The global cooling alarm was sounded throughout the 1970s. In 1974, Time magazine featured an article titled “Another Ice Age?” which cited evidence purporting to show the atmosphere cooling for the previous thirty years. “Telltale signs [of global cooling] are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.” The article featured opinions from climate experts who suggested that mankind may have been responsible for the earth’s cooling. Reid A. Bryson of the University of Wisconsin theorized that dust and “other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight.”38
In 1975, scientists again raised the specter of global cooling. A famous article appearing in Newsweek magazine, titled “The Cooling World,” concluded, “The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” It continued, “[Meteorologists] are almost unanimous in the view that the trend [of global cooling] will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.” The article cited a survey completed in 1974 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealing a drop of half a degree in the average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. NOAA scientists had also concluded that “the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3 percent between 1964 and 1972.”39
Of course, there was no new Ice Age. The “almost unanimous” opinion of weather experts about man-made global cooling was wrong. The Enviro-Statist then swung in the opposite direction, insisting that it is the “almost unanimous” opinion of scientists and other experts that rather than cooling, the earth is actually warming, and man is the culprit once again.
In 2008, the same Newsweek that gave weight to the false science of global cooling published an article titled “Global Warming Is a Cause of This Year’s Extreme Weather.” It wrote mockingly, “It’s almost a point of pride with climatologists. Whenever some place is hit with a heat wave, drought, killer storm or other extreme weather, scientists trip over themselves to absolve global warming. No particular weather event, goes the mantra, can be blamed on something so general. Extreme weather occurred before humans began loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. So this storm or that heat wave could be the result of the same natural forces that prevailed 100 years ago—random movements of air masses, unlucky confluences of high- and low-pressure systems—rather than global warming. This pretense has worn thin.”40
There is no consensus that man has influenced the earth’s temperature or that the earth’s temperature is warmer now than in past periods. And even if there were a consensus, science is not about majority rule. It either is or it is not.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen classified “scientific consensus” respecting global warming as “unscientific.” He said, “With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign. When in 1988 Newsweek announced that all scientists agreed about global warming, this should have been a red flag of warning. Among other things, global warming is such a multifaceted issue that agreement on all or many aspects would be unreasonable.”41
But the political appeal of enviro-statism is strong. Former Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain has insisted, “The debate [about man-made global warming] is over, my friends. Now the question is: what do we do? Do we act, do we care enough about the young people of the next generation to act seriously and meaningfully, or are we going to just continue this debate and this discussion?”42 Former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said, “I believe the debate over global warming is over.”43 Hastert’s Republican predecessor, Newt Gingrich, concurred. “My message, I think, is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading in the atmosphere.”44 Gingrich even said there must be a “green conservatism.”45
The debate is over? The evidence is sufficient? And this from leading Republicans. But no one has been more demagogic and alarmist, and honored for it by the international community and Hollywood, than former vice president Al Gore. It seems that for Gore and his flock, the separation of church and state ends at environmentalism’s edge. Speaking at a Baptist convention, Gore, citing Luke 12:54–57 for scriptural support, argued that it is dishonest for anyone to claim that global warming is merely a theory rather than a scientific fact. “The evidence is there…. The signal is on the mountain. The trumpet has blown. The scientists are screaming from the rooftops. The ice is melting. The land is parched. The seas are rising. The storms are getting stronger. Why do we not judge what is right?”46 And being the prophet that he is, Gore insists that the media stop reporting views that differ from his. “Part of the challenge the news media has had in covering this story is the old habit of taking the on the one hand, on the other hand approach. There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, but when you’re reporting on a story like the one you’re covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don’t take—you don’t search out for someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time.”47 The media are more than willing to accommodate Gore’s commandment. Consider CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. When asked why his reporting on global warming did not acknowledge the views of skeptics, he replied, “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier? This isn’t about politics or pseudo-science or conspiracy theory blogs. This is about sound science.”48
Oh really? President Bill Clinton’s undersecretary of state for global affairs, Timothy Wirth, did not quite see it that way. He said, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”49 And what is the right thing? Maurice Strong, who was an advisor to former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, provides an answer: “We may get to the point where the only way to save the world will be for the industrial civilization to collapse.”50 What he really means, of course, is that the world would be saved if the United States collapsed.
The same United Nations has been advocating the case for man-made global warming for several years. In 1988, it established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which periodically releases reports predicting the end of the world as we know it and insisting its findings are definitive. Dr. Michael Mann, a climatologist, then at the University of Massachusetts, and others conducted an analysis of statistical evidence, from which they concluded that recent temperature increases are “likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years” and that the “1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year” of the millennium.51 Mann’s results yielded a hockey stick–shaped graph purporting to demonstrate a dramatic spike in global temperatures during the last hundred years. This “hockey-stick effect” has been used to describe global warming. In 2001, the IPCC adopted Mann’s findings.52
Dr. Edward Wegman, a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Applied Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association, was tasked by a congressional committee to lead a group of experts in examining the hockey-stick evidence. Wegman reported back, “The assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.” Mann did not have enough historical data to conduct a meaningful st
udy. Wegman added, “There is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimate studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.”53 Mann and the other advocates of man-made global warming did not know how to conduct a correct statistical analysis, nor did they seek input from legitimate statisticians. Noting that so many remain convinced of Mann’s conclusion despite the inaccuracy of his graph, Wegman said, “I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.”54
Among the most widely cited “authorities” for man-made global warming is an IPCC panel report produced in 2007. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, an economist, and a well-known critic of global warming proponents, has said that the “IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment.”55 A study by the Science and Public Policy Institute backs Klaus’s observation: “The IPCC is a single-interest organization, whose charter directs it to assume that there is a human influence on climate, rather than to consider whether the influence may be negligible.”56 As the Heartland Institute notes, “The IPCC’s climate science assessment is dominated by a small clique of alarmists who frequently work closely with each other outside the IPCC process.”57
The IPCC continues to allege that the planet is warming, that the warming is due to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and that the increased carbon dioxide levels are due to the burning of fossil fuels. Unless dramatic steps are taken to cut carbon dioxide levels, mankind can expect famine and starvation, rising sea levels and beach erosion, outbreaks of disease, and loss of rain forests: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” Eleven of the last twelve years (1996–2006) are among the warmest years “in the instrumental record of global surface temperature since 1850.” Global average surface temperature has risen, global average sea level has risen, and Northern Hemisphere snow cover has fallen.58
“Global atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N20) have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.” The report further concludes with “very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.” Moreover, “most of the observed increase in global average temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHC concentrations [man-made greenhouse gases].” Solar and volcanic activity would have “likely” produced global cooling.59
Again, the alarmists’ methodologies have come under severe criticism. For example, the surface stations used throughout the United States to measure temperature are subject to distortion. Many readings are influenced by warming caused by nearby buildings, parking lots, and exhaust vents. The temperature station in Marysville, California, is surrounded by an asphalt driveway and air-conditioning units. Its readings have trended up. The temperature station in Orland, California, has not been affected by outside development. Its readings have trended down.60 And there are charges that historic CO2 measurements are intentionally chosen to ensure that the data reflect an increase, such as ignoring CO2 measurements from the years 1857–1957, which may show higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2 than exist today.61
Even so, does carbon dioxide actually affect temperature levels? Dr. Nir Shariv, a top astrophysicist and associate professor at Hebrew University, used to think so, but not anymore: “Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story told to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media.” Shariv notes that “solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming” and greenhouse gases are largely irrelevant to the climate. If the amount of CO2 doubled by 2100, it “will not dramatically increase the global temperature.” He added, “Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant.”62
Geologist Dudley J. Hughes puts it another way: “Earth’s atmosphere is made up of several major gases. For simplicity, let us picture a football stadium with about 10,000 people in the stands. Assume each person represents a small volume of one type of gas…. Carbon Dioxide [represents] only about 4 parts in 10,000, the smallest volume of any major atmospheric gas.”63 Plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis and exhale oxygen. Humans inhale oxygen to breathe and exhale carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a natural part of the atmosphere—like water vapor. It is not a poison and, therefore, it is not a pollutant. In fact, water vapor is by far the earth’s most significant greenhouse gas, and without greenhouse gases life could not exist.64
There are so many experts who reject the notion of man-made global warming and the historical claims about carbon dioxide they are too numerous to list here. But you would never know it from the media coverage. As the National Center for Public Policy Research reports, in 2008, “Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine announced that more than 31,000 scientists had signed a petition rejecting the theory of human-caused global warming. A significant number of scientists, climatologists and meteorologists have expressed doubt about the danger of global warming and whether or not humans are having a significant impact for the worse on the climate.”65 Moreover, numerous experts are now claiming that, once again, the world is cooling.66
Phil Chapman, a geophysicist, astronautical engineer, and first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, writes, “All four agencies that track the Earth’s temperature—the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California—report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.”67
But the Enviro-Statist is not deterred. Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an advisor to Al Gore, and whose early work was used to justify global cooling but who is now the most influential and bombastic high priest of the global warming movement, told Congress in 2008 that “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”68 Hansen, a master at spinning policy makers and the media, has been effectively challenged by certain of his critics. In 2007, he was forced to revise his figures that showed the hottest decade of the twentieth century was not the 1990s but the 1930s and correct a more recent blunder that showed October 2008 as the hottest on record (scores of temperatures were not based on October readings but on September’s numbers, which had been carried over).69
But the stampede continues. And the solution is the innocuous-sounding “cap and trade” proposal. For the Conservative, this is the most oppressive economic scheme yet to be advanced by the Statist. The way it would work is that the federal government would dictate greenhouse gas emission levels, with emphasis on carbon dioxide, from fossil fuel use. In a relatively short period of time, the government would mandate the steady reduction of the levels of emissions overall and for particular industries that would be legally permitted. Companies that emit less carbo
n dioxide (and other gases) than legally allowed could sell the excess allotments to companies that emit more. And the companies that emit more than their allotted amount would face stiff penalties and fines.
How would this be policed?
The federal government would need to create a vast IRS-type bureaucracy to set allowance levels and process permits, collect data, monitor and audit compliance, investigate alleged violations, and ultimately enforce emission standards and levels through penalties, fines, and litigation. Every company that uses fossil fuels and emits carbon dioxide would likely be affected. Individual companies and entire industries would be at the mercy of the federal government’s arbitrary determinations. And since the government’s role will be the enforcement of its own emission rules and regulations—since there would be no bureaucracy serving as a counterweight, promoting economic growth and free markets—it would be little concerned with the economic consequences of its decisions. Indeed, the stringency of the emission standards would never permit a net excess of emission allowances to offset the amount of emission overages, because to do so would defeat the purpose of the scheme. For individual companies, buying excess carbon emissions would become extremely expensive, resulting in part from price competition. They might be required to reduce production and output, go out of business altogether if their profit margins are tight, or relocate abroad to avoid the emission standards. The jobs lost, wealth destroyed, progress stymied, and resources diverted are of minor import to the Enviro-Statist, who is in a rush to adopt the cap-and-trade scheme.
The Heritage Foundation estimates that one of the more recent cap-and-trade proposals would result in cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) losses of at least $1.7 trillion and could reach $4.8 trillion by 2030; single-year GDP losses of at least $155 billion that realistically could exceed $500 billion; annual job losses exceeding 500,000 before 2030 and that could reach 1,000,000; and the average household paying $467 more each year for natural gas and electricity, or an additional $8,870 to purchase household energy over the period 2012 through 2030.70