Global Warming Campaign Subordinates Science to Politics
By Robert W. Tracinski
In December the world's diplomats will meet in Japan to sign a treaty constricting the lifeblood of industrial civilization: fossil fuels. Like other national leaders, President Clinton is promoting the premise that the carbon dioxide released by such fuels is causing a dangerous global warming. This is no longer a hypothesis, we are repeatedly told by our politicians and journalists, but a fact accepted by an international consensus of scientists.
This contention, however, is the product not of scientific judgment but of political considerations. The chilling reality is that the scientific evidence does not support the global warming case -- and there is no scientific consensus maintaining that it does.
Patrick Michaels, for example, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, points to the data from the worldwide network of weather stations. They show a 0.9 degree Fahrenheit rise in average global temperature since 1880 -- but all of it before 1940. That is, while industrial activity has exploded and CO2 emissions have almost tripled since 1940, no warming has occurred during that time.
Fred Singer, another climatologist from the University of Virginia and the former head of the National Weather Satellite Service, confirms that satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature reveal no increase over the past 18 years -- the entire period for which such data have been collected.
Even if there is some warming, adds Hugh Ellsaesser, a meteorologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, there is no evidence that it is man-made. There was a well-documented warm period 900 years ago -- long before the Industrial Revolution -- when the global temperature was one to two degrees higher than today (incidentally, without any apocalyptic consequences).
The renowned computer models on which much of the fear-mongering is based are fallacious, says MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen. He notes that they cannot account for cooling factors like cloud cover and, had the models been applied to the past century, would have overstated the rate of warming by more than 100 percent.
At least 80 climate scientists have now signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration, stating that "we cannot subscribe to the so-called 'scientific consensus' that envisages climate catastrophes and advocates hasty actions."
Why is the content -- indeed, the very existence -- of such viewpoints largely ignored? The answer is that while genuine scientific debate does not require the suppression of dissenting voices, a politically motivated crusade does. Environmentalists have created a bogus consensus, in order to further the movement's ideological goal of expanding government and constraining industry. The process of an honest, objective search for scientific truth is being abandoned for political ends.
This approach was starkly illustrated by the recent summoning of television weathermen to the White House. Is there any doubt that science was being subordinated to politics when President Clinton -- treating the weathermen like servile propagandists of some totalitarian regime -- exhorted them to mouth the party line on global warming during their broadcasts?
There is a persistent effort by environmentalists to get the public to believe that global warming is a scientifically accepted fact. The 2,000 scientists who contributed to a 1996 report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often cited as the core of this supposed consensus. But many of those names were included, not as recognized climate scientists, but merely as official representatives of their governments. A number of actual climatologists are on the list only because their data were cited or they were asked to review parts of the report -- not because they endorsed its conclusions. In fact, the list includes outspoken critics of the global warming claims, such as Michaels, Lindzen and Robert Balling.
This "consensus" was manufactured primarily by a small number of policy-makers and politically ambitious scientists. They were the ones who wrote the report's summary, which declares that global warming is an uncontested truth. According to Robert Reinstein, the State Department's chief negotiator at the 1990 Earth Summit, the wording of the summary was hammered out by diplomats and "must be considered purely a political document, not a scientific one."
Just as the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT despite the conclusion of its own scientific panel that the pesticide was safe -- just as Congress, in response to the acid-rain campaign, enacted massive restrictions on industry in defiance of the major scientific study Congress itself had commissioned -- so do today's environmentalists pursue a political agenda in militant indifference to the objective evidence.
As December's summit nears, there is indeed a catastrophe that our leaders must act to avert. But the catastrophe is not global warming; it is environmentalism's growing success at politicizing science.
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