The Myth of Catastrophic Global Warming

Last month, the Bush White House, citing a "new" study, revisited its position on global warming. The media went into a feeding frenzy and, like an e-mail scam that won't die, the global warming debate has again been resuscitated. Unfortunately, the "new" study is based on the same old studies -- chief among them the 1996 IPCC ‘s "Summary for Policy Makers" -- whose conclusions rest on three fallacious claims:

1) Based on historical weather data, average global temperatures have risen dramatically in the latter half of the 20th Century.

2) Scientific research indicates that the cause of such rising temperatures is man made.

3) There is a consensus among scientists supporting both claims.

The first claim -- that global temperatures have risen dramatically since 1940 -- finds its source in the

approximately 100 year-old temperature record of the National Weather Service. According to the NASA report, Global Climate Monitoring: The Accuracy of Satellite Data, though, the NWS record is based strictly on surface temperature readings. When weather balloon and satellite records are examined one finds temperatures either stayed the same or actually declined by as much as 1 degree F during that period.

What if we step outside the NWS box?

Data extrapolated from tree ring, ice core and lake sediment indicate that in the 18th Century the average world sea and surface temperatures were 71 degrees F. Climatologists refer to this period as "The Little Ice Age." Such data also show that in 1000 BCE the average global temperature was over 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees F. By comparison, the average global temperature in 1999 was 73.5 degrees F. The conclusion to reach about the claim of dramatically rising global temperatures in the latter half of the 20th Century is clear. First, it depends on where you stick your thermometer, on the surface, (whose reading will be highly inaccurate due to urban hot spots) or in the atmosphere (the most accurate readings). Second, the significance of the data depend upon the historical climate record of the planet. Here, as with any kind of scientific data, context and perspective is everything.

Of the second claim, that the cause of global warming is man-made, environmental activists point to the correlation between recent global industrialization and the sweltering summers of 1998 and 1999. A correlation, though, is not proof of cause. If global industrialization were the cause of planetary warming, the satellite and balloon temperature record from 1940 to 1980 -- a period of far greater worldwide

industrialization -- would show a marked increase in average global temperatures, which it does not. Indeed, such data show temperatures declining.

A cause and effect relationship, though, has been discovered between solar activity and global temperatures. Danish climatologists Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen (in the 1991 issue of Science) and Douglas V. Hoyt and Dr. Kenneth H. Schatten (in their book, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change) found that "global temperature variations during the past century are virtually all due to the variations in solar activity."

What about carbon dioxide levels? Scientists have found that past carbon dioxide levels, based, again, on historical and pre-historical tree ring, ice core and lake sediment samples, have changed significantly without human influence. Note, too, that between 1940 and 1980, when man-made levels of CO2 swelled rapidly, there was a decline in temperatures.

If scientific temperature records belie global warming; if scientists conclude that global temperatures are minimally affected by man; where, then, is scientific consensus -- the third claim supporting the notion of global warming? The answer is: there isn't any.

In 1996 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the IPCC -- released a document titled, "Summary for Policy Makers," which supported the notion of global warming. Environmentalists crowed that 15,000 scientists had signed the document.

However, the report was doctored without the knowledge of most of those 15,000 scientists, whose protests became so vocal that the lead authors backed off their conclusions, disavowing the document as "a political tract, not a scientific report."

In 1998, 17,000 scientists, six of whom are Nobel Laureates, signed the Oregon Petition, which declares, in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. "

In 1999 over ten thousand of the world's most renowned climatologists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, etc., signed an open letter by Frederick Seitz, NAS Past President, that states, in part: the Kyoto Accord is "based upon flawed ideas."

Finally, in a paper in June of 2001, aptly titled, GLOBAL WARMING: The Press Gets It Wrong -- our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: "Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens."

In light of these facts, if the continual resurrection of the issue of global warming in the media is not a consummate example of the Big Lie, I'd be hard pressed to find a better one.

Steven Brockerman is a writer for Capitalism Magazine.