Global Warming It’s Fearmongering And The Usual Globaloney Con: Way Too Many Chicken Littles Shouting

Q. Says here the United Nations is holding a big confab in Kyoto, Japan, to draft a treaty that will stop global warming. Can they really stop global warming?

A: There may not be any to stop.

Q: Come again?

A: Well, it’s true there has been a slight worldwide warming over the last century - about 0.5 degrees Celsius (roughly 1 degree Farenheit). But that may be nothing more than a normal flutter in Mother Earth’s temperature.

Q: Oh, come on. Everybody knows global warming is caused by humans - cars and factories and whatnot pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trapping the sun’s heat. The greenhouse effect.

A: We’re pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, all right - more of it since 1940 than at any time in history. Yet most of the past century’s warming took place before 1940. It may have nothing to do with humans.

Q: Then what could it be?

A: Any number of things: interactions between the atmosphere and the oceans, fluctuations in sunspot activity or solar radiation, even the Urban Heat Island effect.

Q: The what?

A: “UHI,” to the climate-science boys. It may be that global warming is nothing more than bad data, caused by putting weather stations near major population centers - where things tend to be warmer. As Roy Spencer, a researcher at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, told The Washington Post, “Traditional land-based measurements have been skewed by city buildings and concrete that absorb heat and make temperatures artificially high.” That’s why the picture looks different when you get off the ground. Since 1979, satellites and weather balloons have actually recorded a slight cooling trend - temps are down about 0.04 degrees.

Q: So why do I keep seeing these flashy graphs - the ones that show the earth’s temperature jagging upward, until we all turn to toast in a hundred years.

A: Ignore ‘em. Those come from computer models, not verified climate observations. Computers are only as good as the data you feed them, and a lot of these global climate models subsist on pretty spotty diets.

Here’s the dirty little secret of these computer models: They keep getting revised downward. In 1988, the Toronto conference on atmospheric change predicted a global warming rate of 0.8 degrees per decade, leading to a temperature rise of 3 degrees by 2030. Scary, right? But two years later, the first report of the IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the big UN committee dealing with global warming - said that the warming rate would be only 0.3 degrees per decade. By 1995, the second IPCC report had gone even lower: 0.2 degrees of warming per decade. And even that’s probably too high.

Q: Are you sure? I thought the scientists all agreed on this thing.

A: Sure? Nobody who’s serious about this can be sure. The only scientific consensus on global warming is that there’s no consensus.

Just six months ago, Richard Kerr, a senior environmental writer for Science, wrote an article entitled “Greenhouse Forecasting Still Cloudy.” “Many climate experts caution that it is not at all clear yet that human activities have begun to warm the planet,” he wrote. “Indeed, most modelers now agree that the climate models will not be able to link greenhouse warming unambiguously to human actions for a decade or more.”

Q: Then why does Al Gore call it “bordering on the immoral” to be dubious about global warming? And Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said that questioning the Clinton administration’s claims about global warming is “un-American in the most basic sense.”

A: Look, you have to understand what an environmental crisis means to these guys: power. A global warming frenzy offers governments a chance to mine rich new veins of political and economic control. If Gore and Babbitt were really backed up by hard science, would they be using McCarthyesque language?

Q: OK, but just suppose global warming is real. Aren’t you even a little bit panicked?

A: What’s to panic? Worst-case scenario, temperatures creep up very gradually, over decades. Do you panic when we go from freezing winters to steamy summers? If we can adapt to that jolt in temperature every single year, we can certainly adapt to a slo-o-o-w global warming.

Q: So what’s this Kyoto thing really about?

A: Oh, politics. Fearmongering. Gore’s presidential campaign. Chicken Littles shouting that the sky is falling. Some antibusiness radicalism. The usual globaloney.

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