The world is meeting in Kyoto, Japan, to decide how much wreckage to visit upon the Western economies to prevent global warming. Kyoto aims to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would seriously curtail energy use and, with it, economic growth. All under the premise that humans produce global warming and that global warming will produce a human catastrophe. Is this true?
There has been a very slight warming of Earth’s atmosphere in this century (although one still has to explain why satellite and balloon data show no net temperature rise in the last 19 years). But first, it is not clear how much is due to natural variation. Second, even assuming a substantial human contribution, it is not clear what, say, a doubling of CO2 emissions would do to temperatures.
You can get answers by modeling. But scientific models are notoriously subject to the tweaking of underlying assumptions. The predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have already been significantly modified. In 1990, it predicted a 6 degree F rise by 2100. The prediction is now down to a 3 1/2 degree rise, a 40 percent drop. And there is a huge range of uncertainty: the lower-end estimate is less than 2 degrees.
But uncertainty is a feeling foreign to global warming fundamentalists, many of them now gathered in Kyoto. Take that great American evangelist, Vice President Gore, a last-minute attendee. Now, Gore may turn out to be the environmentalists’ villain because he fears infuriating his labor allies at home if he agrees to serious curbs on U.S. CO2 (and thus energy) production. But whatever he ends up doing for personal political reasons, it is clear what he believes. Just two months ago he likened those who question global warming to tobacco executives who with a “straight face” denied that smoking causes cancer. This is a serious charge: not just error, but bad faith.
This attitude is echoed by many scientists. Stephen Schneider, a Stanford scientist and participant at Clinton and Gore’s Global Climate Change Roundtable last July, has said that when it comes to global warming it is “journalistically irresponsible to present both sides.”
It is worth noting that 25 years ago this same Schneider was vociferously denying global warming. Even a tenfold increase in human production of carbon dioxide, he wrote, “which at the present rate of input is not expected within the next several thousand years” is “unlikely to produce a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth.” Indeed, “the doubling of carbon dioxide”–which is what Kyoto is trying so desperately to prevent–“would produce a temperature change of less than one degree (centigrade).”
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Schneider argued then that the real threat was global cooling: The production of aerosols screening Earth from the sun could produce “a decrease of the mean surface temperature by as much as 3.5 degrees centigrade” which “if sustained over a period of several years . . . could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
This is nuclear winter without the nukes. And this was no offhanded comment. This was a paper in the prestigious journal “Science,” complete with equations containing a gaudy excess of exponents and Greek subscripts.
Nor was Schneider alone. In the 1970s, which were–surprise!–cold, global cooling was the vogue. Nigel Calder, former editor of “New Scientist,” said in 1975 that “the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” And Science Digest declared that “how carefully we monitor our atmospheric pollution will have direct bearing on the arrival and nature of this weather crisis,” i.e., a new “ice age.” All this doomsaying provoked J. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to remark in 1976 that “Whenever there is a cold wave, they (the media) seek out a proponent of the ice-age-is-coming school and put his theories on page one. . . . Whenever there is a heat wave . . . they turn to his opposite number (for a prediction of) a kind of heat death of the Earth.”
It is one thing to change your mind. It is another to then write the view you have just abandoned out of polite society, as does Schneider by saying that journalists shouldn’t even present the non-global warming view, and as does Gore when he makes skeptics into the moral equivalent of tobacco executives. Ironically, as climate-change predictions become more malleable and contingent, climate-change activists become more inflexible and intolerant.
The ease with which politicians, popularizers and even scientists can be caught up in popular enthusiasms for one doomsday or another should give us pause. This is not a call for ignoring climate change. It is a call for a modicum of humility before we go ahead and wreck the good life we’ve developed over 200 years in the name of a theory.