An ill-considered treaty

An ill-considered treaty No scientific consensus to support kyoto pact

Editorial Copyright 1998 The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart,FL) November 18, 1998

The United States has signed the Kyoto global-warming treaty, and while Senate ratification may be a long time off (if it comes at all), the Clinton administration's decision is a mistake. It tends to validate an ideologically driven plan that would significantly hamper the U.S. economy on the basis of, well, nothing much.

The administration, of course, says science proves its case and has cited documents supposedly signed by scads of scientists. Valid conclusions in the physical sciences are not reached by counting how many are lined up on your side, of course, but it's worth underlining that the global-warming consensus claimed by President Clinton, Vice President Gore and some groups simply does not exist.

Consider, for instance, one letter in support of the treaty that was supposedly endorsed by 2,600 scientists. Thanks to research by Citizens for a Sound Economy, a number of publications have now reported that only 10 percent of the signers could be called climate experts. Malcolm Wallop, a former U.S. senator now serving as chairman of Frontiers of Freedom Institute, has been quoted as saying that the others include "a plastic surgeon, two landscape architects, a hotel administrator, a gynecologist, seven sociologists, a linguist and a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine."

Meanwhile, far more scientists have objected to the Kyoto treaty in petitions, and more than one poll has found climatologists unconvinced that catastrophic, human-induced global warming is now in process. One of the country's most highly respected meteorologists, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is among those who have told the press that there's just no indication that anything out of the ordinary is now occurring with temperatures.

While a great many scientists in the field aren't convinced that people are causing the climate to heat up, few economists who have spoken out on it think the U.S. economy could keep trotting happily along if the Kyoto treaty were ratified and enforced. Growth would be slowed, jobs would be lost and prices would go up if serious limits were placed on the use of coal, gas and oil as a means of curtailing the release of so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, many economists agree.

The treaty, which raises a host of other issues and has actually been ratified by only one country, Fiji, would not halt warming if everyone ratified it and all the theories are true, even some advocates concede. The push for it seems to come mainly from those who dislike industrial capitalism but do not fear reduced individual liberty or stricter international controls. This treaty, instead of being signed by the United States, ought to be buried somewhere.

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