It's
not PC to blame Mother Nature
In a scientific establishment
50-percent financed by the government few can resist the cult of
human-caused global warming.
Now the global warming debate reveals
that what Bob Tyrrell calls the plutomores (from the Greek plutos,
"riches," and moros, "fools") have reached high positions in the
Bush administration. Fooled entirely by the copious press and television
coverage of the Democratic victory in Florida, for example, Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill seems to believe he was summoned to Washington to
serve as a token Republican in the administration of Al Gore. The Alcoa
corpocrat devoted his first presentation to the Cabinet to an earnest
plutomoronic tract on global warming, urging his baffled companions to
save the planet from Republican religionists. He all but said the Earth is
in the Balance.
O'Neill and his Cabinet colleague Christie Whitman
had provided the high point of this comic opera until the recent assault
on Exxon Mobil by a group of angry shareholders, including a medley of
nuns and Capuchin friars from New Jersey, inspired by Lloyd Keigwin, a
good scientist panicked by pressures of political correctness.
Collaborating in the panic is a writer from the Wall Street Journal
named Thaddeus Herrick, who reports lugubriously that Exxon Mobil is
"increasingly isolated on the issue, not only from the international
scientific community, but also from European competitors...which largely
accept the premise that the Earth is warming because of heat-trapping
greenhouse gases."
Hardly heroic is Exxon Mobil, backpedaling from
its denial of global warming risks. Its own plutomores seem increasingly
ready to capitulate to the idea that their energy products imperil the
planet.
Keigwin, though, is the more intriguing case. A 54-year-old
oceanographer at Woods Hole Observatory near the Massachusetts Cape, he
found a way to concoct a 3,000-year record of the temperatures of the
Sargasso Sea near Bermuda through analyzing thermally dependent oxygen
isotopes in fossils on the ocean floor. He discovered that temperatures a
thousand years ago, during the so-called medieval climate optimum, were
two degrees Celsius warmer than today's and that the average temperature
over the last three millennia was slightly warmer than today's. Roughly
confirming this result are historical records -- the verdancy of Greenland
at the time of the Vikings, the little ice age of the mid-1700s, a long
series of temperature readings collected in Britain over the last 300
years documenting a slow recovery from the ice age, reports of medieval
temperatures from a variety of sources, and records of tree rings and ice
cores.
These previous findings, echoed by Keigwin's, are
devastating to the theory of human-caused global warming. If the Earth was
significantly warmer a thousand years ago, if we have been on a re-warming
trend for three centuries, if, as other even more voluminous evidence
suggests, the Earth has repeatedly seen mini-cycles of warming and cooling
of about 1,500 years duration, then any upward drift in temperatures we
may be seeing now -- included scattered anecdotes of thinning arctic ice
-- is likely to be the result of such cycles.
Thus the case for
human-caused global warming can no longer rest on the mere fact of
contemporary warming. To justify drastic action like the Kyoto treaty
requiring a reduction in U.S. energy consumption of some 30 percent,
unfeasible without destroying the U.S. economy, the human-caused global
warming advocates would have to demonstrate a persuasive mechanism of
human causation. This they show no sign of being able to do. Grasping the
point, scientists at Exxon Mobil recently used the Keigwin data in a
Wall Street Journal ad and the PC bees hit the fan.
By all
reasonable standards, Keigwin is a hero. Not only did he invent an
ingenious way to compile an early temperature record, but he made a giant
contribution to discrediting a movement that would impose a deadly energy
clamp on the world economy. But soon enough his government-financed
colleagues began to exert pressure. Was he a tool of the oil companies?
Lordy no, he wrote, in an indignant letter to Exxon Mobil, denying that
his findings had anything much to do with the global warming issue.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Dr. Keigwin warns
that the results are not representative of the Earth as a whole. He
says that the importance of his research isn't in the data per se, but
rather that marine geologists can undertake such a study at all.... He
wants to put the issue behind him." Hey, he's got a new government grant
to find out "what's causing a substantial warming in the Atlantic Ocean
off Nova Scotia." He has not reached any conclusion -- but according to
the Journal, "he gives a nod to global warming concerns, saying
'I'd take a guess.'"
Scores of scientists have been pressured to
embrace the cult pressures that befall any critic of the cult of
human-caused global warming. In a scientific establishment 50 percent
financed by government, few can resist. An eminent scientist who was once
the leading critic of global warming had to stop writing on the subject in
order to continue his research. The source of the pressure that ended his
publications was then-Senator Al Gore. Later this scientist coauthored a
key paper with Arthur Robinson -- organizer of a petition against Kyoto
signed by 17,000 scientists -- but had to remove his name under pressure
from Washington.
Keigwin's denials of his own significance are all
pathetically misleading. The temperature pattern he found in the Sargasso
Sea is indeed a global phenomenon. Sallie Baliunas and Willi Soon of
Harvard have uncovered a new oxygen isotope study that extends this
temperature record another 3,000 years based on six millennia of evidence
from peat bogs in northeastern China. The peat bog records both confirm
Keigwin and demonstrate an even warmer period that lasted for 2,000 years.
During this era, beginning some 4,000 years ago and running until the
birth of Christ, temperatures averaged between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius
higher than they do today.
Summing up the case is an article
published earlier this year by Wallace Broecker in the prestigious pages
of Science entitled "Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?" His
answer is a resounding yes. As Craig and Keith Idso report in a March 7
editorial on their Webpage, Broecker recounts substantial evidence for a series
of climatic warmings spaced at roughly 1,500-year intervals. Broecker
explains the science of reconstructing the histories of surface air
temperatures by examining temperature data from "boreholes." From some
6,000 boreholes on all continents, this evidence confirms that the Earth
was significantly warmer a thousand years ago and two degrees Celsius
warmer in Greenland. This data, Robinson warns, is less detailed and
authoritative than the evidence from the Sargasso Sea and from the Chinese
peat bogs. But together with the independent historical record, the
collective evidence is irrefutable. Thousands of years of data demonstrate
that in the face of a few hundred parts per million increase in CO2,
temperatures today, if anything, are colder than usual. Temperatures in
Antarctica, for example, have been falling for the last 20 years. The
global satellite record of atmospheric temperature, confirmed by weather
balloons, shows little change one way or another for the last three
decades. Terrestrial temperature stations, on average, show more warming
over the past century, but many are located in areas that were rural when
the stations were established and are densely urban today, a change which
causes local warming. The dominance of natural cycles globally is not
surprising since, as Baliunas and Soon report, the impact of changes in
sun energy output are some 70,000 times more significant than all human
activity put together.
In the end, the global warming panic will
take its place in the history books next to other environmental chimeras,
such as the threat of DDT (but not of pandemic malaria), the peril of
nuclear power (but not of coal mining), the brain-curdling effect of
cellphones (but not of far more potent sun rays), the menace of powerlines
(but not of poverty), the poison of alar (though not of rotten apple
juice), the danger of asbestos in walls (but not of fire), the
carcinogenic impact of PCBs (but not of carrots, peanut butter, coffee and
other items that test more toxic in the same way) and the horror of radon
and other sources of low-level radiation (despite its beneficial effect on
health through a process called hormesis).
Overall, the situation
is simple. Politicized scientists with government grants and dubious
computer temperature models persuaded the world's politicians to make
pompous fools of themselves in Kyoto. Socialist politicians were happy to
join an absurd movement to impose government regulations over the world
energy supply and thus over the world economy. The scientific claims and
computer models have now blown up in their faces. But rather than admit
error they persist in their fear-mongering. When this happened with DDT,
hundreds of millions of people died of malaria. They continue to die. How
many people would die as a result of an energy clamp on global
capitalism?