The United states and other industrialized nations are on the brink of adopting Policies that will hurt national economies, and drive manufacturing and other industries into less developed and less regulated countries (with the perverse effect of destroying their environment).
Next month, at the Kyoto Climate Conference, the Clinton administration will put forward its proposal to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, from fossil fuel burning, back to the 1990 level. The target dates are between the years 2008 to 2012 - a politically convenient choice. With U.S. CO2 emissions already 10 percent above the 1990 level, and growing, the required over a decade may be as much 5 percent to 35 percent. Such curtailment will cost citizens literally hundreds of billions of dollars in higher product costs and lost wages - all to mitigate climate "disasters" that exist only on computer printouts and in the feverish imagination of professional environmental zealots.
The proposed actions to mandate binding emissions targets on dioxide will curtail energy use through rationing and taxation, and the impact of these actions will fall most heavily on the poorest among us. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate very sensibly voted 95-0 against adopting such policies if they would damage the U.S. economy or if they were not uniformly applied to all But the senators, very unsensibly, failed to address ore basic issue: the lack of scientific justification for such policies. It is still not too late to do so.
Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth has made the statement-- repeated by bureaucrats around the world--that climate science is "settled." President Clinton in calling for sweeping policy actions, has termed the evidence for global warming "compelling."
But the Climate Treaty signed at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit," rests on three suppositions that are questionable or even demonstrably false:
First, the assertion that a "signal" of a global warming from human activities has been detected in the climate record of the last hundred years, thus validating the predictions - by computer models -of a substantial future warming.
Second, that this future warming will have catastrophic consequences, including droughts, floods, storms and a rapid and significant rise in sea level, and a proliferation of tropical diseases.
Finally, that scientists know which atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are "dangerous" and which are not; that drastic reductions of CO2 emissions and energy use - by industrialized nations can stabilize CO2 concentration at near-present levels; and that such economically damaging measures can be justified politically, even though there is no significant scientific support for a global "threat."
Actual observations of climate tell quite a different story. Almost all of the half-degree C (1 degree F) warming over the last century actually occurred before 1940, before energy use added appreciable CO2 to the atmosphere. Most scientists agree that the warming was a natural climate variation, a return to "normal," if you will, after 400 years of colder temperatures that scientists refer to as the "Little Ice Age."
In the last 50 years, the increase in global average temperature has been minuscule; in the last 20 years, as recorded by weather satellites, global climate appears to have cooled. That leaves scientists looking for new mechanisms for climate change and new theories to try to account for the fact that global temperature is not behaving the way greenhouse theory says it should.
Significantly, the United Nations' own science advisory group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has repeatedly backtracked in trying to explain the disparity between computer simulations of the atmosphere and actual observations. As late as 1992, the IPCC judged the data and the theory to be "broadly consistent" and claimed a "scientific consensus" that global warming was upon us. In its 1996 report, however, the IPCC had to admit that the models were unreliable; it brought out a new explanation atmospheric aerosols - to paper over the gap between theory and observations.
Now, only a year later, this IPCC hypothesis no longer works. What is overlooked in governments focusing solely on greenhouse theory is that there are some half-dozen published mechanisms that could account for the fact that no significant global warming has occurred in the last half-century, and none at all in the last two decades. No one knows which of these mechanisms, if any, is correct-, discovering that is the job of the research scientist. All we can be certain of at this point, is that the science of global warming, far from being "settled," is still an unfinished debate.
Next: Alternatives to the greenhouse theory, and why computer models don't work.
S. Fred Singer President of The Science & Environmental Policy Project in Fairfax and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, chaired the US. government panel investigating possible climate effects from supersonic transports (SSTs). This series is adapted from his latest book "Hot Talk,- Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate," published this month by the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif.
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