Vice President Al Gore's White House press briefing on July 14 was well classic
Al Gore. Flanked by tame government scientists, the Vice President released a
global temperature analysis that claimed last month was the hottest June
since reliable record-keeping started over a century ago. Mr. Gore said forcefully "The
evidence of global warming keeps piling up, month after month, week after
week. How long is it going to take before these people in the Congress get
the message? People are sweltering out there." Gore then acknowledged that
there's no proof that the recent extreme weather events are being caused by global
warming.
Media-wise, the briefing was more notable for who passed on it than who wrote
it up. NBC and ABC did the usual gush and CNN Headline News prefaced coverage
of the Dallas heatwave with one of the more asinine statements on television:
Federal officcials today said the first six months of this year have been the
warmest in the history of the Earth. Major newspapers, however, largely
took a pass. The Washington Post was the only paper to give the briefing
significant play. Associated Press covered it, but not UPI/Reuters or the
Dow Jones Newswire. Nothing turned up on the Internet at the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, or Miami Herald. The
Boston Globe ran the AP story on page 14, but cut it short, ending with (and
thereby emphasizing) a paragraph about how satellite-based temperature
readings show a slight downward trend. The Wall Street Journal gave it a few sentences
in a news round-up column; one assumes when the Apocalypse is announced the
Journal will set it in larger type.
The same day Gore was staging his briefing, Dr. John Christy of the Earth
System Science Laboratory, University of Alabama, Huntsville, raised questions
about local weather records turning up in newscasts around the country.
After both Associated Press and National Public Radio announced that last
month in Huntville, Alabama, was the hottest ever, Dr. Christy researched the local
records at the Alabama State Climatology Office. He found that there were six
years--1914, 1921, 1936, 1943, 1952, and 1953with warmer Junes than 1998. He
speculated that reporters were inadvertently being given faulty information by
the National Weather Service, whose computerized data banks are incomplete.
Indeed, the NWS Office in Birmingham, Alabama, admitted its state data only
went back to 1958.
Multiply Huntsville by a few dozen cities around the United States and you
have a major information snafuone that affects public perceptions about
whether the climate is warming. After Christy went public with his concerns, a
Canadian colleague reported a similar problem in Canada, where regional
temperature records are given only for the last 50 years, despite the fact
that many locations have records going back a hundred years and more. Again, it
presents the distorted view that recent temperatures are the warmest ever.
Staff members assigned to the House Small Business Committee, chaired by
Congressman Jim Talent, have been trying for the past month to arrange a House
debate on the scientific evidence for global warming. Satellite data expert
Dr. John Christy; Dr. Patrick Michaels, climatologist and professor,
University of Virginia; and SEPP President Dr. S. Fred Singer, physicist and former
director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, were readily lined up to
present a critique of the government's evidence. A number of other
scientist-critics were equally available.
But despite some flexibility on the date (finally scheduled for Monday, July
27), signing up the government's usual suspects for the pro-warming
presentation the same scientists who are only too happy to come to Washington,
D.C., to star in the Vice President's press briefings or to submit to an
interview with reporters from CNN, NBC, ABC, etc.--proved a bit of a
problem. As staff members ruefully reported, here are the replies:
Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science in
New York: It's really not a good time for me to get away right now.
Dr. Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and author of two books on global
warming: Stanford won't pay my travel, and besides I have jury duty.
Dr. Robert Watson, with the World Bank Environment Program and now chairman of
the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC ), who finally
responded after five telephone calls: Sorry I'm going to be out of the country.
Dr. Michael McCracken, director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program:
Gee, I'd like to come, but I'm putting on a conference that week.
Dr. Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at
Princeton, where pricey global climate modeling is supported by government
funds through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Mahlman
insulted the scientist-critics, loudly insulted the congressional staff member
who called him, and refused to take part in the debate.
Dr. Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's Climate Data Center, Asheville, NC:
Initially asked to think about it overnight; called back an hour later and
said he'd be on leave the week before and didn't want to use vacation time to
prepare. Sorry.
Dr. John Holdren, environmental policy professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy
School of Government: Going to be out of town that day.
Dr. Daniel Lashoff, formerly with the Clinton administration, now back as
senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council: I'll come, but not
if I'm the only witness.
Staff members, shocked by the response, say they will likely recommend to the
Committee chairman that the debate be postponed until late August. If
government experts present a second round of excuses, they say they will
recommend more forceful means of getting these witnesses to the table.
Well, suing the government seems to get results. On Friday, July 17, the U.S.
District Court in North Carolina, acting on a lawsuit filed by the tobacco
industry, struck down a 1993 finding by the Environmental Protection Agency
that so-called second-hand smoke causes lung cancer. According to the
Associated Press, the EPA's controversial report concluded that second-hand
tobacco smoke should be classified as a Class A carcinogen and was responsible
for more than 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. That report has since been
cited widely in decisions by state and local officials to restrict smoking in
public places, including bars, restaurants, airliners, and offices.
But the court ruled that the EPA had based its report on inadequate science
and failed to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between
second-hand smoke and lung cancer. It further stated that the EPA followed
improper procedure by not including industry experts in its deliberations, as
required by law, and further criticized the EPA for having aggressively
utilized the report's findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme
intended to restrict plaintiffs' products and to influence public opinion.
Said the court: EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had
begun...[and] adjusted established procedures and scientific norms to validate
the agency's public conclusions.
Not surprisingly, the EPA announced that an appeal was virtually certain.
Carol Browner, EPA administrator, said she was disturbed by the decision.
Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said, No one wants to go
back to smoking on airplanes, smoking in restaurants. No one wants to go back
to polluting indoors.
We haven't seen any surveys on how the public feels about a ban versus simply
setting aside a smoking section in restaurants and airplanes, but that misses
the point. Any survey of airline frequent flyers would turn up a goodly
number who would like to see crying babies shipped by truck, but is anyone
suggesting cooking scientific research so the government could justify banning
babies from airlines? The point is, the EPA distorted and misused science to
support arbitrary social policy. As the court in North Carolina ruled, that
has to stop.
With that, we'll pour ourselves a tall, cool one, and bask in summer sunshine
until next week.
TW2 is compiled by SEPP Research Associate Candace Crandall. Visit The
Science & Environmental Policy Project web site (www.sepp.org) for new articles and commentary.
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