-mouse game, each trying to win the policy war and finally sway public opinion. EPA made a feeble attempt - scotched by Congress - to label carbon dioxide, the chief target of the Kyoto Protocol, as a “pollutant,” which would have permitted the federal government to control all emissions of it, under the Clean Air Act. Despite that setback, the White House has managed to bleed money out of its $2-billion-a-year climate-research program to study the possible effects of a putative global warming on different geographical areas and population groups of the United States. It held eighteen regional workshops, each exhibiting some regional suitable horror scenario such as sea-level rise in Florida, disappearing glaciers in Montana, and floods, droughts, and tornadoes in the Midwest. In reaction, Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) has added amendments to six appropriation bills, to prohibit the use of funds for implementing, in any way, the purposes of the Kyoto Protocol. He claims strong bipartisan support, including that of heavyweights such as Rep. John Dingell (D-MI).

Both business and labor are internally divided on the issue. Energy companies tend to be against Kyoto, but foreign-based oil firms such as British Petroleum and Shell are at least speaking favorably about going along, even as they continue to sell petroleum products and search for more crude oil. In beggar-thy-neighbor fashion, natural-gas firms and pipeline companies hope to gain an advantage. This attitude can also be found in the ads of the nuclear industry, which is eager to burnish its public image as a non-emitter of greenhouse gases. A particularly egregious example is the Ford Motor Company, which talks “green” while continuing to rake huge profits on SUVs (such as the Excursion, which only gets ten mpg). The business opponents of Kyoto are organized around the Global Climate Coalition, while the Kyoto supporters have the International Climate Change Partnership. The White House is trying to split industrial opposition further by offering “early credits” to firms that voluntarily reduce emissions. These credits could become valuable if Kyoto is ever ratified and includes a trading program in emission rights that can be sold to firms that find it difficult to reduce emissions. Obviously, companies that have earned early credits are more likely to become political boosters for Kyoto.

Support for Kyoto from labor is divided along white-collar/blue-collar lines. The United Mine Workers have already come out strongly against Kyoto because the agreement heavily penalizes coal use. Other unions, however, envision a migration of manufacturing jobs out of the country if the United States accepts Kyoto’s restrictions on energy use. White-collar workers, teachers, and public employees, of course, do not have this problem and can afford to cater to their partisan interests, which are mostly Democratic. Many academics and media people tend to have a similar mind-set, and the possible loss of millions of blue-collar jobs leaves them unconcerned.

Environmental pressure groups, however, provide most of the real excitement. Greenpeace is no longer just focusing on seal pups and dolphins, and Ozone Action has stopped worrying about the stratospheric ozone layer. Global warming is the new cash cow for these organizations, and everyone wants a piece of it. The newest kid on the block, in fact, is really no kid at all but a well-funded propaganda operation to promote the Kyoto Protocol to industry, set up by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the beneficiary of ultraconservative Joe Pew’s Sun Oil money. Of course, there are think tanks (such as the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute) on the other side as well, spreading the message that the best information available from climate science contradicts the alleged need for drastic policies certain to cause great economic harm. Needless to say, these groups don’t get any government money.

Media Bandwagon

The media play a crucial role in the ongoing debate. While they overwhelmingly believe that global warming is a looming problem that calls for fairly drastic measures, most try to mention an opposing viewpoint somewhere, but they often identify it with industry and therefore, by implication, as self-serving and not worth listening to. An interesting case is provided by Brill’s Content, which prides itself on being above the fray. It investigated a case in which the International Herald Tribune (IHT) published an op-ed signed by two scientists, George Woodwell and John Holdren, featuring ad hominem attacks on skeptics of the global warming hypothesis. The op-ed, it turned out, had been submitted by Ozone Action (OA) and may even have been written by that organization¾in which case the IHT should certainly have informed its readers of the authors’ interest, as Brill’s correctly noted.

After the editor of IHT complained, Brill’s ombudsman Bill Kovach investigated. He was assured by the scientists that they had written the piece, but he found that OA had “helped with research.” Unfortunately, his report leaves open the question of exactly who drafted the op-ed. If the “research” consisted of several well-chosen paragraphs that the scientists signed, perhaps after minor changes, they did not “write” the op-ed in the accepted sense of the term. Kovach, however, failed to follow up on that question and dismissed as mere “coincidences” eight correspondences between the op-ed and a propaganda flyer put out by OA during the same week. One of these correspondences was that both the op-ed and the flyer attacked the skeptics’ position and stated that it “dissolves under close scrutiny.”

Skeptical Scientists

Although the mass media have come to a consensus on global warming, the scientific community has not. Surface temperature data do show a warming since the beginning of the twentieth century, but most of it occurred before 1940, after which the climate cooled for more than three decades. Weather satellite data, the only truly global measurements, show little if any atmospheric warming, in direct disagreement with the best computer-created climate model predictions. Scientists now agree on the absence of an appreciable warming of the atmosphere but cannot agree on whether the surface data, which shows a strong warming trend, can be trusted. Critics can say “garbage in, garbage out” regarding the computer predictions, but climate models are the only tools available for predicting future climate conditions. Unless validated by scientific observations, the model results cannot justify drastic actions that will inevitably lead to economic decline. We are being pushed into solving a “problem” that has not been observed to exist but is only predicted by computers fed information by fallible human beings with their own judgments of what is important. No wise person would buy an expensive insurance policy without some evidence of risk. Moreover, renowned economists assure us that a warming of the planet would actually bring benefits, not losses.

Agriculture, for example, can only benefit from more rain with fewer severe storms, milder winters, longer growing seasons, and higher levels of carbon dioxide. And contrary to the conventional wisdom, global warming would not speed up the rise of sea level but might actually slow it down because increased evaporation from the oceans leads to more precipitation and increased ice accumulation in the polar regions.

The lack of scientific consensus on the causes and possible effects of global warming is easily demonstrated. Many scientists show “concern” in public but voice doubts in private. Government funding agencies, which support much scientific research, are unlikely to support a proposal unless it expresses deep concern about global warming and explains how the study will save the world. Other scientists don’t have such constraints. The “dwindling band of skeptics” who consider climate warming the “empirical equivalent of the Easter Bunny” (as Al Gore put it) is growing rapidly. In fact, a real thorn in Gore’s side is the “Leipzig Declaration,” which grew out of a scientific conference held in that city in November 1995 and has been signed by more than a hundred climate scientists. The declaration states quite simply the scientists’ beliefs: “We believe the Kyoto Protocol is dangerously simplistic, quite ineffective, and economically destructive to jobs and standards of living.” A group of broadcast meteorologists and a number of state climatologists have signed similar documents. Even more impressive is the 1998 “Oregon Petition” against Kyoto, which was signed by nearly twenty thousand scientists.

A puzzling fact about the whole global-warming debate is that although it should be a question of science, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol tend to be Left-wing, liberal, and Democratic, while opponents are overwhelmingly Right-wing, conservative, and Republican. Perhaps the best explanation for this pattern is that the policies proposed to mitigate global warming would certainly lead to massive expansion of government control of economic operations and personal behavior, affecting the use of energy, automobiles, and everything from recycling to enforced conservation. It would also require a much greater involvement of the UN, overriding many aspects of national sovereignty. The Left considers these measures good and indeed necessary because they subscribe to Al Gore’s vision of the world. A majority of the Right, however, strongly opposes anything that impinges on personal freedom.

The public, strangely enough, has not shown much interest in global warming. In a 1989 survey of American adults, only 35 percent said that they were worried a “great deal” about global warming. By 1997, the response was even lower; only 24 percent claimed that they worried a “great deal” about it. Citizens have strong preferences for personal cars, SUVs, and private transportation, and they hate it when the electricity goes out. They apparently consider energy use absolutely essential to modern daily life. The public also has widely varying views about the proper role of government, which will be tested during the forthcoming presidential elections. George W. Bush, although ambivalent about the climate science, opposes Kyoto. Bush supporters are hoping that Gore will make the climate issue the centerpiece of his campaign—and might even be willing to help him do so. Here, oddly enough, they are on the same wavelength as the environmentalists. During a recent Earth Day event, Greenpeace activists heckled the Vice President with hoots of “Al Gore, read your book!” Earth in the Balance may finally get the close scrutiny it deserves.

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