SENATE DISTRICT 42
REPUBLICANS BLOG
REPRESENTING EDEN PRAIRIE AND SOUTHERN MINNETONKA

Last update: June 14, 2007 – 11:33 PM

Calling global warming "a huge and defining issue of our time," Gov. Tim Pawlenty kicked off Thursday's meeting of a group that will help establish climate-protection strategies that could reshape daily life in Minnesota for the next several decades.

The Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group, made up of more than 50 leaders from the state's major businesses, utilities, environmental groups and churches, will assemble a salad of strategies designed to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

At its meeting in St. Paul on Thursday, the group discussed ways to get there, including ideas as broad as setting up a carbon trading market, reducing speed limits and increasing grassland and forest.

They also talked about specific measures such as streamlining trash pickup in St. Paul to reduce the number of garbage trucks in city alleys.

"We'd all feel better about it if we'd done this 30 years ago, but better late than never," said Rep. Bill Hilty, DFL-Finlayson, one of the legislators who helped shepherd Pawlenty's Next Generation Energy Initiative into law earlier this year.

That bill authorized the climate change group, established the emissions reduction goal, and also set one of the nation's toughest courses for utilities to convert to renewable energy sources. In addition, it set goals for reducing fossil fuel consumption and required utilities to help cut the state's energy use.

The climate panel will meet four more times as a whole in the next seven months and more often in smaller, technical groups. It will bring its recommendations to the Capitol on Feb. 1, where they might either be enacted by Pawlenty through executive order or offered to legislators as possible bills.

The Minnesota group faces a steep learning curve and a tight timetable, said Tom Peterson, executive director of the Center for Climate Strategies, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that is coordinating the panel's work and has done similar projects in 10 other states.

"This group is bigger than most," he said. "The good news is that there are hundreds of different ways to fix the problem, and the bad news is that there are hundreds of different ways to fix the problem.

"But the state's been more active than most, and the recent legislation is unique in its degree of focus on the issue," Peterson added. "And Tim Pawlenty is taking the idea about as seriously as I've seen any governor take it."

The panel's diverse membership includes representatives of corporate giants, labor organizations, environmental groups, schools and polar explorer Will Steger. Jeff Korsmo, chief administrative officer for Mayo Clinic Rochester, said he's involved because he recognizes climate change as a health issue and that solving it is a matter of solid corporate citizenship.

Mark Wolak, superintendent of the Mahtomedi Public Schools, said he views it as a chance to build on the district's strides in energy efficiency through building design, operations and education.

The public will be able to listen and participate in working group sessions by phone.

"The public is engaged on the issue of global warming," said Cesia Kearns, clean air and energy organizer for the North Star chapter of the Sierra Club, which is not represented on the panel. "This is one way Minnesota could be on the cutting edge of solving global warming."

Economic costs and opportunities will be central to the group's discussions. J. Drake Hamilton, a panelist who is also science policy director for Fresh Energy, a group that explores economic benefits in energy efficiencies and new technologies, said she thinks the panel's recommendations will be "eye-opening."We're shifting the whole economy," she said. "People are going to like stopping at the fuel pump less often."

The group's work, following the Legislature's backing of Pawlenty's bill, also signals that the discussion about climate change has taken an emphatic turn.

"We're starting from a point where the governor has said, 'Let's not debate the science, but figure out what we can do here in Minnesota to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,' " said David Thornton, assistant commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which along with the state Department of Commerce helped organize the panel.

John Hood's Daily Journal
Who Is The Center For Climate Strategies?
By Dr. Roy Cordato

This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Roy Cordato, Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation.

Imagine that a commission or study group was formed by the state of North Carolina to consider and evaluate proposals for reforming North Carolina’s business regulations. Furthermore, the state hired consultants to assess the economic impact of the different changes being considered. Now imagine the consulting group was formed by a very conservative out-of-state think tank or advocacy group, known for opposing business regulations – the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation. In addition, most of the group’s funding was coming, not from taxpayers, but from four wealthy foundations known for supporting right-wing causes.

What would the reaction be from North Carolina’s editorial writers, left-wing advocacy groups, and think tanks? Certainly there would be outrage and justifiable complaints that “right-wing” money and large, out-of-state right-wing organizations were trying to influence North Carolina’s policy process by infiltrating the work of an official government body.

This is the situation that Carolina Journal reporter Paul Chesser has uncovered in a series of three articles that he recently published on CarolinaJournal.com. The only difference is that the issue is not business regulation but global warming policy, and the advocacy groups and foundations are known for their activities on the political left, not the political right. Not surprisingly, the reaction from North Carolina’s media elite has not been one of outrage or even concern, but deafening silence.

The government study group is the Climate Action Plan Advisory Group (CAPAG), formed by North Carolina’s Division of Air Quality, and the consulting firm is the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS). The Pennsylvania Environment Council, an environmental advocacy group known to take alarmist positions on global warming, founded CCS. CCS is receiving $350,000 for the work that it is doing for CAPAG, and more than two-thirds of this money ($225,000) is coming from four prominent foundations known for funding left-wing causes: $100,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (New York); $75,000 from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation (North Carolina), the largest contributor to left-wing think tanks and advocacy activities in North Carolina; $30,000 from the Surdna Foundation (New York); and $20,000 from the Marisla Foundation (California). All of these foundations have histories of funding organizations that take an alarmist position on global warming.

DAQ and CAPAG are using a consulting firm that was founded by an environmental advocacy group and that is being paid for by left-wing foundations to provide “objective” analysis of proposals to combat global warming. But it doesn’t stop there. CAPAG is using that analysis to make recommendations to the Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change, whose charge is to assess policies and make recommendations to the General Assembly. The legislative commission is performing no independent analysis of its own and is relying on CAPAG and CCS. Furthermore, CAPAG is not sending out any of the analysis for peer review. This would be easy to do given the extensive expertise in environmental, resource, and energy economics on faculties throughout the UNC system.

Even more problematic is that DAQ and CAPAG have ceded almost total control of the decision-making process over to CCS. While the consulting group does not make final policy recommendations, it does design and provide the list of policy options that CAPAG considers. So the all-important power to determine the range of possibilities has been turned over to CCS. Given CCS’ pedigree, it is not surprising that its approach to framing these options assumes the most extreme and alarmist views on global warming, i.e., that it is caused by humans, will have catastrophic consequences, and could be reversed or altered by the policies that are recommended. In addition to this, CCS runs and controls the agenda and voting process of all CAPAG meetings and the meetings of CAPAG’s “technical working groups.”

The proposals that CCS has presented to CAPAG include a 50-cent per gallon increase in the gasoline tax; higher taxes on electricity; subsidies to interest groups – like the wind and solar power industries – via a renewable portfolio standard; increased subsidies for public transportation; major restrictions on property rights through smart growth land use policies; and a host of other proposals that have been pushed by left-wing environmental groups for decades. Indeed, the set of proposals looks as if it could have come from a position paper published by Environmental Defense or the Sierra Club. In the midst of all this, they have conveniently ignored the uncontested fact that there is nothing North Carolina could reasonably do, even in conjunction with the entire world, which would noticeably impact the climate. Of course, if CCS acknowledged this fact, it would dry the river of left-wing foundation money that is flowing into its coffers.

What CCS is Not Doing

Many, including John Garrou, co-chair of the Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change, claim that CCS is conducting cost/benefit analysis. In fact, this is not the case. Instead, what CCS is doing, at best, is simply “cost analysis.” The consultants are examining and comparing the costs of carbon dioxide reduction proposals that, as noted, they devised in the first place. Most of their analysis does not display knowledge of even basic economics. For example, much of what economists consider to be true opportunity costs are left out of the calculations. They ignore impacts on the poor, unemployment rates, health and safety, Gross State Product, and nearly all other significant variables. But this is not surprising since CCS shows no one with an advanced degree in economics on its published list of analysts.

What is particularly telling about the CCS analysis is that there is no discussion of the actual climate change benefits that will follow if its list of suggestions is adopted. This, at a minimum, is what would have to be done if actual cost/benefit analysis were to be pursued. The fact that CCS is not doing this is a tell-tale sign that their work is motivated by advocacy and not a sense of analytical rigor. The truth, which CCS surely knows but never acknowledges, is that none of its proposals – whether enacted by the state, the nation, or the world – would have any noticeable impact on the climate for the foreseeable future—100 to 200 years. Effectively this means that the higher taxes and new regulations that they are presenting would impose significant costs on North Carolina’s citizens with zero climate change benefits. This is an aspect of the scientific debate that is not in dispute.

Conclusion

For the citizens of North Carolina, the real problem is not with CCS but with the Division of Air Quality and its parent agency, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). They are working hand in glove with CCS as participants in this charade. DENR and DAQ apparently have no problem turning over the state’s business to an organization that is being paid for by ideology-driven foundations and, at a minimum, has the appearance of being an advocacy front group. If the state agencies were truly serious about obtaining objective and unbiased analysis, there is a vast amount of relevant expertise in the UNC system that could be employed to carry out real economic analysis. But then there would be the risk that this might not lead to the desired results.

Turning up the Heat on Gore
By Jonah Goldberg, National Review

As fate would have it, the same week Al Gore was testifying before Congress, I was doing a little testifying myself. Admittedly, there were a tad fewer paparazzi in the Madison, Wis., classroom where I was giving a talk on global warming (sponsored by Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT). The debate in Washington offered some familiar echoes.

One student asked a long and rambling question that went basically as follows: He understood why I think Al Gore is dishonest and misleading. But how can I criticize Gore when all he wants to do is make people change their behavior and take care of this planet?

Translation: Gore is on the side of the angels and therefore it's mean-spirited to throw inconvenient truths back at the Oscar winner for "An Inconvenient Truth". "Yeah, exactly," the kid responded when I rephrased the question thusly.

The press and the Democrats seem to share this kid's sensibility. Covering Gore's congressional testimony, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank portrayed Gore as a man of science versus a bunch of creationist nutjobs. Milbank wrote: " . . . instead of giving another screening of 'An Inconvenient Truth,' the former vice president found himself playing the Clarence Darrow character in 'Inherit the Wind.'" It's an unintentionally accurate comparison, because the movie completely distorted the reality of the Scopes trial. The real Clarence Darrow contentedly lost the open-and-shut case after a nine-minute jury deliberation. The movie was about something bigger than the facts. So is Al Gore. And that's why his fans love him.

Gore says global warming is "a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth." It's graver than any war. He compares it to the asteroid that allegedly killed the dinosaurs.

But here's the thing. If there were an asteroid barreling toward earth, we wouldn't be talking about changing our lifestyles, nor would we be preaching about reducing, reusing and recycling. We would be building giant wicked-cool lasers and bomb-carrying spaceships to go out and destroy the thing. But Gore doesn't want to explore geo-engineering (whereby, for example, we'd add sulfate aerosols or other substances to the atmosphere to mitigate global warming). Why? Because solving the problem isn't really the point. As Gore makes it clear in his book, "Earth in the Balance," he wants to change attitudes more than he wants to solve problems.

Indeed, he wants to change attitudes about government as much as he wants to preach environmentalism. Global warming is what William James called a "moral equivalent of war" that gives political officials the power to do things they could never do without a crisis. As liberal journalist James Ridgeway wrote in the early 1970s: "Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society ... (and) developing a more coherent central state."

This explains Gore's relentless talk of "consensus," his ugly moral bullying of "deniers" and, most of all, his insistence that because there's no time left to argue, everyone should do what he says.

Isn't it interesting how the same people who think "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" when it comes to the war think that dissent when it comes to global warming is evil and troglodytic?

"If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor," Gore said this week. "If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

True enough. But if your baby's crib is on fire, you don't run to a politician for help either.

You can tell that Gore's schtick is about something more than the moderate and manageable challenge of global warming when he talks of sacrifice. On the one hand he wants everybody to change their lifestyles dramatically. These are the sacrifices the voracious energy user Al Gore won't have to make because he can buy "carbon credits" for his many homes and his jet-setting.

But when asked this week about the enormous and unwise costs his plan would impose on the U.S. economy (according to the global consensus of economists), Gore said that his draconian emissions cuts are "going to save you money, and it's going to make the economy stronger."

Not Easy Being Green
Terry Keenan, Fox News

It's not easy being green. Just ask former Vice President Al Gore.

While the newly anointed Oscar winner has made what Katie Couric called a “triumphant return” to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gore was tripped up by a simple question from Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. Late into the hearing, Inhofe showed Gore a clip from his film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” The clip challenged the audience with this question:

“Are you ready to change the way you live?”

Simple enough. But Inhofe took this question a step further, by placing it right at the foot of the former vice president. Correctly noting that Gore is adored by hundreds of thousands for his green message, Inhofe asked the Tennessee Democrat if he'd be willing to pledge to “consume no more energy for use in your residence than the average American household by one year from today?”

It was a “gotcha” moment, and one that was not widely reported in the mainstream media. Gore refused to take the pledge, adding that, “we live a carbon-neutral life.”

Get ready to hear a lot about carbon-neutral living in the days and months ahead. It's the new euphemism for Escalade-driving environmentalists who “purchase" carbon credits to assuage any guilt about their private jets and 20,000 square foot summer homes.

In fact there is a $100 million dollar bull market in such credits -- and it’s growing, with for-profit companies such as TerraPass, selling credits that give wealthy Americans a “pass” when it comes to actually cutting down on their own carbon consumption. The idea is so hot that several business schools have begun programs in environmental finance.

How do these carbon offsets actually work? Well, like a charm if you're in the business of buying your way out of looking like a hypocrite. And, if you're actually sincere about protecting the environment -- well, the jury's out on that one.

In theory, these carbon credits could have a positive effect on the planet, by encouraging companies to cash-in on environmentally friendly practices by “selling” their credits to gas-guzzling greenies and the like. But a recent study by Businessweek shows that, in many cases, the environmental changes that resulted in companies earning these carbon offsets were just sound business moves, and had nothing to do with being environmentally friendly. As was the case with a huge garbage dump in Arkansas -- the carbon credits were just a fortunate coincidence of decisions made by its owner, Waste Management, years ago. Other schemes were just that -- a lot of hot air.

Yet Gore and the other greenies seem to be sleeping well at night, content that all of this paper shuffling allows them to live in carbon neutral bliss. What power these little credits possess -- conferring upon their owners the right to consume carbon with abandon, while enjoying the moral high ground to lecture to the rest of us to cut back on energy.

Could Kermit have it wrong? Maybe it is easy being green after all.

Beware of Global Warming Extremism
by Peter Bozanich, Eden Prairie

Here are three common techniques that global warming extremists use to shut down dissent.

(1) Shoot the messenger.

Instead of taking on the argument, you try to cast doubt on the writer’s credibility. For example, suggest that the writer is “funded by the oil industry”. This does nothing to refute the argument, but it makes readers question whether the writer should be believed at all.

(2) Ride the bandwagon.

One will frequently hear global warming extremists use the phrase “consensus” as in “there’s no point discussing this -- a consensus of scientists agree that global warming is real”. This is a term which belongs in the realm of politics much more than science. Remember that there was once a “consensus” on the world being flat.

Richard Lintzen, an MIT scientist, calls global warming “junk science”. Dr. Timothy Ball, a climatologist at the University of Winnipeg, calls global warming “the greatest deception in the history of science”. Bill Gray, a climatologist from the University of Colorado (and the nation’s foremost hurricane expert), calls global warming a “hoax”.

In fact there is a film out now which refutes much of the current disinformation about global warming called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. The program which aired earlier this month in Great Britain, features expert after expert in the fields of climatology, oceanography, biogeography, meteorology, and paleoclimatology from reputable institutions such as NASA, MIT, The International Arctic Research Centre, the Pasteur Institut in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, Jerusalem, Alabama and Virginia.

The documentary can actually be viewed for free online (just search "great global warming swindle video” in Google) and can even be purchased on DVD. The film won’t win any Oscars, but definitely destroys the myth that there is a consensus about global warming.

(3) Outright censorship.

This is the most dangerous aspect of the current hysteria. Former Pioneer Press columnist Brian Lambert suggested in a recent column that global warming skeptics should now be silenced. Two state climatologists -- David Legates in Delaware and George Taylor in Oregon -- are being threatened with loss of employment because they have expressed doubts about global warming. The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen recently called for decertification of meteorologists who refuse to acknowledge global warming.

It’s like a religion shunning its heretics. It recalls the darkest days of McCarthyism -- a time when people were afraid to speak the truth for fear of losing their job, their freedom, and even their life.

No one is disputing that our climate is changing. But the theory that carbon dioxide emissions have any discernable effect on climate has always lacked solid scientific evidence. Yes, humans have an effect on climate, but it’s infinitesimally tiny compared with the vast natural forces which are constantly pushing global temperatures up and down.

The reason all of this matters is that once politicians have scared you into believing that the world is about to end, they leave you with no other choice but to let them fix it. And it is their solution -- not global warming -- that ought to terrify every one of us.

It turns out that the cost of committing our state to a lower standard of living, fewer jobs, and higher prices are real and quantifiable. According to a Heritage Institute study the costs of limiting carbon emissions in Minnesota would include:

• A cost of $4.2 billion per year. That's money that will no longer be available for schools, roads, fighting crime, or health care.
• 30,000 lost jobs. Innocent people will be thrown out of work.
• $1.6 billion in lost wages. While government gets bigger, you get poorer.
• A drop in agricultural output. Watch your grocery bills skyrocket!

Real people and real jobs would all suffer. And for what? Because your politician saw Al Gore’s movie and believes every word?

When you hear the phrase “global warming”, think “big government” and “central control”. Because that is the ultimate goal. The global warming extremists don’t want to debate. But they do want your freedom. And they’ll try to shout down anyone who stands in their way.

The Imperial Mr. Gore
by Michael Reagan

Al Gore showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday proclaiming his devotion to the concept of bipartisanship, calling on Republicans to join ranks with him and the Democrats in his great crusade to save the world from being barbecued by the warming of the globe that he insists is threatening our very survival.

In a rather bizarre display of the spirit of bipartisanship, he then promptly refused to appear until after the Republicans made their opening statements and insisted on being allowed to subject them to his own 35-minute rambling opening statement, delivered in the manner of a British resident commissioner reading the 39 articles of the Anglican Confederation to a conscript assemblage of Zulus, as the late Murray Kempton once remarked about Bill Buckley’s announcement that he was running for mayor in New York City years ago.

That was just the beginning. In both the House and Senate the Democrats paid him homage and allowed him to run roughshod over any Republican rash enough to raise questions about his specious recitation of the alleged facts behind global warming.

Chairing the hearing in the Senate, Senator Barbara Boxer allowed Gore to avoid answering Republican questions by letting him run on and on with meaningless observations, thereby using up the questioning senator’s allotted time and limiting his ability to seek answers to legitimate questions.

In one instance, after Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., asked him to sign a pledge that he would not use any more energy than the average American family -- he uses 20 times that amount -- he avoided making that pledge by talking about other matters thus using up most of the Senator’s allotted time.

Here is a man who makes no bones about wanting to limit population growth by forcing Africans to stop having children but escapes any criticism for what is undisguised racism. If a Republican engaged in such racist proposals he would be ridden out of town on a rail.

But cutting population by abortion and contraception and other such methods is not Gore’s only contribution to population control in Africa. He and his fellow envirocrats have an even better way of getting rid of lot of inconvenient Africans -- deprive them of the opportunity to have electricity by banning building power plants -- a lack of which now kills at least a million Africans every year.

As Paul Driessen explained in the British documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” depriving Africans of the opportunity to have electricity will continue to kill at least a million Africans every year, as the lack of electric power on the African continent is doing right now.

Driessen, a former environmentalist activist himself, reminds us that in the name of environmental safety a million Africans die ever year from malaria, a disease that could be all but eliminated by the use of DDT, which has been banned thanks to Al Gore’s pals in the environmental movement.

“It was Environmental Defense and the foundations that created it that launched this nasty campaign against DDT just as they're doing on global warming,” Driessen told NewsMax.com in an exclusive interview.

“They just vilified anyone who tried to stand up in defense of DDT -- an inquisition threatening to burn them at the stake and they just beat them into silence.

“So that in the end you end up with the same situation you have now with global warming -- incredibly nasty attacks on companies, on users of energy -- a repeat of the same tactics, and they're gunning for the same power and control -- it’s not just over a chemical or the chemical industry or one particular insecticide (as in the case of DDT) but what is over the foundation of civilized society -- energy, abundant reliable and affordable energy, and you don't get there with wind power or solar power or any of these other clean, green, fanciful, imaginary energy technologies that they approve of.”

Gore tells us that we must change our way of life by cutting our use of energy. For many Africans, however, changing their way of life simply means dying.

Whose Ox Is Gored?
The media discover the former vice president's environmental exaggerations and hypocrisy.
John Fund, Wall Street Journal

The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist.

Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal."

All of this comes in the wake of the enormous publicity Mr. Gore received after his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar. The film features Mr. Gore reprising his famous sighing and lamenting how the average American's energy use is greedily off the charts. At the film's end viewers are asked, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"

The Nashville-based Tennessee Center for Policy Research was skeptical that Mr. Gore had been "walking the walk" on the environment. It obtained public records showing that for years Mr. Gore has burned through more electricity at his Nashville home each month than the average American family uses in a year--and his consumption was increasing. The heated Gore pool house alone ran up more than $500 in natural-gas bills every month.

Mr. Gore's office responded by claiming that the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero." But CNSNews.com reports that Mr. Gore doesn't purchase carbon offsets with his own resources, and that they are meaningless in terms of global warming.

The offset purchases are actually made for him by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that Mr. Gore co-founded, and which provides carbon offsets as a fringe benefit to all 23 of its employees, ensuring that they require no real sacrifice on the part of Mr. Gore or his family. Indeed, their impact is also highly limited. The Carbon Neutral Co.--one of the two vendors that sell offsets to Mr. Gore's company, says that offset purchases "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions . . . in the short term."

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The New York Times last week interviewed many scientists who say they are alarmed "at what they call [Mr. Gore's] alarmism on global warming." In a front-page piece in its science section, the Times headline read "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype."

The Times quoted Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, as telling hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America that "I don't want to pick on Al Gore. But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data." Mr. Easterbrook made clear he has never been paid by any energy corporations and isn't a Republican.

Even James Hansen, a scientist who began issuing warning cries about global warming in the 1980s and is a top adviser to Mr. Gore, concedes that his work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws." Other flaws are more serious, such as Mr. Gore's depiction of sea level rises of up to 20 feet, which would cause Florida and New York City to sink below the surface.

Sober scientists privately say such claims are exaggerated. They point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that released its fourth report on global warming last month. While it found humans were the main cause of recent global warming, the report also indicated it was a very slow-moving process. On sea levels, the U.N. panel reported its s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. The new high-end best estimate is less than half the previous prediction, which was still far below Mr. Gore's 20 feet. Similarly, the new report shows that the panel's 2001 report overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

In an email message to the Times, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. But it's increasingly clear that far from the "consensus" on global warming we are told exists, scientists are having a broad and rich debate on many aspects of it. Nearly two decades after Mr. Gore first claimed that "we face an ecological crisis without any precedent in historic times," we don't know if that is really true.

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Then there is the Gore zinc mine. Mr. Gore has personally earned $570,000 in zinc royalties from a mine his father bought in 1973 from Armand Hammer, the business executive famous for his close friendship with the Soviet Union and for pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions during Watergate. On the same day Al Gore Sr. bought the 88-acre parcel from Hammer for $160,000, he sold the land and subsurface mining rights to his then 25-year-old son for $140,000. The mineral rights were then leased back to Hammer's Occidental Petroleum and the royalty payments put in the names of Al Gore Jr. and his wife, Tipper.

Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider claims the terms of the 30-year Occidental lease agreement gave the Gores "no legal recourse" to get out of it. She said the Gores never thought about selling the land and would not comment on whether they ever tried to void the lease. "There is a certain zone of privacy once people go into private life," Ms. Kreidler said. She said critics of the arrangement should realize it should be viewed in a "1973 context, not a 2007 context. . . . There was a different environmental sensibility about all sorts of things."

But what about a 1992 context? That is the year Mr. Gore published "Earth in the Balance," in which he wrote: "The lakes and rivers sustain us; they flow through the veins of the earth and into our own. But we must take care to let them flow back out as pure as they came, not poison and waste them without thought for the future." Mr. Gore wrote that at a time when he would be collecting zinc royalties for another 11 years.

The mines had a generally good environmental record, but they wouldn't pass muster either with the standard Mr. Gore set in "Earth in the Balance" or with most of his environmentalist friends. In May 2000 the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation issued a "Notice of Violation" notifying the Pasminco mine its zinc levels in a nearby river exceeded standards established by the state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. In 1996 the mine twice failed biomonitoring tests designed to protect water quality in the river for fish and wildlife. "The discharge of industrial wastewater from Outfall #001 [the Caney Fork effluent] contains toxic metals (copper and zinc)," the analysis stated. "The combined effect of these pollutants may be detrimental to fish and aquatic life."

The Gore mines were no small operations. In 2002, the year before they shut down, they ranked 22nd among all metal-mining operations in the U.S., with total toxic releases of 4.1 million pounds. A new mine operator, Strategic Resource Acquisition, is planning to reopen the mines later this year. The Tennessean reports that just last week, Mr. Gore wrote SRA asking it to work with a national environmental group as it makes its plans. He noted that under the previous operator, the mines had, according to the environmental website Scorecard, "pollution releases from the mine in 2002 [that] placed it among the 'dirtiest/worst facilities' in the U.S." Mr. Gore requested that SRA "engage with us in a process to ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices." The Tennessean dryly notes that Mr. Gore wrote the letter the week after the paper posed a series of questions to him about his involvement with the zinc mines.

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Columnist Steven Milloy recalls talking with Mr. Gore in 2006 about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol he helped negotiate as vice president. "Did we think Kyoto would [reduce global warming] when we signed it? . . . Hell no!" said Mr. Gore, according to Mr. Milloy. The former vice president then explained that the real purpose of Kyoto was to demonstrate that international support could be mustered for action on environmental issues. Mr. Gore clearly believes that the world hasn't acted with enough vigor in the decade since Kyoto, which may explain his growing use of the global-warming hype that concerns many mainstream scientists.

Mr. Gore has called the campaign to combat global warming a "moral imperative." But Mr. Gore faces another imperative: to square his sales pitches with the facts and his personal lifestyle to more align with what he advocates that others practice. "Are you ready to change the way you live?" asks Mr. Gore's film. It's time people ask Mr. Gore "Are you ready to change the way you live, as well as the way you lecture the rest of us?"

Debunking global warming myths
By Licia Corbella, Calgary Sun

The British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle is, well . . . great.

The program, which aired last Thursday in the U.K. to much buzz, has since been watched by hundreds of thousands of others around the world via the Internet. It exposes numerous lies and myths presented as fact by those who believe in the unproven hypothesis that human-created carbon dioxide (CO2) is the driver of the Earth's warming climate.

The same broadcaster -- Channel 4 in the U.K. -- that recently exposed the extremist ideology being preached in Britain's supposedly "moderate" mosques has now similarly helped to tear away the veil of lies and religious zeal surrounding the global warming industry.

The film features an impressive group of experts in the fields of climatology, oceanography, biogeography, meteorology, and paleoclimatology from reputable institutions such as NASA, MIT, The International Arctic Research Centre, the Pasteur Institut in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, Jerusalem, Alabama and Virginia.

That should help top the claims there is a consensus of scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

Expert after expert in this film blasts craters into the theory that CO2 -- which only makes up 0.054% of the earth's atmosphere -- has ever driven climate. Ice core records, in fact, prove the opposite, that CO2 lags warming by as much as 800 years.

The main cause of warming is, not surprisingly, the sun.

"The analogy I use," says Dr. Tim Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, "is my car's not running very well, so I'm going to ignore the engine, which is the sun, and I'm going to ignore the transmission, which is the water vapour and I'm going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel which is the human produced CO2. The science is that bad."

The film starts off covering indisputable facts. There was a Medieval Warm Period that was warmer than today -- that led to incredible wealth in Europe when the bulk of the continent's great cathedrals were built and when Britain had thriving vineyards. Then came the Little Ice Age that started in the 17th century and was so cold London's Thames River would freeze so solidly festivals were held on it.

About 10,000 years ago, during a time known as the Holocene Maximum, it was much warmer even than the Medieval times.

Dr. Ian Clark, Prof. of Isotope Hydrogeology and Paleoclimatology at the U of Ottawa, notes polar bears (which have become the poster-animal of the global warming industry) survived that sustained warm cycle and that volcanoes produce more CO2 every year than all human activity.

What's more, prior to 1940 temperatures on Earth were rising long before industrialization took place.

Then, when carbon dioxide emissions rose markedly in the post-war economic boom period, temperatures fell for the next three decades, again, in direct contravention of the theory being espoused and believed by so many.

Ironically, in the 1970s, just as scientists started predicting another climate catastrophe -- an impending ice age -- the planet started warming again.

The documentary ends with a quote from Dr. Fred Singer of the U of Virginia.

"There will still be people who believe this is the end of the world, particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the U.K. telling people that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the Earth will be the Antarctic and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who move to the Antarctic. I mean, this is hilarious," he says with a chuckle.

"It would be hilarious, actually, if it weren't so sad."

See the film at: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog?entry=24760&only

Ruud to speak at St. Paul event

Rep. Maria Ruud, who represents District 42A in Eden Prairie and Minnetonka, is set to speak at an event from 6:30 to 8:45 p.m. Thursday, March 15, at Christ Lutheran Church, 105 University Ave. W., St. Paul.

The Lutheran Coalition for Public Policy is sponsoring the event with Congregations Caring for Creation, and Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light.

Ruud and Sen. Ellen Anderson, authors of the Global Warming Mitigation Act bills in the house and senate, "will give us the inside story on what is happening in the Minnesota Legislature," according to a news release.

Participants will be able to join in activities like:

• Training/role playing on meeting with your legislator
• Letter writing to legislators about the importance of global warming solutions
• Networking about Earth Day activities
• Minnesota Energy Challenge support.
• Sign up for showings of movies like “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“Global warming is a serious threat to humanity’s future! Global warming is not a myth, but a stark reality!”

These statements from the media are meant to scare the living daylights out of you. Lately, global warming headlines are becoming more alarming. In fact, some school children are reportedly unable to sleep because of what they are being taught about the horrors of global warming.

Should we, like the producers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” be concerned to the point of near hysteria?

I don’t think so.

Green movement supporters, Hollywood elites, and some politicians say we ought to stop what we are doing and turn our lives upside down, that is, if we earthlings are to survive.

Get rid of your SUV, replace it with an earth-friendly hybrid; walk or take mass transit; install solar panels for heating water, etc. These are just a few ways to pitch in to help the cause – it seems no sacrifice is too large or small!
Hollywood elites and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi use their public platforms to encourage us to do what we can to save the planet. The hypocrisy of their piety is not lost on most of us as they fly around in their private jets, burning thousands of pounds of fossil fuel, creating tons of new greenhouse gases.

“The government must do something!”

Answering that call, our Minnesota legislators and Gov. Pawlenty are considering the Global Warming Mitigation Act of 2007; it is intended to mitigate global warming by reducing Minnesota’s greenhouse gas emissions and thereby “avoid dangerous climate changes in the future.”

Even “C” students like me can see the handwriting on the wall: more governmental bureaucracy, more obnoxious regulations, more expense for business to pass on to consumers, more expense to taxpayers and everyone will now have less discretionary income with which to payer higher taxes!

Just 30 years ago the green movement was concerned about global cooling and the impending doom of the next Ice Age. Today, they are worried sick about global warming! It is interesting to note that thousands of qualified experts completely disagree with the current consensus of human-induced global warming. For instance, the “UK News” on March 4, 2007, released a story stating:

“Accepted theories about man causing global warming are ‘lies,’ claims a controversial new TV documentary. ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ – backed by eminent scientists – is set to rock the accepted consensus that climate change is being driven by humans.”

It is true our Earth has been warming for the past century and average surface temperatures have risen one degree Fahrenheit. What is not so certain is what accounts for this change. Is global warming occurring because of increasing greenhouse gases (GHG’s) owing to increased fossil fuel use; temporary increases in solar radiation; or simply a mysterious planetary cycle as unstoppable as the tides?

No one really knows for sure.

Yes, greenhouse gas levels are increasing, however, contrary to prevailing opinion, GHG’s do not produce global warming – global warming produces more greenhouse gases!

“In 1997 more than 20,000 qualified scientists signed (the Robinson Petition) declaring, ‘There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.’”

Beneficial effects from increased atmospheric CO2? I don’t recall hearing much about that … I guess it’s just an inconvenient truth.

Similarly, our new Global Warming Mitigation Act puzzles me. If our legislators are truly intent on mitigating global warming by reducing Minnesota’s greenhouse gas emissions, why doesn’t the Act even mention nuclear energy as a possible source of relief?

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the three primary sources of emission-free energy are nuclear (73 percent), hydropower (24 percent) and solar/wind/geothermal (3 percent). Why did our lawmakers advocate solar/wind/geothermal and biofuels, but totally ignore additional nuclear energy?

Wind turbines and solar power may be fine on the farm or in my backyard but they are simply not in the same league with nuclear power generators. Nuclear is inexhaustible, emits zero pollutants or GHG’s, cheaper than coal and has a small footprint. In 2005, we would have needed wind turbines covering an area the size of West Virginia (24,230 square miles) or solar cells covering an area the size of New Jersey (8,720 square miles) to equal the United States’ nuclear energy output!

Instead of implementing ineffective solutions that subject us to burdensome and costly new regulations, why not get serious about reducing greenhouse gases by producing more nuclear energy?
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Eden Prairie resident William Kittelson’s column, “Right Side of the Prairie,” appears on the second Thursday of the month.

Carbon indulgences for modern sinner
Al Gore's money justifies his using more than his share of resources. Does that make sense?
By Debra J. Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle

Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was billed as "a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it." But right after the movie won an Oscar for best documentary, America learned that Gore's crusade ends at his front door.

A conservative think tank, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, released a press release that showed the Gores spent $30,000 a year on energy for their suburban Nashville home -- and burned 221,000 kilowatt-hours last year, or 20 times the national average. The reaction of Gore's spokesperson is instructive. Kalee Kreider told ABC News' Jake Tapper, "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue, so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent."

Kreider is right, in a way. Gore is the most effective global-warming advocate in America. Yet somehow Gore has little problem doing a lot of the very thing he tells the rest of the country not to do -- that is, burning more energy than is necessary.

The message comes across loud and clear: The Gores are rich, and rich people are going to burn a lot of energy. They won't let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyle.

That's why "Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David can boast on the movie website that she is "committed to stopping global warming," denounce people who drive SUVs -- and still fly in private Gulfstream jets. (Having been blasted in the press for her high-flying ways, David told ABC last year that she was cutting back on her private-plane travel. Talk about commitment.)

And let us not forget two other California pioneers on climate change -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, both owners of multiple SUVs and users of private planes.

Fear not, however, because Gore, like the people who put on the Oscars, is "carbon neutral." As Kreider told ABC, the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero."

I used to figure that rich sinners, who bought "indulgences" from the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, would be ashamed of the bargain that other churchgoers looked upon with scorn and derision.

But lo, on Academy Awards night, the stars were quite impressed with themselves for participating in a "carbon-neutral" event. Cozy up to the Natural Resources Defense Council, and all those private flights, limo rides and multiple homes disappear. Almost like special effects.

I know that the word on many readers' lips is: hypocrisy.

But the real issue is that the most effective spokesman for global warming apparently doesn't think he has to show personal leadership by curbing his energy consumption. The same goes for Feinstein and Schwarzenegger, who are happy to push for laws that make other people cut their emissions, but are far too affluent to cut back themselves.

"With the future so open to doubt," Gore wrote in his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance, "we routinely choose to indulge our own generation at the expense of all who will follow."

Now Gore has a spokesperson who explains his indulgence -- er, offset -- policy. And it apparently doesn't matter that Gore's behavior signals to global-warming agnostics (like me), and to global-warming believers, that the climate situation must not be that dire after all.
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Debra J. Saunders' column is distributed by Creators Syndicate.

State Capitol Environment
Greenhouse gas limits take first step in Legislature
House committee approves bill despite concern that emission cuts could hamper future power generation
By Dennis Lien, Pioneer Press

A proposal setting long-range goals for reducing Minnesota's contributions to global warming passed its first legislative hurdle Tuesday night, but not without a debate over the state's future power needs.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Maria Ruud, DFL-Minnetonka, would have Minnesota cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-producing byproducts of fossil fuels by 15 percent by 2015, 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050. A task force would spend the next year figuring out how the state could meet those goals and then make recommendations to the Legislature.

The measure, one of several global-warming initiatives being considered this year, passed the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee despite fears it would inhibit new power-plant construction and the accompanying thousands of jobs. Citing projected population increases in Minnesota in coming decades, Rep. Joe Hoppe, R-Chaska, said, “I think we need to consider where we are going to get the power.”

But Ruud argued that her legislation wouldn't have such an effect. New power plants that offset the new emissions they would produce could be built, she stressed.

“We're kind of in the middle of this evolution in which our world is changing, and I think that's creating some fear,” Ruud said afterward.

Without strong leadership on global warming from the federal government, she said the state must act now to limit its contributions or face a deteriorating situation later.

Recently, some of the world's leading climate scientists said global warming had begun, is “very likely” caused by man and will continue for centuries. The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- a group of scientists and representatives of 113 counties -- predicted temperature rises of 2 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.

Many experts argue that reducing future greenhouse-gas emissions will help limit the speed and extent of warming.

Ruud's bill, which passed on a voice vote, now goes to the Energy Finance and Policy Division. A companion bill sponsored by Sen. Ellen Anderson, DFL-St. Paul, awaits a hearing in a Senate committee.

In many respects, their proposal is similar to ones from Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has outlined ways to address global warming in recent months. Pawlenty, however, doesn't favor specific target dates and would give utilities more flexibility in offsetting the carbon pollution they generate.

“While we believe climate change is real, we recognize there are uncertainties,” said Edward Garvey, Minnesota's deputy commerce commissioner.

A recently passed renewable-energy law “has the effect of potentially stabilizing the carbon emissions from our electricity sector,” Garvey added.

Ruud and Pawlenty both recommend having a task force of citizens and experts work on ways to tackle the problem.

More than a dozen other states, mostly in New England and along the West Coast, already have established greenhouse-gas emissions targets. Some are more aggressive than Minnesota's proposal and some less so.

One of three targets in California, for example, is 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. Rhode Island has two targets: reaching 1990 levels by 2010 and 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Saying Minnesotans are repeatedly telling legislators they want them to act now, Ruud said the issue shouldn't pit one side or cause against another.

“We have learned that global warming is not just an environmental issue; it is an economic issue,” Ruud said. “It's a social justice issue and a moral issue.”

In a polemical and thought-provoking documentary, film-maker Martin Durkin argues that the theory of man-made global warming has become such a powerful political force that other explanations for climate change are not being properly aired.

The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun's radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

The film argues that the earth's climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease.

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biogeography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center, and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.

The film hears from scientists who dispute the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. 'The ice core record goes to the very heart of the problem we have,' says Tim Ball, Climatologist and Prof Emeritus of Geography at the University of Winnipeg in the documentary. 'They said if CO2 increases in the atmosphere, as a greenhouse gas, then the temperature will go up'.

In fact, the experts in the film argue that increased CO2 levels are actually a result of temperature rises, not their cause, and that this alternate view is rarely heard. 'So the fundamental assumption, the most fundamental assumption of the whole theory of climate change due to humans, is shown to be wrong.'

'I've often heard it said that there is a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue, that humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system,' says John Christy, Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center, NSSTC University of Alabama. 'Well I am one scientist, and there are many, that simply think that is not true.'

The film examines an alternative theory that explains global temperatures, based on research by Professor Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Space Center. The professor and his team found that as solar activity increases, and the sun flares, cloud formation on earth is significantly diminished and temperature rises.

Ian Clark, Professor of Isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology at the Dept of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa explains: 'Solar activity over the last hundred years, over the last several hundred years, correlates very nicely, on a decadal basis, with temperature.'

Finally, the film argues that restricting CO2 emissions could actually be damaging for people in the developing world. James Shikwati, Kenyan director of the Inter Region Economic Network, says: 'The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival.

'I don't see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway network, it might work, maybe, to power a small transistor radio.

'The thing that emerges from the whole environmental debate is the point that there is somebody keen to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told don't touch your resources, don't touch your oil, don't touch your coal; that is suicide.

'Global Warming Is Lies' Claims Documentary

Accepted theories about man causing global warming are “lies” claims a controversial new TV documentary.

“The Great Global Warming Swindle” -- backed by eminent scientists -- is set to rock the accepted consensus that climate change is being driven by humans.

The program, to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday March 8, will see a series of respected scientists attack the “propaganda” that they claim is killing the world’s poor.

Even the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is shown, claiming African countries should be encouraged to burn more CO2.

Nobody in the documentary defends the greenhouse effect theory, as it claims that climate change is natural, has been occurring for years, and ice falling from glaciers is just the spring break-up and as normal as leaves falling in autumn.

A source at Channel 4 said: “It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for.”

Controversial director Martin Durkin said: “You can see the problems with the science of global warming, but people just don’t believe you – it’s taken ten years to get this commissioned.

"I think it will go down in history as the first chapter in a new era of the relationship between scientists and society. Legitimate scientists – people with qualifications – are the bad guys.

“It is a big story that is going to cause controversy.

“It’s very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total nonsense.

“Al Gore might have won an Oscar for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, but the film is very misleading and he has got the relationship between CO2 and climate change the wrong way round."

One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but palaeontologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.

He has evidence showing that warmer spells in the Earth’s history actually came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.

Prof Clark believes increased levels of CO2 are because the Earth is heating up and not the cause. He says most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas.

When the temperature increases, more gas is released into the atmosphere and when global temperatures cool, more CO2 is taken in. Because of the immense size of the oceans, he said they take time to catch up with climate trends, and this ‘memory effect’ is responsible for the lag.

Scientists in the program also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.

It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.

This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.

The program claims there appears to be a consensus across science that CO2 is responsible for global warming, but Professor Paul Reiter is shown to disagree.

He said the influential United Nations report on Climate change, that claimed humans were responsible, was a sham.

It claimed to be the opinion of 2,500 leading scientists, but Prof Reiter said it included names of scientists who disagreed with the findings and resigned from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and said the report was finalised by government appointees.

The CO2 theory is further undermined by claims that billions of dollars are being provided by governments to fund greenhouse effect research, so thousands of scientists know their job depends on the theory continuing to be seen as fact.

The program claims efforts to reduce CO2 are killing Africans, who have to burn fires inside their home, causing cancer and lung damage, because their governments are being encouraged to use wind and solar panels that are not capable of supplying the continent with electricity, instead of coal and oil-burning power stations that could.

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore is shown saying: “Environmentalists have romanticised peasant life, but this is anti-human.

“They are saying the world’s poorest people should have the world’s most expensive form of form of energy – really saying they can’t have electricity.”

Gary Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, is featured in the programme, and has just released a book claiming that clouds are the real reason behind climate change.

‘The Chilling Stars’ was written with Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark who published a scientific paper, claiming cosmic rays cause clouds to form, reducing the global temperature. The theory is shown in the programme.

Mr Calder said: "Henrik Svensmark saw that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars - when there are more cosmic rays, there are more clouds.

“However, solar winds bat away many of the cosmic rays and the sun is currently in its most active phase, which would be an explanation for global warming.

“I am a science journalist and in my career I have been told by eminent scientists that black holes do not exist and it is impossible that continents move, but in science the experts are usually wrong.

“For me this is a cracking science story – I don’t come from any political position and I’m certainly not funded by the multinationals, although my bank manager would like me to be.

“I talk to scientists and come up with one story, and Al Gore talks to another set of scientists and comes up with a different story.

“So knowing which scientists to talk to is part of the skill. Some, who appear to be disinterested, are themselves getting billions of dollars of research money from the government.

“The few millions of dollars of research money from multinationals can’t compare to government funding, so you find the American scientific establishment is all for man-made global warming.

“We have the same situation in Britain The government’s chief scientific advisor Sir David King is supposed to be the representative of all that is good in British science, so it is disturbing he and the government are ignoring a raft of evidence against the greenhouse effect being the main driver against climate change.”

The program shows how the global warming research drive began when Margaret Thatcher gave money to scientists to ‘prove’ burning coal and oil was harmful, as part of her drive for nuclear power.

Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London , who also features in the film warned the issue was too complex to be down to one single factor, whether CO2 or clouds.

He said: “The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start because you can’t say that just one factor can have this effect.

“The system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on CO2 production would be, or indeed of continuing to produce CO2.

“It’s ridiculous to see politicians arguing over whether they will allow the global temperature to rise by 2C or 3C.”

Mr Stott said the film could mark the point where scientists advocating the greenhouse effect theory, began to lose the argument.

He continued: “It is a brave programme at the moment to give excluded voices their say, and maybe it is just the beginning.

“At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion and this is dangerous.”

In the program Nigel Calder says: "The greenhouse effect is seen as a religion and if you don’t agree, you are a heretic.

He added: “However, I think this program will help further debate and scientists not directly involved in global warming studies may begin to study what is being said, become more open-minded and more questioning, but this will happen slowly.”

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.

“By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century,” Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie. Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's “potential risks are very great” and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off “spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.”

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in L'Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. “The cause of this climate change is unknown,” he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the “science is settled.”

Dr. Allegre's skepticism is noteworthy in several respects. For one, he is an exalted member of France's political establishment, a friend of former Socialist president Lionel Jospin, and, from 1997 to 2000, his minister of education, research and technology, charged with improving the quality of government research through closer co-operation with France's educational institutions. For another, Dr. Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution. His break with scientific dogma over global warming came at a personal cost: Colleagues in both the governmental and environmental spheres were aghast that he could publicly question the science behind climate change.

But Dr. Allegre had allegiances to more than his socialist and environmental colleagues. He is, above all, a scientist of the first order, the architect of isotope geodynamics, which showed that the atmosphere was primarily formed early in the history of the Earth, and the geochemical modeller of the early solar system. Because of his path-breaking cosmochemical research, NASA asked Dr. Allegre to participate in the Apollo lunar program, where he helped determine the age of the Moon. Matching his scientific accomplishments in the cosmos are his accomplishments at home: Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth's crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l' Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.

Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change “simplistic and obscuring the true dangers,” Dr. Allegre especially despairs at “the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.” The world would be better off, Dr. Allegre believes, if these “denouncers” became less political and more practical, by proposing practical solutions to head off the dangers they see, such as developing technologies to sequester C02. His dream, he says, is to see "ecology become the engine of economic development and not an artificial obstacle that creates fear."
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Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Claude Allegre received a Ph D in physics in 1962 from the University of Paris. He became the director of the geochemistry and cosmochemistry program at the French National Scientific Research Centre in 1967 and in 1971, he was appointed director of the University of Paris's Department of Earth Sciences. In 1976, he became director of the Paris Institut de Physique du Globe. He is an author of more than 100 scientific articles, many of them seminal studies on the evolution of the Earth using isotopic evidence, and 11 books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Science.

Gore the Guzzler

How big is Al Gore's carbon footprint?

Pretty hefty.

Gore grabbed an Oscar Sunday night for his global-warming horror flick, "An Inconvenient Truth" - and took the opportunity to lecture America about its duty to Go Green and stay there.

Now a Tennessee think tank has revealed an inconvenient truth of its own - about what Gore actually practices, as opposed to what he endlessly preaches.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, using public records, calculated the Gores' energy use for the past two years at their new 20-room, 10,000-square-foot home in suburban Nashville.

In all, the main house and the pool house used an average 18,414 kilowatt-hours (KWH) of power a month last year; that's 14 percent more the 16,200 monthly KWH they devoured in 2005.

Thus does the carbon footprint - the amount of greenhouse gas generated to keep Gore in kilowatts - grow.

But just how much juice is that?

Well, average national household use is 10,656 KWH. For an entire year, that is.

Al and Tipper beat that monthly.

For perspective, the average residential customer in New York City skimped by on just 300 KWH a month, or 3,600 a year - less than 2 percent of Gore's use.

OK, so that's mostly for apartments.

Up in Westchester, where most customers own comfortably large homes, the average monthly usage is 450 KWH, or 5,400 KWH a year - still under 3 percent of what the Gores consume.

As for cost, the average New York City residential energy bill last month was $62.88 before taxes, according to Con Edison; in Westchester, it was $81.80.

What about the Gores?

They paid $1,359 a month for electricity - or about $16,000 per year.

No doubt one could raise a family on that in Tennessee -- though not in a home quite as large as Gore's.

And just how big is that palace, comparatively speaking?

Take your typical 800-square-foot, one-bedroom Manhattan pad: You could fit 12 1/2 of them inside the Gores' abode.

A spokeswoman for Gore didn't dispute the figures, but insisted the former Second Family purchases enough energy from renewable sources to offset their sizable carbon footprint.

No doubt.

But that's just another way of saying that the rich truly are different.

Gore, a Kyoto Protocol advocate, has enough socked away so he won't miss a meal should that treaty ever be adopted -- and wreck the U.S. economy.

It was the fear of such damage, recall, that led the U.S. Senate -- Veep Al Gore presiding -- to reject Kyoto 95-0.

What a hypocrite he is.

And he's not alone.

As The Los Angeles Times reported this week, two of California's greenest pols -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- continue to flit around on their private Gulfstream jets.

A single cross-country flight on such an aircraft emits up to 90,000 pounds of carbon dioxide -- nearly double the amount the average American produces from all activities in an entire year.

Meanwhile, Laurie David, producer of that Gore documentary, also uses private Gulfstreams -- though she rebukes those driving SUVs. (She now says she's cutting back on her private jet usage -- but gradually, like a smoker trying to quit.)

And so it goes.

Gore always was tiresome.

Obviously nothing has changed.

Inconvenient Truths: Novel science fiction on global warming
By Patrick J. Michaels

IN THE NEWS:

• As much as 70 percent of California's $1-billion orange crop has been destroyed by RECORD COLD temperatures across the state. The freeze will mean much higher prices for many vegetables and fruits.
• As many as 55 people have been killed by winter storms.
• In Missouri storms have left 450,000 homes without power.
• In Chicago, two water main breaks and two dead from the cold.
• In St. Louis, ice clogs up river transportation as they experience their coldest temps in 25 years.
• Democrats are busy pushing a discredited report on global warming put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists. This same radical group is also pushing for unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United States.

Remember this the next time you hear a liberal carping about global warming. This is the kind of weather they apparently like. As cold as it got this last year, liberals would prefer that it was a whole lot colder.

Questions costs of renewables bill
Sen. David Hann (R-42), Eden Prairie

Recently, the Senate passed a bill establishing a renewable energy standard that I opposed. Because I was one of only a few who opposed it, you should know why I think this is a bad idea for Minnesota. The bill mandates utilities to supply 20 percent to 25 percent of their power through renewable sources, most of which is to be created by wind. While in theory mandating renewable energy sounds like a good idea, in practice it would leave Minnesota families and businesses footing the bill, without any real estimate of environmental benefits.

When the bill was discussed on the Senate floor I asked the bill’s sponsors to provide us with a realistic estimate of the actual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions the bill would accomplish. This question went unanswered. I then asked for the impact this mandate would have on rates to consumers. The answer was, “The utilities are still trying to figure this out.”

The purported reason for setting this standard and increasing wind energy is to significantly reduce “greenhouse gases,” such as carbon dioxide. The bill passed by the Senate would raise the current 800 megawatts of energy produced by wind to about 6,000 megawatts, with as little as a 2 percent estimated reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Department of Commerce.

In addition to having very little impact on the environment, the Commerce Department has estimated that the impact on ratepayers would be significant, adding thousands of dollars of additional annual costs to businesses and manufacturers – not to mention the increased costs to school districts and families. We also know the mandate will require an additional 2,000 miles of transmission lines costing between six and nine billion dollars.

I am not opposed to renewable energy. Renewable energy sources have a place in meeting our overall energy demand. However, even the most optimistic estimates suggest that renewable energy sources will only meet a fraction of the total demand. Only two years ago, we passed a renewable energy objective that allowed utilities to integrate renewable sources in a cost-effective manner. There has been an increase in renewable use under the objective. It is not clear to me why we need to abandon the progress we have made under the renewable energy objective, in favor of a costly mandate that has no clear benefit.

You may have seen the bogus UN report noting that children in the US and UK have it so much worse than in Sweden and the Netherlands.

Well, it's bogus and hardly worth going into.

The BBC took it seriously, though, and asked British kids what would make their lives better.

Some of their answers:

No global warming and more kindness to animals! -Lilly, 8, Sheffield

My life would be a lot better if global warming wasn't a problem, it is really worrying to know that we could be in danger. -Lucy, 13, Birmingham

I would like life better if we didn't have the threat of global warming and for people to be much nicer!!! -Olivia, 9, Canterbury

It would make my life better if we didn't have to think about wars - and poverty - around the world, day in, day out. Global warming is also an issue - it's involved in everyone's lives. -Hayley, 10, Bristol

I'd like to think that global warming was not a problem - I'm worried that something will happen like in the movie "The Day after Tomorrow". -Jessica, 13, Surrey

Not having to worry about the environment so much because it is worrying me as you can see it in the papers, news and literally everywhere you go!!! It's making me and my friends go mad about what's happening to our planet. -Leanne, 12, Clacton-On-Sea

I don't feel safe about global warming so I think people should start helping. I also don't like groups of people hanging around on streets. -Isaac, 8, Leeds

What on earth? The British media-political-industrial complex needs to get a hold of itself. There is really no good reason for so many children to be so upset over this issue.

The screeching about global warming from certain corners of the world has become full-blown unthinking hysteria. In many countries, there is no room for dissent on the issue, regardless of party or ideology. In this country, meanwhile, the issue is far too politicized and polarized to even have a reasonable discussion about it.

Previous Quotational Therapy Session: Reagan & Tax Charts.

Responds to Ruud
By Steve Moore, Plymouth

In response to Rep. Maria Ruud's letter on global warming, gosh, when I was in grade school we learned that the state of Minnesota was covered by a glacier thousands of years ago.

What melted it? There were no power plants emitting tons of carbon dioxide, no cars and trucks burning gas. I guess the cavemen must have used too much wood for their fires.

Global Warming
By Representative Maria Ruud (D-Minnetonka)

Members of the Minnesota House and Senate met last week for a presentation on the crisis of global warming by polar explorer and Minnesota native Will Steger. Eight legislative committees that consider issues of environment, energy, and transportation attended the meeting, including the Energy Finance and Policy Division on which I serve as vice-chair.

Mr. Steger made it clear that global warming could devastate Minnesota's natural resources. In fact, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency predicts that global warming could completely destroy the Boundary Waters' boreal forests, dramatically lower lake levels across the state, decrease ice cover during the winter and threaten waterfowl populations.

Truly, the future of Minnesota's environment and economy depends on the action we take today. Sound scientific evidence has told us that global warming is not a myth, but in fact a stark reality. It is in our best interest to set Minnesota on course to be a regional leader in the fight against global warming.

There is a lot the Legislature can do in this effort. By taking the lead on renewable energy standards, transportation reform and investment in alternative fuels, we will not only protect our environment from further damage, but also harness great economic opportunity and provide energy security for our state.

The time to act is now. If we do not act quickly, the opportunity to address the problem of global warming may pass. Empowered by this knowledge, we must make significant strides in the fight against global warming. Now is the time to act in the best interest of our economy and our environment.

I have introduced legislation that requires Minnesota to take immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

This bill, known as the Global Warming Mitigation Act of 2007, would put Minnesota on the cutting edge of the fight against the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Specifically this bill would set net Minnesota greenhouse gas reduction targets from 2005 levels of at least 15 percent by 2015, 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050. These target goals are based on the current scientific understanding of what needs to be done in order to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.

The bill would also implement a cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from the generation of electricity. This system would limit the total tons of carbon dioxide emitted from Minnesota on an annual basis for the purpose of electricity.

It would also prohibit the building of large new power plants in the state and prevent the import of electricity from plants outside the state until the cap and trade system is implemented. This would ensure that the problem of global warming is not made worse while we are planning solutions for it.

Other states such as California, Maine, New Mexico and Connecticut have already enacted similar legislation and have become regional leaders in the fight against global warming as a result. By doing so here in Minnesota, we have the potential to realize real economic and environmental benefits as a regional hub for the new and competitive energy industries of the 21st century.

Left unattended, the impacts of global warming will do further and perhaps irreparable damage to both our natural resources and our many industries that depend on these natural resources for survival.

Inaction will set our economy back on the opportunity to lead new and profitable energy industries. Sound scientific evidence, potential economic growth and the prospect of energy security for this state are compelling us to act. It is our moral responsibility as stewards of this earth to do so.
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Maria Ruud is the DFL representative from House District 42A (Southern Minnetonka and Northern Eden Prairie)

Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide
Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?
By Timothy Ball

Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.

No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.

I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.

In another instance, I was accused by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki of being paid by oil companies. That is a lie. Apparently he thinks if the fossil fuel companies pay you have an agenda. So if Greenpeace, Sierra Club or governments pay there is no agenda and only truth and enlightenment?

Personal attacks are difficult and shouldn't occur in a debate in a civilized society. I can only consider them from what they imply. They usually indicate a person or group is losing the debate. In this case, they also indicate how political the entire Global Warming debate has become. Both underline the lack of or even contradictory nature of the evidence.

I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises.

Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky's book "Yes, but is it true?" The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky's findings occur when you ask the question he posed. Wildavsky's students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.

Climate of Opinion
The latest U.N. report shows the "warming" debate is far from settled

Last week's headlines about the United Nations' latest report on global warming were typically breathless, predicting doom and human damnation like the most fervent religious evangelical. Yet the real news in the fourth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be how far it is backpedaling on some key issues. Beware claims that the science of global warming is settled.

The document that caused such a stir was only a short policy report, a summary of the full scientific report due in May. Written mainly by policymakers (not scientists) who have a stake in the issue, the summary was long on dire predictions. The press reported the bullet points, noting that this latest summary pronounced with more than "90% confidence" that humans have been the main drivers of warming since the 1950s, and that higher temperatures and rising sea levels would result.

---------------------

More pertinent is the underlying scientific report. And according to people who have seen that draft, it contains startling revisions of previous U.N. predictions. For example, the Center for Science and Public Policy has just released an illuminating analysis written by Lord Christopher Monckton, a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher who has become a voice of sanity on global warming.

Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.'s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report's high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction. Similarly, the new report shows that the 2001 assessment had overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

Such reversals (and there are more) are remarkable, given that the IPCC's previous reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001, have been steadily more urgent in their scientific claims and political tone. It's worth noting that many of the policymakers who tinker with the IPCC reports work for governments that have promoted climate fears as a way of justifying carbon-restriction policies. More skeptical scientists are routinely vetoed from contributing to the panel's work. The Pasteur Institute's Paul Reiter, a malaria expert who thinks global warming would have little impact on the spread of that disease, is one example.

U.N. scientists have relied heavily on computer models to predict future climate change, and these crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate. According to the models, for instance, global temperatures were supposed to have risen in recent years. Yet according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, the world in 2006 was only 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 2001--in the range of measurement error and thus not statistically significant.

The models also predicted that sea levels would rise much faster than they actually have. The models didn't predict the significant cooling the oceans have undergone since 2003--which is the opposite of what you'd expect with global warming. Cooler oceans have also put a damper on claims that global warming is the cause of more frequent or intense hurricanes. The models also failed to predict falling concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, another surprise.

Meanwhile, new scientific evidence keeps challenging previous assumptions. The latest report, for instance, takes greater note of the role of pollutant particles, which are thought to reflect sunlight back to space, supplying a cooling effect. More scientists are also studying the effect of solar activity on climate, and some believe it alone is responsible for recent warming.

--------------------

All this appears to be resulting in a more cautious scientific approach, which is largely good news. We're told that the upcoming report is also missing any reference to the infamous "hockey stick," a study by Michael Mann that purported to show 900 years of minor fluctuations in temperature, followed by a dramatic spike over the past century. The IPCC featured the graph in 2001, but it has since been widely rebutted.

While everyone concedes that the Earth is about a degree Celsius warmer than it was a century ago, the debate continues over the cause and consequences. We don't deny that carbon emissions may play a role, but we don't believe that the case is sufficiently proven to justify a revolution in global energy use. The economic dislocations of such an abrupt policy change could be far more severe than warming itself, especially if it reduces the growth and innovation that would help the world cope with, say, rising sea levels. There are also other problems--AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example--whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.

One unfailingly entertaining aspect about the global Global Warming fracas is the intellectual sophistry—though that may be too flattering a word, since sophists possess the veneer of plausability—of the environmentalist movement. The argument, as it is played out in a peculiarly fractured way in the mass media, goes something like this:

— Listen, we’ve got global warming.
— Mmm.
— So will you sign on to this protocol?
— Nah. Gutting American industry doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
— But the world is going to end in ten years.
— So how will not opening a few new car factories help? And wouldn’t this protocol encourage our chief competitors to open their own new factories while we’re hamstrung here?
— Because it will. Sign here, please.
— I don’t think that’s good policy.
— Listen. Why do you hate science?
— I don’t hate s—
— You’re a crazy Christian, aren’t you?
— What? Yes, the earth is getting warmer but this cycle’s been happening f—
— What we need to do then is sign this protocol here. Ready to sign?
— …
— Here’s a pen.
— …
— Sign.
— Look, the problem is that even if you can throw off a million years’ worth of evidence and demonstrate that human industry, in the plink of time we’ve had here, has caused a planet-killing shift in atmosphere, your ideas about fixing it are absolutely unworkable. I mean, it’s a gnat compared to the leviathan weight of human history you claim led us here.
— Stop it. OK? Just stop. Look at this picture. It shows a mountain with snow. Now, that was fifty years ago. Here’s another picture. What do you see?
— No snow.
— No snow! How can you not believe in global warming now, you planet-hating bastard? Don’t you understand that there is a scientific consensus? A consensus!
— Right, I know it’s getting warmer.
— Then sign on to my policy slate. Don’t read it. Just sign.
— No.
— When will we ever convince you Global Warming skeptics?

And that’s how it goes. For a glimpse of how this sort of tack is taken against President Bush, read this post on National Review’s The Corner, which details all the various times Bush has “finally” admitted the existence of Global Warming.

INCONVENIENT QUESTIONS
Will Al Gore Melt?
If not, why did he chicken out on an interview?
By Flemming Rose and Bjorn Lomborg

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Last week he was in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.

The interview had been scheduled for months. The day before the interview Mr. Gore's agent thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?

One can only speculate. But if we are to follow Mr. Gore's suggestions of radically changing our way of life, the costs are not trivial. If we slowly change our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, the U.N. actually estimates that we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world. However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30% poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change.

Clearly we need to ask hard questions. Is Mr. Gore's world a worthwhile sacrifice? But it seems that critical questions are out of the question. It would have been great to ask him why he only talks about a sea-level rise of 20 feet. In his movie he shows scary sequences of 20-feet flooding Florida, San Francisco, New York, Holland, Calcutta, Beijing and Shanghai. But were realistic levels not dramatic enough? The U.N. climate panel expects only a foot of sea-level rise over this century. Moreover, sea levels actually climbed that much over the past 150 years. Does Mr. Gore find it balanced to exaggerate the best scientific knowledge available by a factor of 20?

-----------------------

Mr. Gore says that global warming will increase malaria and highlights Nairobi as his key case. According to him, Nairobi was founded right where it was too cold for malaria to occur. However, with global warming advancing, he tells us that malaria is now appearing in the city. Yet this is quite contrary to the World Health Organization's finding. Today Nairobi is considered free of malaria, but in the 1920s and '30s, when temperatures were lower than today, malaria epidemics occurred regularly. Mr. Gore's is a convenient story, but isn't it against the facts?

He considers Antarctica the canary in the mine, but again doesn't tell the full story. He presents pictures from the 2% of Antarctica that is dramatically warming and ignores the 98% that has largely cooled over the past 35 years. The U.N. panel estimates that Antarctica will actually increase its snow mass this century. Similarly, Mr. Gore points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but don't mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing. Shouldn't we hear those facts? Mr. Gore talks about how the higher temperatures of global warming kill people. He specifically mentions how the European heat wave of 2003 killed 35,000. But he entirely leaves out how global warming also means less cold and saves lives. Moreover, the avoided cold deaths far outweigh the number of heat deaths. For the U.K. it is estimated that 2,000 more will die from global warming. But at the same time 20,000 fewer will die of cold. Why does Mr. Gore tell only one side of the story?

Al Gore is on a mission. If he has his way, we could end up choosing a future, based on dubious claims, that could cost us, according to a U.N. estimate, $553 trillion over this century. Getting answers to hard questions is not an unreasonable expectation before we take his project seriously. It is crucial that we make the right decisions posed by the challenge of global warming. These are best achieved through open debate, and we invite him to take the time to answer our questions: We are ready to interview you any time, Mr. Gore--and anywhere.
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Mr. Rose is culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, in Copenhagen. Mr. Lomborg is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

Those Bad News Bears

The Bush administration buys into global warming hype by proposing that polar bears be listed as an endangered species. The only thing endangered about polar bears is the truth.

Polar bears are cute and cuddly, at least when they are small. Certainly the marketing department of Coca-Cola thought so when it featured the critters in a famous ad campaign. Now the greenies have made them the poster pets of global warming, and the Bush administration is going along.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proposed on Wednesday that polar bears should be listed as "threatened" on the government's list of imperiled species, a step below "endangered," a category reserved for those facing imminent extinction, which greenies believe applies.

A little over a year ago, three environmental groups — the Center for Biological Diversity, National Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace — sued to force just such a designation from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees endangered species.

"This is a victory for the polar bear, and all wildlife threatened by global warming," said Kassie Siegel, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity. "There is still time to save the polar bears, but we must reduce greenhouse-gas pollution immediately."

Taking a somewhat different view is Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist with the government of Nunavut, a territory in Canada. According to Taylor, and contrary to greenie hype, climate change — particularly in the Arctic — is not pushing them to the brink of extinction. They have adapted and will continue to adapt to their environment.

In a 12-page report to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Taylor stated: "No evidence exists that suggests that both bears and the conservation systems that regulate them will not adapt and respond to the new conditions." Taylor emphasized polar bears' adaptability, saying they evolved from grizzly bears about 250,000 years ago and developed as a distinct species about 125,000 years ago, when climate change also occurred.

Writing in the Toronto Star in May, Taylor opined: "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or are increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present."

The current population of polar bears is said to have dwindled to 22,000 to 25,000. A half-century ago, before SUVs doomed the planet, there were only 8,000 to 10,000 polar bears, according to science writer Theo Richel.

Much of this increase is due to hunting restrictions that were put in place. And if polar bears, as reported, seem to be losing weight, it may be because increasing populations are competing for the same food supply.

Actually, global warming might help in that area. A reduction in ice cover creates a better habitat for seals, which are the bears' main food. Less ice cover means more sunlight producing more phytoplankton, increasing the supply of other food sources.

On land, blueberries, which the bears adore, would become more plentiful. Taylor says he's seen bears so full of blueberries they waddle.

"Life may be good," Taylor said, "but good news about polar bear populations does not seem to be welcomed by the Center for Biological Diversity. It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria."

Media Shows Irrational Hysteria on Global Warming
By Sean Tuffnell, National Center for Policy Analysis

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 / U.S. Newswire/ -- David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), testified this morning at a special hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The hearing examined climate change and the media. Below are excerpts from his prepared remarks.

"In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

"I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." "The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. ... The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."

"In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the "hockey stick," because of the shape of the temperature graph. "Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.

"There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed."

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The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D. C. that advocates private solutions to public policy problems. NCPA depends on the contributions of individuals, corporations and foundations that share our mission. The NCPA accepts no government grants.

Squeal now before city trades libraries for lipstick on a pig
by Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

As it considers a plan to close libraries in three parts of town that lack well-heeled political clout, Minneapolis somehow has found the money for new programs designed to make politicians look good.

This is part of the prettifying of a city that continues to let basic services shrivel while raising taxes. This is known as putting lipstick on a pig.

Here are a few examples of new programs funded with new money while the $300,000 or $400,000 it would take to keep the three community libraries open cannot be found.

• $100,000 from the general fund (the first time it has happened) to a nonprofit tree-planting group. This is how tree huggers get a bad name.

• $50,000 to add an aide to the office of Mayor R.T. Rybak. This aide will specialize in education policy. Education apparently does not include keeping libraries open.

• $150,000 to hire liquor-license inspectors so bar owners can get licenses faster, while libraries that somehow stayed open during the Depression close in the middle of a city building boom. Maybe we need whiskey in the libraries.

• Hundreds of thousands of dollars more to speed city permits and hire an environmental champion to begin the Mill City's fight against global warming. Hooray! Al Gore's call to save the planet has been heard in City Hall! Too bad Al didn't say anything about saving libraries.

• And $35,000 to hire a person to sit in the City Hall corridor along 5th Street and help visitors who are lost. It is not visitors who have lost their compass. It is the politicians.

Astonishing. Appalling.

The mayor and the council are proposing a 2007 budget that includes about a million for new positions and programs (not counting public safety) while closing libraries.

Although the Library Board finally seems to be retreating in the face of public anger and today plans to discuss options aimed at keeping at least the Southeast and Webber Park libraries open, there seems to be no hope in store for the Roosevelt library, which is just as deserving as the other two. The City Council is scheduled to make a final budget decision on the three libraries at 5 p.m. on Monday.

The library mess represents a giant dereliction of duty and abdication of responsibility shared by an ineffective Library Board, a blame-shifting mayor and a City Council that has too many dim bulbs on it.

There are noble exceptions on the council side, and they have paid a price for being outspoken.

When Council Member Gary Schiff tried to shift the money to fight global warming to the libraries, he was publicly chewed out by Rybak, who practically wept tears of outrage as he accused Schiff of ignoring Al Gore's commandments. And Council Member Diane Hofstede, a former president and long-time member of the Library Board, was slapped down when she moved to postpone new (non-public safety) city hires for six months.

That delay would have saved the city half a million dollars, more than enough to keep the three jeopardized libraries open.

"Closing libraries will be a scar on the heart of the city," Hofstede said Tuesday. "There is a big lack of leadership in this city. How can you claim to care about families and children when you are closing neighborhood libraries?"

Schiff is more emphatic: "Taxes are going up, and services are being cut," he said. "We're not covering the basics. Our priorities are awry."

Hofstede and Schiff are among the stalwart few still fighting for the libraries. That decision will come Monday, when the council takes up final passage of the 2007 budget. Your vote might still make the difference.

Archibald MacLeish, the late, great poet and librarian of Congress (he was appointed by FDR) said, "What is more important in a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."

The Shame of Modern Minneapolis is that its leaders can even think of closing century-old community libraries without being ashamed. If they can't be ashamed, they should at least be afraid.

Those numbers in City Hall, if you would like a last chance to be heard, are:

• Mayor R.T. Rybak: (612) 673-2100

• City Council: (612) 673-2200

Today's Forecast...

What happened to all the monster storms that global warming was going to stir up? The 2006 hurricane season, which officially ends Thursday, came in like a lamb and is going out the same way.

We should all thank Al Gore that we're still alive. After all, it was his widely acclaimed propaganda film "An Inconvenient Truth" that warned us of the coming hurricane plague. Storms like Katrina, which stars in his movie, were going to be arriving in larger numbers and with greater violence. We were doomed, thanks to the infernal internal combustion engine.

But a funny thing happened on the road to ruin: There were only nine named storms in the Atlantic season, with five of them becoming hurricanes. Last year, in an above-average season, there were 27 named storms, 15 of which were hurricanes. From 1995 to 2005, the average was 15 named storms and 8.5 hurricanes.

This was the first season since the 1997 Atlantic hurricane period that the Gulf of Mexico suffered only one storm; it is also the first since that same year that no Category 4 or 5 storms formed.

We've said this before and we have to say it again: When experts can't even predict a six-month storm season with any accuracy, there's no way they can accurately predict the global climate many decades from now.

Yet those who have a deep faith in the global warming theory, like those who from the beginning of man have been predicting the world is about to end, will continue to forecast global warming-related afflictions.

This week many of them will be found in Washington, where the Supreme Court will hear arguments that carbon dioxide should be regulated as a pollutant under federal clean air laws.

This is crazy. CO2 is a naturally occurring gas. During the respiration process, humans and animals emit CO2 into the atmosphere; during photosynthesis, plants take in CO2 and convert it to oxygen. CO2 is used in soft drinks, baking, life jackets, medicines and fire extinguishers. Among other applications, it is used as a solvent by "green" dry cleaners.

Yes, we're aware of its greenhouse properties. Yet we're not convinced that the globe is warming because we burn fossil fuels — a process that creates CO2 — for power generation and transportation. The uneventful hurricane season only cements our doubt.

That's not to say that a particularly brutal 2007 hurricane season would make us believers. We understand the storm cycle and know that we're in a turbulent period, so next year might be busy.

We wish Gore had the same grasp of reality, but that's probably asking too much. It's much more important that at least five members of the Supreme Court have an understanding of the issue that isn't tainted with green. The world sorely needs a cool front to blunt the overheated global warming rhetoric.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Global Warming Gag Order
Senators to Exxon: Shut up, and pay up.

Washington has no shortage of bullies, but even we can't quite believe an October 27 letter that Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe sent to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Its message: Start toeing the Senators' line on climate change, or else.

We reprint the full text of the letter here, so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company "should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on "global remediation efforts."

The Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy, they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years." (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.

This is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but we didn't know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media around by the nose, too. Congratulations.

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Let's compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We'll grant that's a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case.

The letter is so over-the-top that we also wonder if Mr. Rockefeller in particular has even read it. (He and Ms. Snowe didn't return our call.) The Senator hails from coal-producing West Virginia, where people know something about carbon emissions. Come to think of it, Mr. Rockefeller owes his own vast wealth to something other than non-carbon energy. But perhaps it's easier to be carbon free when your fortune comes from a trust fund.

The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming--as it has--but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.

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Every dogma has its day, and we've lived long enough to see more than one "consensus" blown apart within a few years of "everyone knowing" it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Imagine if this letter had been sent by someone in the Bush Administration trying to enforce the opposite conclusion? The left would be howling about "censorship." That's exactly what did happen earlier this year after James Hansen, the NASA scientist and global warming evangelist, complained that a lowly 24-year-old press aide had tried to limit his media access. The entire episode was preposterous because Mr. Hansen is one of the most publicized scientists in the world, but the press aide was nonetheless sacked.

The Senators' letter is far more serious because they have enormous power to punish Exxon if it doesn't kowtow to them. A windfall profits tax is in the air, and we've seen what happens to other companies that dare to resist Congressional intimidation. It's to Exxon's credit that, in its response to the Senators, the company said that it will continue to fund free market research groups because "there is value in the debate" that helps promote "optimal public policy decisions." Too bad that's not what the Senators care about.

Dissent On Ice

Like an ill wind that never stops blowing, the global warming lobby keeps pushing for a solution when there's no problem. This time it's eco-taxes that are going to save us from our selfish selves.

British media are calling a government proposal there a "secret document" to levy "a package of stealth taxes on fuel, cars, air travel and consumer goods . . . to combat global warming." The plan is in response to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a reportedly grim document written by former World Bank chief Sir Nicholas Stern that is, well, overheated.

Spouting hyperbole and distortions about actively debated science is one thing; using it to justify a wallet grab is another.

"The proposals, leaked to the Mail on Sunday, show that the government is considering introducing a raft of hard-hitting 'eco-taxes' that will have a devastating effect on the cost of living," the Daily Mail reported.

"Most controversial of all, the documents reveal the government is planning to grab billions of pounds of extra revenue from motorists — without telling them. It is considering introducing a special mechanism so that whenever oil prices go down, the government would get the cash in extra fuel tax — not the motorist."

Environment Secretary David Miliband , who outlined the tax proposal, would also impose a pay-per-mile pollution tax on motorists, a value-added tax on flights to EU destinations and a new tax on inefficient large appliances and light bulbs. One of the goals of the new tax regime would be to reduce "car use and ownership."

How long before domestic environmental alarmists latch onto Miliband's ideas and give them traction among the green lobby and its allies in Congress? How much would imposition of both back door and observable eco-taxes cost Americans? And for what — the possibility that these added taxes likely would stop the projected warming by a half-degree or less?

While we wonder, the British have a good idea what the eco-taxes will cost them — and it won't be cheap.

"Typical families with two children could have to pay up to 1,300 pounds more every year, according to estimates," says the British Sun.

That's nearly $2,500, a significant amount — particularly when, despite what Al Gore claims, there is still no scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and is a threat.

We think Michael Palmer, general manager of two local Maine television stations, summed this up pretty well when he sent an e-mail over the summer to his staff telling them enough with the global warming stories. "The issue has evolved from hard science into hard politics," Palmer wrote.

It seems we can trust the British to help us in the war on terrorism but we can't trust them to make rational policy decisions about global warming.

This is the government that has reportedly asked Stern to convince Americans of the climate change threat, as if we haven't already been subjected to enough hypocritical sermons about global warming from Gore, opportunist politicians, media know-nothings and dilettante celebrities. It's been clear for some time that while Prime Minister Tony Blair sees clearly the threat of terrorism, his vision is clouded on global warming.

What the climate change debate needs is a large dose of healthy skepticism, more research and a lot less blind faith in a theory. But we will get none of these as long as we're continuously told that scientific consensus buttresses the believers' position and dissenters are shouted down — the exact opposite of real science, by the way.

What we will get, unless more people begin to open their minds, are higher taxes in developed nations, widespread job losses, stagnant economies, energy rationing and perpetual lectures about the excesses of Western living.

The environmental lobby might welcome a world such as that, but it just doesn't sound so hot to us.

The real climate change catastrophe
CSR must recognize how misguided energy policies will affect the world’s poor
By Paul Driessen

Every snowstorm, hurricane, deluge or drought generates headlines, horror movies and television specials, demanding action to avoid imminent climate catastrophe. Skeptics are pilloried, labeled “climate criminals,” and threatened with “Nuremberg-style war crimes trials.”

Britain’s Royal Society has demanded that ExxonMobil stop funding researchers who say global warming is primarily the result of natural forces. Meanwhile, scientist James Hansen received $250,000 from Teresa Heinz-Kerry for insisting that warming is due to humans, and “socially responsible” investor services refuse to list or recommend corporations they deem insufficiently sensitive on the subject.

Not surprisingly, companies from Wal-Mart to BP, GE and JP Morgan have brought climate activists into their board rooms, lobbied Congress for climate and ethanol legislation, and retooled to produce new product lines intended to boost tax subsidies, favorable PR and profits.

But are these actions socially responsible or in the best interests of society as a whole?

Asserting “the science is settled” ignores the debate that still rages. Proclaiming that “climate change is real” ignores Earth’s constant, natural warming and cooling.

Vikings raised crops and cattle in Greenland 1000 years ago, while Britons grew grapes in England. Four hundred years later, the Vikings were frozen out, Europe was gripped in a Little Ice Age, and priests performed exorcisms on advancing Swiss glaciers. The globe warmed in 1850-1940, cooled for the next 35 years, then warmed slightly again.

Detroit experienced six snowstorms in April 1868, frosts in August 1869, a 98-degree heat wave in June 1874, and ice-free lakes in January 1877. Wisconsin’s record high of 114 degrees F in July 1936 was followed five years later by a record July low of 46. In 1980, five years after Newsweek’s “new little ice age” cover story, Washington, DC endured 67 days above 90 degrees.

Studies by National Academy of Sciences, NOAA, Danish and other scientists continue to raise inconvenient truths that question and contradict catastrophic climate change theories, computer models and assertions. The “hockey stick” temperature graph (which claimed 1990-2000 was the hottest decade in 1000 years) was shown to be invalid; the Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years; the US is yet to be hit by a major hurricane in 2006; interior Greenland and Antarctica are gaining ice mass, not losing it; and Gulf Stream circulation has not slowed, as claimed in 2005.

Other recent studies conclude the sun’s radiant heat and cosmic ray levels affect planetary warming and cloud formation more strongly than acknowledged by climate alarmists. That’s logical. Why would natural forces that caused climate change and bizarre weather in past centuries suddenly stop working?

Why would we assume (as many climate models do) that energy, transportation and pollution control technologies will suddenly stagnate at 2000 levels, after the amazing advances of the previous century? And can we afford the Quixotic attempt to stall or prevent future climate change?

Just the current Kyoto Protocol could cost the world up to $1 trillion per year, in regulatory bills, higher energy costs and lost productivity. That’s several times more than the price tag for providing the world with clean drinking water and sanitation – which would prevent millions of deaths annually from intestinal diseases. Over 2 billion of the Earth’s citizens still do not have electricity, to provide basic necessities like lights, refrigeration and modern hospitals. Instead they breathe polluted smoke from wood and dung fires, and die by the millions from lung diseases. But opposition to fossil fuel power plants, in the name of preventing climate change, ensures that these “indigenous” lifestyles, diseases and deaths will continue. Opposition to hydroelectric projects (damming rivers) and nuclear power (radioactive wastes) likewise perpetuates endemic Third World poverty. So would a new European Union proposal to tax imports from China, India and other poor countries that are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, because this gives them an “unfair trade advantage” over EU countries that are struggling to meet their Kyoto #1 commitments.

Former Vice-President Al Gore autographs copies of the Portuguese version of his book, An Inconvenient Truth, during a book-signing event in a Sao Paulo hotel October 17, 2006.

But UK Climate Change Minister Ian Pearson insists that climate change “is one of the most pressing issues facing countries in sub-Saharan Africa.” And environmental zealots blame malaria rates on climate change, to deflect charges that their callous opposition to insecticides is killing African babies.

Elsewhere, government and private studies calculate that the Protocol would cost the United States up to $348 billion in 2012. The average American family of four would pay an extra $2,700 annually for energy and consumer goods, and in US minority communities, the climate treaty would destroy 1.3 million jobs and “substantially affect” standards of living.

Yet, even perfect compliance with Kyoto would result in Earth’s temperature being only 0.2 degrees F less by 2050 than under a business-as-usual scenario. Assuming humans really are the culprits, actually controlling theoretical global temperature increases would require 40 Kyoto treaties – each one more restrictive, each one expanding government control over housing, transportation, heating, cooling and manufacturing decisions.

The real danger is that we will handcuff economies and hammer poor families, to promote solutions which won’t solve a problem that the evidence increasingly suggests is moderate, manageable and primarily natural in origin.

The real danger is that we will handcuff economies and hammer poor families, to promote solutions which won’t solve a problem that the evidence increasingly suggests is moderate, manageable and primarily natural in origin.

The real catastrophe is that we are already using overwrought claims about a climate cataclysm to justify depriving Earth’s most impoverished citizens of electricity and other modern technologies that would make their lives infinitely better.

Real ethics and social responsibility would weigh these costs and benefits, foster robust debate about every aspect of climate change, ensure continued technological advancement, and give a seat at the decision table to the real stakeholders: not climate alarmists – but those who have to live with the consequences of decisions that affect their access to energy, health, hope, opportunity and prosperity.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death. CORE will host a November 29 program at the United Nations on how climate change programs and policies might affect industrialization, families and communities in developing nations.

It's Not That Hot

Remember the breathless warnings that global warming was going to bring more and stronger hurricanes? We sure do. But Mother Earth apparently forgot that she had a role to play.

'The global warming influence provides a new background level that increases the risk of future enhancements in hurricane activity," Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said in June.

Trenberth got a large share of exposure for his theory, but he is not alone in his assessment. Other scientists have decided that human-induced global warming is going to kick up more lethal hurricanes. Even that renowned scientist Robert Kennedy Jr. has made the connection between global warming and hurricanes, blaming Mississippi's Republican governor, Haley Barbour, for his role in "in derailing the Kyoto Protocol."

All this, and the current hurricane season, is fading without a cataclysm. Does this indicate we're now in a global cooling period?

No. Last year's record number of storms, topped by the Katrina disaster that killed 1,800, indicated that we're doomed by a warming trend caused by human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases.

Maybe there was good reason for the gloomy predictions that global warming would pump hurricane activity. There were 28 tropical storms last year, a 33% jump over the previous record of 21 that was set in 1933.

Actually there wasn't a good reason. The fact that projections for the current season ending Nov. 30 were so far off the mark — we've had nine tropical storms, five of which became hurricanes — shows that predicting weather more than a few days in advance is folly, just as predicting climate change decades from now is a foolish endeavor.

Could an increase in storm activity in the last eight weeks of the season allow the count to catch up with the projections and prove the alarmists right?

Not likely, says the Colorado State University hurricane research team headed by William Gray, the man who pioneered hurricane forecasting. His team is predicting two more tropical storms and one more hurricane "largely due to developing El Nino conditions in the central and eastern Pacific."

El Nino, a warming of waters from the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean that spreads to the eastern Pacific, is fully a product of nature. Should we take this as evidence that the earth's climate system is stronger than man's ability to change it? That would be a reasonable assumption, but not one that global-warming faithful would draw.

The global-warming people have too much at stake to become reasonable. If there is little or no impact on climate from man's activities, they'll have to find another way to subvert capitalism and grind developed economies — ours especially — to a halt.

Cooling Down The Climate Scare

The country is drowning in wild alarums warning of impending doom due to global warming. Yet there has risen — from the U.S. Senate, of all places — a lone voice of rational dissent.

While Al Gore drifts into deeper darkness on the other side of the moon, propelled by such revelations as cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming," Sen. James Inhofe is becoming a one-man myth-wrecking crew.

Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, took to the Senate floor two days last week to expose the media's role in the global warming hype. This is a man who more than three years ago called the global warming scare "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and has made a habit of tweaking the left-leaning environmental lobby.

One member of the media, Miles O'Brien of CNN, responded last week to Inhofe's criticism of the media with a piece criticizing Inhofe and challenging his arguments. If anything, it seems that O'Brien's reply simply motivated Inhofe to continue his effort to undress the media's complicity and bring light to the issue.

We hope so. The "science" on global warming and the media's propaganda campaign need to be picked apart.

The assumptions made by gloomy theorists should be revealed for what they are: mere conjecture.

The lies and carefully crafted implications, many of them discharged like toxic pollutants by a former vice president, deserve a thorough and lasting deconstruction.

What the public needs — and deserves — is a credible voice to counter the sermons from Gore, on whose behalf cigarettes were distributed in 2000 to Milwaukee homeless people who were recruited by campaign volunteers to cast absentee ballots. Inhofe could be that voice.

He's no John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness. What he is, in fact, is a thrice-elected senator, a former member of the House and, before that, a state senator and representative.

For those not impressed by a political background — after all, Gore, far out of proportion to his qualifications, rose to the second most powerful position on Earth — consider that Inhofe is an Army veteran and longtime pilot, and has actually worked in the private sector.

Unlike most in the Senate, Inhofe is willing to stand on a soapbox and expose his head to his opponents' rhetorical stones. Name another in that august body who would dare label as a hoax the premise that undergirds the day's most trendy pop cult. Is there anyone there who would want to try to stand up to the likes of O'Brien?

O'Brien's biased report is not exactly the type of exposure global warming skeptics hope for, though. The goal, say the skeptics, should be to teach and inform, to provide an alternative to the flood of hyperbole and intentionally misleading thunder that's passed off as settled science.

There are enough scientists to fill a fleet of Humvees who can express scepticism over global warming, despite Gore's claims that the matter has been resolved in favor of his conclusions. But none has the forum a U.S. senator can command. With rare exceptions, scientists can marshal media attention on the climate change issue only by spouting the party line that man-made emissions are causing Earth to warm. That's the sort of stuff the press laps up like a starving dog.

Without the wind of a compliant media at his back, Inhofe nevertheless got his message out to America, primarily through C-Span and the Drudge Report, which linked to his speeches at the Web site of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Among those responding to Inhofe's first speech included a scientist and a meteorologist. Both hold views on global warming that are in line with the senator's — which puts them at odds with the environmental lobby's assertions of "consensus" that have been relentlessly beaten into the masses for more than a decade.

The most important audience, though, is among the Americans who have no links to science. They're the ones who have a lot to learn and will benefit the most from someone who has mass access to the public and is willing to challenge the widely — and often uncritically — accepted claims about climate change.

Al Gore's Weather of Mass Destruction: An Incoherent “Truth”
Andrew Joppa, Naples (Florida) Daily News

In his film, An Inconvenient Truth , Al Gore postures as a sincere, conscientious environmentalist.

Before we finalize Gore's beatification, could we pause for a moment and at least examine the merit of his positions?

This generic requirement was suggested by Martin Luther King Jr. when he observed, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity."

In truth my conclusion about Gore's motivations finds a greater degree of intentional, manipulative intent. It is all too evident that Gore is still functioning, as always, as a politician. It is all too evident that Gore is ignoring any information that stands in the way of his alarmist, global warming theology.

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT says, "A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that that the earth and its climate are dynamic; thatthey are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is even worse."

Since 1990 the only modification in the original anthropogenic (derived from human activity) claim has been to create a more sophisticated packaging of the "trash science." Gore's movie is but the latest and slickest of this development. He still presents, however, the same haggard ideology.

The genuine ethical issues, however, have been constant. They were and still are, "To what degree, if any, is mankind responsible for any increased planetary temperatures and what will be the repercussions of the increases if they take place?"

The available information, if it is viewed objectively, exonerates mankind at any level of significance and fixes the responsibility (or credit if the result is beneficial) where it has always belonged; natural climatic variation.

The following information should provoke any person of reason to at least reexamine their support of Gore's anthropogenic global warming theories:

1) Approximately 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is produced by water vapor. Gore does not even mention it. If water vapor is included in his analysis it destroys Gore's premise that human activity through CO2 production is the major player in global warming. Why did Gore leave it out?

2) There is no consensus among climatologists. Gore's consensus position, a study done by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, theoretically shows scientific consensus but this has been widely rejected and has not proven to be replicable. In addition, there are 18,000 scientist signatories to a petition called The Oregon Petition which says there is no evidence for man-made global warming theory. Why did Gore ignore these findings?

3) The cost of signing on to and fulfilling the Kyoto Protocols would cost the U.S. at least $400 billion per year. At best, this would avert less than one tenth of one degree of temperature increase during the next 50 years. Why do you think Gore ignores the issues of minimal benefit at maximum cost?

4) The Medieval Warming Period can be documented both scientifically and historically. This in itself destroys Gores premise since it shows a fairly recent warming variance that is totally independent of human impact. Farming in Siberia and grapevines in the Northern altitudes of the Vikings, both serve to document this reality. Why did Gore ignore all information about this warming period?

5) Most of the warming in the last century occurred before 1940, before CO2 emissions could have been a major factor. Temperatures fell between 1940 and 1970 even as CO2 levels increased. This alone destroys Gore's premise since it strongly suggests natural variation. Why does Gore ignore this challenge to his dogma?

Commenting on these, and many other significant errors, Prof. Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives the following assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that he and his film are commanding public attention."

We must not shut down Western growth and economic systems as a result of the distortions of Gore's doomsday prophesy. Poverty and famine would become rampant and the quality of human life would be dramatically reduced. Before we accept that end we must be absolutely sure that we're not being manipulated by the unethical environmental/political alchemy of Al Gore.

Keep in mind the words of H. L. Mencken: "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

Gore's position is a political argument presented in the trappings of science.
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Andrew Joppa taught business, economics and ethics for 30 years at Mercy College, Westchester, NY. He founded and directed a master's of science program in organizational leadership.

A Convenient Lie
By John Stossel

When he was in college, atmospheric-science professor John Christy was told, "it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy."

That prediction has gone the way of so many others. But environmentalists continue to warn us that we face environmental disaster if we don't accept the economic disaster called the Kyoto treaty. Lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense Council (another environmental group with more lawyers than scientists) explain: "Sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas." And Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," depicts a future in which cities are submerged by rising sea levels.

Wow.

But many scientists laugh at the panic.

Christy says, "Doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines but have proven to be completely false. Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change sound all too familiar."

But the media can't get enough of doomsday.

The Washington Post reported that because of melting ice caps and glaciers, "The End Is Near!" But melting Arctic ice won't raise sea levels any more than the melting ice in your drink makes your glass overflow.

MSNBC and the BBC ran stories on the coming calamity from Greenland's melting glaciers. Unlike Arctic ice, those melting glaciers could raise sea levels. But other reports note that Greenland's ice has been thickening in the interior of Greenland.

The former vice president's film shows dramatic film of big chunks of ice breaking off glaciers, but the "calving" of icebergs is a normal, natural process involved in the growth of glaciers into the sea. The movie features some majestic glaciers that existed in the 19th Century that have all but disappeared today -- but it doesn't bother to mention any of the glaciers growing in Norway, New Zealand and even the United States. The U.S. Forest Service reports that the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska's Tongass National Forest is advancing so rapidly, it threatens to close off a major fjord.

He shows shocking time-lapse photos of ice disappearing from Mt. Kilimanjaro. The ice there has been melting for over a hundred years.

Climate always changes. "An Inconvenient Truth" implies that all serious scientists agree that it is a crisis, and that the United States must immediately reduce carbon dioxide emissions as dictated by the Kyoto treaty the Bush administration so arrogantly refuses to sign -- the same treaty the Clinton-Gore administration didn't even submit to the Senate.

But even advocates of Kyoto admit that if all nations signed the agreement and obeyed it, it would affect global temperatures by less than a tenth of a degree!

To achieve a meaningful reduction in emissions, politicians would have to set drastic limits on driving, air conditioning and all industrial production. I suppose "essential" car use would be allowed, and politicians would decide what is essential. A $10 a gallon tax on gasoline might be a start, and Al Gore could funnel the tax money to the scientist "friends" he repeatedly cites in his movie.

Let's calm down.

The scary claims about heat waves and droughts are based on computer models. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. They were unable to anticipate the massive amounts of heat energy that escaped the tropics over the past 15 years, forcing modelers back to the drawing board. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

The fundamentalist doom-mongers ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season.

Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument?

"It's the money!" says Dr. Baliunas. "Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it."

And the politicians would have one less excuse to take control of our lives.

EARTH IN THE BALANCE
Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

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The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.

Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

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So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

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Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Chill out over global warming
By David Harsanyi, Denver Post Staff Columnist

You'll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society.

Why not give it a whirl?

Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you're at a LoDo cocktail party and see what happens.

Admittedly, I possess virtually no expertise in science. That puts me in exactly the same position as most dogmatic environmentalists who want to craft public policy around global warming fears.

The only inconvenient truth about global warming, contends Colorado State University's Bill Gray, is that a genuine debate has never actually taken place. Hundreds of scientists, many of them prominent in the field, agree.

Gray is perhaps the world's foremost hurricane expert. His Tropical Storm Forecast sets the standard. Yet, his criticism of the global warming "hoax" makes him an outcast.

"They've been brainwashing us for 20 years," Gray says. "Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was."

Gray directs me to a 1975 Newsweek article that whipped up a different fear: a coming ice age.

"Climatologists," reads the piece, "are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

Thank God they did nothing. Imagine how warm we'd be?

Another highly respected climatologist, Roger Pielke Sr. at the University of Colorado, is also skeptical.

Pielke contends there isn't enough intellectual diversity in the debate. He claims a few vocal individuals are quoted "over and over" again, when in fact there are a variety of opinions.

I ask him: How do we fix the public perception that the debate is over?

"Quite frankly," says Pielke, who runs the Climate Science Weblog (climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu), "I think the media is in the ideal position to do that. If the media honestly presented the views out there, which they rarely do, things would change. There aren't just two sides here. There are a range of opinions on this issue. A lot of scientists out there that are very capable of presenting other views are not being heard."

Al Gore (not a scientist) has definitely been heard - and heard and heard. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is so important, in fact, that Gore crisscrosses the nation destroying the atmosphere just to tell us about it.

"Let's just say a crowd of baby boomers and yuppies have hijacked this thing," Gray says. "It's about politics. Very few people have experience with some real data. I think that there is so much general lack of knowledge on this. I've been at this over 50 years down in the trenches working, thinking and teaching."

Gray acknowledges that we've had some warming the past 30 years. "I don't question that," he explains. "And humans might have caused a very slight amount of this warming. Very slight. But this warming trend is not going to keep on going. My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle '40s to the middle '70s."

Both Gray and Pielke say there are many younger scientists who voice their concerns about global warming hysteria privately but would never jeopardize their careers by speaking up.

"Plenty of young people tell me they don't believe it," he says. "But they won't touch this at all. If they're smart, they'll say: 'I'm going to let this run its course.' It's a sort of mild McCarthyism. I just believe in telling the truth the best I can. I was brought up that way."

So next time you're with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell 'em you're not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You'll probably be called a fascist.

Don't worry, you're not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.
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David Harsanyi's column appears Monday and Thursday. He can be reached at 303-820-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.

Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
By Richard Lindzen

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific 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. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, 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. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. 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. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

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To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.

All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming -- not whether it would actually happen.

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Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
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Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Aliens Cause Global Warming
A lecture by Michael Crichton
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA
January 17, 2003

My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.

It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values-international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be avery good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought -- prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan's memorable phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.

But let's look at how it came to pass.

The Drake Equation and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.

SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

One way to chart the cooling of enthusiasm is to review popular works on the subject. In 1964, at the height of SETI enthusiasm, Walter Sullivan of the NY Times wrote an exciting book about life in the universe entitled WE ARE NOT ALONE. By 1995, when Paul Davis wrote a book on the same subject, he titled it ARE WE ALONE? ( Since 1981, there have in fact been four books titled ARE WE ALONE.) More recently we have seen the rise of the so-called "Rare Earth" theory which suggests that we may, in fact, be all alone. Again, there is no evidence either way.

Back in the sixties, SETI had its critics, although not among astrophysicists and astronomers. The biologists and paleontologists were harshest. George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard sneered that SETI was a "study without a subject," and it remains so to the present day.

But scientists in general have been indulgent toward SETI, viewing it either with bemused tolerance, or with indifference. After all, what's the big deal? It's kind of fun. If people want to look, let them. Only a curmudgeon would speak harshly of SETI. It wasn't worth the bother.

And of course it is true that untestable theories may have heuristic value. Of course extraterrestrials are a good way to teach science to kids. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to see the Drake equation clearly for what it is-pure speculation in quasi-scientific trappings.

The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.

Nuclear Winter and the TTAPS Report

Now let's jump ahead a decade to the 1970s, and Nuclear Winter.

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on "Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations" but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on "The Effects of Nuclear War" and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment. However, because the scientific processes involved were poorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimate the probable magnitude of such damage.

Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences commissioned a report entitled "The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon," which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke from burning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would be so much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere would reduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis, and that this would last for weeks or even longer.

The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions." This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate. [TTAPS: from the initials of the last names of its authors, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan]

At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:

Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe… etc

(The amount of tropospheric dust=# warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance…and so on.)

The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.

And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made. Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic.

According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.

But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.

This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.

The real nature of the conference is indicated by these artists' renderings of the the effect of nuclear winter.

I cannot help but quote the caption for figure 5: "Shown here is a tranquil scene in the north woods. A beaver has just completed its dam, two black bears forage for food, a swallow-tailed butterfly flutters in the foreground, a loon swims quietly by, and a kingfisher searches for a tasty fish." Hard science if ever there was.

At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

Ehrlich answered by saying "I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…"

Politics and the rise of "Consensus Science"

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compellng evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy . . . the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

But back to our main subject.

More Nuclear Winter

What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.

Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, "I really don't think these guys know what they're talking about," other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science but . . . who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?" And Victor Weisskopf said, "The science is terrible but -- perhaps the psychology is good." The nuclear winter team followed up the publication of such comments with letters to the editors denying that these statements were ever made, though the scientists since then have subsequently confirmed their views.

At the time, there was a concerted desire on the part of lots of people to avoid nuclear war. If nuclear winter looked awful, why investigate too closely? Who wanted to disagree? Only people like Edward Teller, the "father of the H bomb."

Teller said, "While it is generally recognized that details are still uncertain and deserve much more study, Dr. Sagan nevertheless has taken the position that the whole scenario is so robust that there can be little doubt about its main conclusions." Yet for most people, the fact that nuclear winter was a scenario riddled with uncertainties did not seem to be relevant.

I say it is hugely relevant. Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible. In one context, maybe you will get some mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there, if you subvert science to political ends.

That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn clearly-and defended.

What happened to Nuclear Winter? As the media glare faded, its robust scenario appeared less persuasive; John Maddox, editor of Nature, repeatedly criticized its claims; within a year, Stephen Schneider, one of the leading figures in the climate model, began to speak of "nuclear autumn." It just didn't have the same ring.

A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should affect the war plans." None of it happened.

What, then, can we say were the lessons of Nuclear Winter? I believe the lesson was that with a catchy name, a strong policy position and an aggressive media campaign, nobody will dare to criticize the science, and in short order, a terminally weak thesis will be established as fact. After that, any criticism becomes beside the point. The war is already over without a shot being fired.

Second-Hand Smoke: Using Bad Science to Promote Good Policy

That was the lesson, and we had a textbook application soon afterward, with second hand smoke.

In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was "responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults," and that it " impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people." In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen.

This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that "Second-hand smoke is the nation's third-leading preventable cause of death." The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.

In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had "committed to a conclusion before research had begun", and had "disregarded information and made findings on selective information." The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: "We stand by our science….there's wide agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings…a whole host of health problems." Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn't even a consensus of scientists that Browner evokes! It's the consensus of the American people.

Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.

Global Warming and the Use of Computer Models

As with nuclear winter, bad science is used to promote what most people would consider good policy. I certainly think it is. I don't want people smoking around me. So who will speak out against banning second-hand smoke? Nobody, and if you do, you'll be branded a shill of RJ Reynolds. A big tobacco flunky. But the truth is that we now have a social policy supported by the grossest of superstitions. And we've given the EPA a bad lesson in how to behave in the future. We've told them that cheating is the way to succeed.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact. The deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established:

(1) Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron.

(2) Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases.

(3) In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.

When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the modelmakers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.

Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.

I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.

But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilites could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draft report said, "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." It also said, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes." Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate."

What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this contentious area.

The answer to all these questions is no. We don't.

In trying to think about how these questions can be resolved, it occurs to me that in the progression from SETI to nuclear winter to second hand smoke to global warming, we have one clear message, and that is that we can expect more and more problems of public policy dealing with technical issues in the future-problems of ever greater seriousness, where people care passionately on all sides.

And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will propose one.

Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them. The fact is that the present structure of science is entrepeneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from organizations which all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the research-or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for science.

Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.

I believe that as we come to the end of this litany, some of you may be saying, well what is the big deal, really. So we made a few mistakes. So a few scientists have overstated their cases and have egg on their faces. So what.

Well, I'll tell you.

Science as Religion

In recent years, much has been said about the post modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct. We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called "The Skeptical Environmentalist".

The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever "published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review." But of course the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication. But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists?

Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was "rife with careless mistakes." It was a poor display featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist." Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to?

When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn't enough, he put the critics' essays on his web page and answered them in detail. Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down.

Further attacks since have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That's why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That's why the facts don't matter. That's why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He's a heretic.

Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I'd see the Scientific American in the role of mother church.

Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively separate science from policy. The late Philip Handler, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that "Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference-science and the nation will suffer." Personally, I don't worry about the nation. But I do worry about science.

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Crichton is the author of many science fiction thrillers such as "The Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park". In a recent book, "State of Fear", Crichton entertains while exposing the fearmongering surrounding the issue of global warming. His current book, "Next" deals with the issue of genetic experimentation.