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November 08, 2006

The Global Warming Heat is On

By Thomas Bray

Expect to hear a lot about global warming in coming months.

In Congress, a Democratic majority can be expected to use committee hearings to portray the Bush administration as out of step with its allies on the subject. More immediately, 189 countries that have signed the Kyoto protocol to roll back emissions of greenhouse gases are meeting in Kenya, armed with yet another study claiming that it would be far cheaper to clamp controls on carbon dioxide now than deal with the problem later.

And the Supreme Court is scheduled later this month to hear arguments from Greenpeace and others that the Environmental Protection Agency should regulate carbon dioxide, a perfectly natural substance, as a pollutant.

Fortunately a hardy band of skeptics has been pointing out that claims to certainty about global warming, much less what it might cost to deal it, are based on very shaky evidence, mostly computer models that can't predict what the weather will be a month from now, much less 100 years from now. Unfortunately this has earned them ferocious attacks on their integrity.

England's Royal Society, for example, the oldest scientific society in the world, recently demanded that ExxonMobil cease making grants to think tanks harboring those who offer "misleading" thoughts about global warming. The society, long known for its left-wing leanings, seems to harbor no questions about the potentially corrupting effect of the $4 billion in grants that researchers receive annually from government in the U.S. and Britain.

Back in the states, the Washington Post editorialized that Bush will go down as "the President who fiddled while Greenland melted," ignoring the fact that Greenland got its name from an era - centuries before there was an industrial revolution - when temperatures went through a warming cycle. And on Grist magazines website, an author offered the thought that when global warming drowns and fries the planet, there should be "Nuremberg" trials for the "deniers," a term equating scientific skeptics with Holocaust denial.

I am not a scientist, so I can't fully judge the merits of the global warming debate. But color me skeptical if for no other reason than groups that try to suppress debate usually lack confidence in their own arguments.

I might also be more sympathetic if so many environmental prophecies hadn't turned out to be false, or at least vastly exaggerated. Remember Stanford University professor Thomas Ehrlich's claim of a "population bomb" that would lead to mass starvation by the early 1980s? Remember the so-called "Limits to Growth" study in the 1970s that we were running out of natural resources? Remember the "global cooling" consensus of the 1970s?

And even before that, how about Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" jeremiad, which launched the modern environmental jihad against chemicals by proclaiming the death of nature from the use of DDT and other chemicals?

But, lo, no less than the World Health Organization earlier this year called for reinstating DDT as a weapon in the fight against malaria, which has cost tens of millions of lives in the last half century. When used responsibly, WHO pointed out, there is little danger to humans and animals.

Now they tell us. Where is the outrage about the tens of millions who have died a horrible, shivering death from malaria in the intervening decades? As Reason Magazine's Ron Bailey asks, will there be a Nuremberg trial for those, like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, who overreacted to the DDT scare and pushed world governments into policies that arguably cost millions of human lives?

Oh well, their intentions were good...weren't they? And don't we have to make such decisions even when the evidence is fragmentary? If we wait for all the facts, mightn't it be too late to do something?

Well, yes, sometimes we may not act until it's too late. But what if we had wasted hundreds of billions to combat the prophesied global cooling of three decades ago? The "precautionary principle" so loved by Al Gore and the like cuts both ways. There are plenty of reasons to take precaution against precipitous government action as well.

Indeed, if the left is in the process of making a political comeback in this country, that's something we very much need to keep in mind.

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