Is there any misfortune, disaster or otherwise unwelcome phenomenon out there that Vice President Al Gore can't blame on alleged global warming? Last time it was the forest fires in Florida. Next time he may hold it responsible for the heartbreak of psoriasis. For the time being, however, it's the heat wave in the South.
"The evidence of global warming keeps piling up, month after month, week after week," he said at a White House news conference. "How long is it going to take before these people in the Congress get the message? People are sweltering out here."
Mr. Gore acknowledged that he couldn't actually prove global warming was to blame for the heat wave, which is rather the point after all. What he did do was release a global temperature analysis which purported to show that this was the hottest June on record. The mean temperature for the month was about one degree hotter than the monthly average and about 0.4 degrees above the previous high for June in 1994.
Before anyone starts house hunting in Iceland, it's worth noting that about the same time Mr. Gore was issuing his apocalyptic warnings, a scientist in Alabama was issuing a press release of his own, playing down the heat wave. The problem, said Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama's Earth System Science Laboratory in Huntsville, is that reports of record high temperatures in the United States may be based on incomplete records from the National Weather Service.
Those records, he said, often don't go back as far as records kept at the local level, which can date back a century or more. Mr. Christy makes no reference to Mr. Gore's remarks. His findings are still notable. Although June 1998 was indeed a warm one in Huntsville, it was by no means the warmest. Mr. Christy said 1914, 1921, 1936, 1943, 1952 and 1953 were all hotter.
"We realize the timely nature of media services and the temptation to report a particular event as the hottest, coldest, most, least, wettest, driest, etc.," he said. "We will begin soon to digitize all of Alabama's weather records so we can offer a more expeditious and representative picture of today's 'extremes' in terms of over 100 years of Alabama's climate. In the mean time, when old timers say, 'aw shucks, it was worse back in '52, '53 and '54,' believe them."
Hot as it isn't, Mr. Gore is still sweating the politics of the matter. The Kyoto climate protocols, the vice president's obsession, are in serious trouble. The accord seeks to limit possibly climate-changing greenhouse emissions, except of course in 132 countries including China, India, Brazil and Mexico. But a follow-up meeting in Bonn, Germany, last month failed to resolve disagreements over the plan.
Meanwhile U.S. lawmakers, who think the plan would put the country at a competitive disadvantage given all the exemptions for other countries, have declined to finance the administration's $6.3 billion initiative to limit emissions by promoting research on energy-efficient technology. And they are threatening to pass legislation that would block the administration from taking steps to implement the protocols before they are ratified by the Senate.
Hence Mr. Gore's highly publicized campaign to fend off such legislation by claiming that there are links between climate change and heat waves, forest fires, tornadoes and anything he can find at hand. When will lawmakers get the message? The bad news for Mr. Gore is that it appears they already have.
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