Let's talk money a moment -- serious money. The New York Times, in a story at the bottom of page 11 on March 3, reported that a planned U.N. conference on the environment this summer could result in regulations that would suck $600 billion a year from the world economy.
The previous day, the Times told of a plan to give "poor nations" $125 billion a year for environmental programs to permit industrialization while dealing with such issues as global warming. This figure was said to be "$70 billion more than all the financial assistance they now receive," meaning additional demands on an already-strapped world economy. Even the plan's chief proponent, U.N. official Maurice F. Strong of Canada, admitted that the amount was "unrealistic in today's economy."
Nevertheless, he and other U.N. bureaucrats will scratch around for it.
But as these boxcar figures rumble through our media, little attention is being given to important questions: Are alarmists in science and the media unnecessarily inflating "global warming" to apocalyptic proportions? Are our policy makers making costly decisions on global warming on the basis of proven scientific fact, or on hysterically one-sided media reports?
At the end of a brilliant documentary film, The Green- house Conspiracy, climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia tells the interviewer of the many uncertainties underlying global warming. He asked, "Would you march down the road towards a policy which people have rightfully said requires an economic restructuring of the world, knowing that the world [climate] is behaving opposite to what the basis for that policy said?"
The stakes are high, both economically and politically. Environmentalists want tough government rules that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent. Industrialized nations would be asked to levy new fuel taxes that the Department of Energy estimates could double the price of gas and electricity, stunting economic growth.
Politically, the United States is being pressured to yield sovereignty over much of its industry to a new "Global Environmental Protection Agency," which a Russian U.N. official says would exert "coercive powers" in carrying out its mandate. [See Editor's Cuff Notes]
Summer Day Story
How did the global warming scare get started? And how much should we trust what our media are telling us about the issue? The scare became torrid on one of Washington's hottest days of a hot summer, June 13, 1988. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, chose that day to declare that warming was real. "In my opinion," Hansen said, "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." Hansen asserted that "temperature data" indicated a significant warming trend the past three decades and predicted, "with 99 percent confidence we can state that the warming during this time period is a real warming trend."
Hansen's statements touched off media frenzy. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the butterfly specialist used by NBC News as its "environmental expert." warned on the "Today" show that melting polar ice could inundate Washington. D.C., much of Florida and the Los Angeles basin -- not to mention coastal resort areas all around the perimeter of the U.S. The Washington Post ran a front-page story with a cartoon depicting the Washington Mall as an urban lagoon, lined with palm trees, with speed boats darting about as bikini- clad women lolled on the shore.
Most stories sorely lacked scientific balance. The Center for Media and Public Affairs analyzed greenhouse stories from January 1985 through June 1991 on the Big Three TV networks and in the New York Times. Washington Post. Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. Hansen's "523 source appearances more than doubled the total for any other individual." reported Dr. S. Robert Lichter. Another warming zealot, Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, was second most-quoted. Our media accepted myth as reality.
Brits Do the Job
British filmmaker Hilary Lawson stepped into the media vacuum with the best single explanation we've seen of the hoax -- the documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy. Released in 1990. The people who run U.S. public broad- casting are warming zealots so, unsurprisingly; they banned Lawson's film from the PBS network, although it ran on WETA-TV in the Washington, D.C. area. Instead, PBS opted for a hopelessly one-sided film. After the Warming, which was 90 minutes of greenhouse gabble.
Lawson's honest reporting stung the greenhouse zealots and their PBS chums. Sen. Albert Gore, Jr. (D., Tenn.), who has just published a mushily reasoned book on global warming, defended PBS censorship in a March 3 floor speech. He denounced Lawson's documentary as "some ridiculous program from another country." Insulting the many eminent U.S. and British scientists interviewed by Lawson. Gore likened the documentary to a "nut show" that claimed the moon landing was a hoax.
Contrary to Gore's hyperbole, Lawson did a fair documentary; letting both sides state their case. He started work accepting the greenhouse theory but decided the zealots were wrong. He set the stage in his opening: "It has all the hallmarks of a good disaster movie...an impending crisis that threatens to engulf the world. From an almost benign start, a hardly perceptible change in temperature, the globe could suddenly topple into crisis.... changing large tracts of land into desert and wreaking havoc on our culture." He said that global warming proponents are forecasting "something akin to an apocalypse, an earth parched and scorched by the sun, a climate in chaos. Nor is it a theory supported only by a few cranks. It has been endorsed by the great and the good, by academics and politicians. There is only one problem: there is mounting evidence that it is not true."
At a 1989 Earth Day conference at the University of Missouri. Dr. Michaels is shown asking a "predominantly scientific" audience how much temperatures during the summer of 1988 differed from the normal. The group estimate was that Missouri averaged 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. However, Michaels says, temperatures were below average. He was not surprised: he had asked the same question at 120 conferences, and each time people thought temperatures had risen, even in places where they were colder than normal.
Dr. Richard Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, commented. "The notion of a warming...is sort of drilled into people to the point that it would seem surprising that anyone would question it. But yet under- lying it is very little evidence at all; in fact, there is ample evidence to the contrary." Lindzen's MIT colleague, Prof. Reginald Newell, did not see "any evidence of a catastrophic change in our climate at the present time." In Lawson's scenario, the global warming myth rests on four pillars, each of which he demolished in turn.
Pillar #1: Empirical Evidence
At the core of the global warming myth is the assertion that earth climate records show that temperatures have increased and that sea levels have risen over the last century. But Lawson commented, "It's far from easy to get an accurate picture of what is happening to the world's weather. Our evidence is dependent upon thousands of individual measurements, taken every hour of every day at weather stations throughout the world...." Some 60,000 readings are taken each day, 22 million a year.
Studies done at East Anglia University in England have played an important part in the promotion of the green- house theory. Professor Tom Wigley stated that in the last half-century or so, "the global mean temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. Now that doesn't sound like a very large amount, but it is a very important and significant change."
Lawson countered, "There are a number of problems with the data. the first...is that the weather stations are not evenly distributed around the globe." As MIT's Lindzen points out. "Land is about only 30 percent of the earth's surface." Ocean weather stations are relatively scarce: "for instance, you have St. Helena Island representing one-third of the Atlantic Ocean, and that is a little bit questionable."
Lawson noted that land temperature readings are distorted by readings taken in urban areas that are "heat islands" -- for instance, the Phoenix airport, where instruments are near concrete runways. Dr. Robert Bailing of the University of Arizona said these "heat islands" could be detected in cities as small as 300 people. Any time man replaces vegetation with concrete, "you create...a distortion...that can add up to two or three degrees.... We have to be careful when ...people...say, 'I have detected global warming.' because what they may have detected is urban warming." After examining readings from 1,000 stations, Bailing concluded "that most of the United States has cooled this century, and not warmed."
Data from space "has made the land record more doubtful," Lawson said. No longer do climatologists rely upon thermometers and weather balloons. Satellite sweeps give the equivalent of "tens of thousands of thermometer readings taken by hand," without suffering the distortions of island heat effect, and are accurate to within one hundredth of a degree.
Contrary to land thermometer readings showing an under- lying warming trend, satellite readings show the earth was "rather warmer during the first half of the eighties and rather cooler the last half." Dr. Roy Spencer of the NASA Space Center, the leading space meteorologist, stated, "The trend in the thermometer data is only one to two tenths of a degree, which doesn't sound like much but it's enough to be a significant difference with satellite information with no trends. Over the entire ten year time there was no net warming or cooling."
Even if the ground readings are accepted as valid, whether there has been warming depends on the time scale examined. Wigley of East Angila University claims that his temperature data shows an underlying increase of half a degree Celsius over the last century. But as Lindzen says, "it's clearly not a record you draw a straight line through and say it's warming. The last 50 years, it went down and it went up." And from 1930 to 1970, a time of high auto and industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), average U.S. temperatures actually fell.
Another element of the warming theory is alarm about rising seas. Lawson showed a British TV clip of a tropical island, which the narrator predicted would be covered with water by the time youngsters in the surf are adults. Lawson stated. "It's not only the media, it's the scientists themselves who are not adverse to making the situation look dramatic."
Prominent Colorado meteorologist Dr. Stephen Schneider: "If the sea level rises, and those projections range anywhere from a few centimeters to maybe a meter or so within the next hundred years, that by itself is not that serious except for the places that are low lying...." He mentioned Bali, Venice and London. "But what is really serious is if the warming of the oceans causes an increase in the energy source for severe storms. Then you get a higher probability of more intense hurricanes or other severe storms driven by ocean evaporations."
"But as with temperature changes," Lawson found, "the facts about sea level rises tell a different story." Dr. David Audrey, who heads coastal research at the Woods Hole Oceanic Institute in Massachusetts, said that the record is ambiguous for the last 800 years. In the British Isles, in the north the sea level is falling; in the south it is rising. And, according to Audrey, the land itself rises and falls in coastal areas, further complicating projections. By choosing time spans and measuring stations researchers can prove any thesis they wish -- but the bottom line is that no significant sea level rises have been measured. Audrey is emphatic: "There is no evidence that sea level rise has accelerated due to global warming."
In 1989, according to Lawson, there "appeared to be evidence of sea-ice melt. Submarines going under the northern polar cap reported that ice in specific areas appeared to be less thick than previously. But Dr. Julian Paren of the British Antarctic Survey stated, "Just two snapshots of Arctic sea ice, ten years apart, even if they did show a thinning, really wouldn't be significant compared with long term monitoring of sea-ice extent." Again, the submarine data is contradicted by satellite observations. NASA photographs in a time sequence showed the growth and contraction of the polar ice cap over months and years, giving a daily picture of sea-ice extent. According to Paren, there have been changes "from year to year" but no lasting changes of any significance. Nor do salt samples taken from ice along the polar caps show significant contraction.
Lawson concluded, "So, from the actual climate record of the earth, from the measurements of thermometers on land and changes of sea levels and ice extent, there is no convincing evidence of either a rising temperature or an increase in sea level."
Pillar #2: CO2 as Villain
A second claim is that climatic records show that an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere causes an increase in temperature. Schneider asserted that 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, there was 25 percent less CO2 in the atmosphere and about 50 percent less methane. "Cold times tend to be associated with less greenhouse gases, warm times with more greenhouse gases."
Lawson: "But that's only part of the story." Our knowledge of Ice Age temperatures, and the CO2 content of the atmosphere, can be measured with precision from core samples from the Antarctic ice pack -- 160,000 years of atmospheric history in cores taken 2,000 meters below the surface. "There is no doubt, from the record, that for the past couple of hundred thousand years, temperature and carbon dioxide levels do appear to follow each other. But it's far from clear that carbon dioxide causes temperature to change." In graph form, temperature increases parallel but lag just behind rises in carbon dioxide levels. Dr. Parch stated, "We know for certain that the temperature falls long before the carbon dioxide levels fall. The decline in temperature actually causes the decline in CO2."
The historical record shows that CO2 levels have risen steadily since the middle of the 19th Century, but only in the 1950s did levels start to increase rapidly. Lawson said, "But even if we accept the thermometer data, the temperature change that is supposed to have been caused by CO2 does not coincide with the increases in carbon dioxide."
Wigley agreed that the data presented "a remarkable puzzle" which he attributed to "natural variabilities" in the climate. But Michaels thinks little of this reasoning: "It's pretty apparent that the lion's share of the warming occurred before the lion's share of the increases [in CO2] went in, There are so many things that can go against a simplistic theory before you have to admit that the theory is simplistic."
Pillar #3: Climate Models
Lacking credible historical data, warming alarmists rest much of their case on "climate models," or computer simulations, which try to replicate weather trends. As Lawson stated, "Perhaps more than anything else it has been the predictions of these climate models that a doubling in CO2 will lead to an increase in temperatures of three to five degrees Celsius by the end of the next century."
According to the models, areas with large amounts of CO2 become hotter than the average. Schneider designed one of five models considered the most influential in the global warming debate. "They do very well," says Schneider. "We take our models, we let the sun get higher, it gets warm, the sun goes away, it gets colder."
Lawson: "Some scientists, however, are less impressed." Richard Lindzen stated, "I don't think we can speak of the models as being accurate at this point. They are experimental tools...To use them in a forecast mode, in a delicate thing, like this warming, is calling on an accuracy these tools simply do not have."
Prof. Peter Jonas of the University of Manchester is a world expert in the effect of clouds on the climate, and how different types of clouds reflect the sun's rays. He felt climate models "are treating clouds in a very simplistic manner [which] makes it very difficult to include the true magnitude of the feed back effects..." As temperatures raise evaporation increases, and more clouds are created which reflect the sun's radiation away. "This has the effect of giving rise to a smaller amount of warming at the earth's surface," Jonas states. "The increase in temperatures due to the carbon dioxide is reduced by the presence of these clouds."
Lawson stated, "But if we are to believe the predictions of these models, we must first be convinced that they accurately simulate our current planet." One "leading" climate model compiled by the British Meteorological Office showed as much rain falling in the central Sahara Desert in the summer as in Ireland and Scotland.
Pillar #4: Physics
Lawson states, "The greenhouse physics is supposed to show that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It absorbs the sun's radiation reflected from the earth's surface and in turn emits that radiation again, causing an increase in the amount of radiation, or heat flux, arriving on the surface earth, resulting in a warming of the planet."
But many atmospheric physicists do not accept this assumption. "I'm saying that is not at all evident," stated Newell of MIT. In the first place, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, nor the most important. Two other important "greenhouse gases" are water vapor and ozone, which both absorb and emit radiation. As Newell explained, radiation from CO2 increases heat -- which in turn causes more evaporation of water, which by producing clouds has a cooling effect. Clouds also reflect more solar radiation away from the earth. By increasing CO2, Newell said. "You could actually end up with a lower temperature.
The effect of "greenhouse gases" is further confused by convection currents, which carry warm air from the surface to higher altitudes. According to MIT's Lindzen, this, too, can lead to cooling "even though you had a net increase in the amount of greenhouse gas."
Thus, as Lawson stated, the final pillar "turns out to be as insubstantial as the rest," and the global warming edifice collapsed with a boom.
Why Trust 'Em?
The alarmists become even more suspect when Lawson points out that such persons as Stephen Schneider a decade or so ago warned that a "new Ice Age"-- not global warming -- threatened the earth. He wrote in a book: "I have cited many examples of climatic variability and repeated the warnings of well-known climatologists that a cooling trend has set in -- perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age." Schneider lamely explained to Lawson, "I said that because at the time it was true."
But, Lawson asked, "Now you are asking governments to spend billions of dollars on a view which is different from one you held a decade ago?"
Schneider says that "people learn," and that he is not embarrassed that new information caused him to change his position. Michaels said that when he was in graduate school "it was gospel" that a new Ice Age loomed. "To tell the truth. I had trouble warming up to that one, too, it is not the first, but it is certainly the loudest of the environmental apocalypses."
"It's easier to get funding if you can show some evidence for impending climate disasters," stated Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA. A decade ago the fashionable scare was the new Ice Age, now it's global warming; "who knows what it will be ten years from now."
What You Can Do
Send the enclosed card or your own letter to Ted Turner, urging him to air The Greenhouse Conspiracy on his superstation, WTBS.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1275 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005 and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $22.95 a year and 1st class to those contributing $32.95 a year or more. Non-members subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail).
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD THE STORY ABOUT THE MAN IN SUBURBIA FACED WITH THE task of getting rid of a litter of unwanted kittens. He goes to a park several neighborhoods away and tells playing children, "Look, kids, unless you take these kittens. I'm going to have to drown them." The children choke back their tears and run home to introduce their great new kitties to Momma. Cheap trick? I suppose so, and the Turner Broadcasting System is doing the same underhanded stunt in exploiting the fears of children about the environment. It is airing a series of short pieces featuring children telling horror stories about the environment. A sweet little girl who says she is from Bangladesh does the global warming schtick. This segment opens with scenes of flood devastation, which she blames on global warming. "Is it fair," she asks, "for us to lose the places we live because of what other countries are doing to the air?" The next shot is of a seer gazing into a crystal ball, "I see the temperatures rising as the century turns--two degrees--five degrees, six degrees--even more--" Oh, nonsense!
AS THIS AIM REPORT MAKES CLEAR, GLOBAL WARMING ISN'T THE MENACE THAT TURNER'S scare ads and supposedly objective "news reporting" would have us believe. Turner's ads are designed to use the unnecessary fears of little children to pressure the Bush Administration to support the professional envirocranks who will dominate the U.N. conference on the environment that opens in Rio de Janeiro in June. Kids are urged to send leaf-shaped postcards to officials urging them to have the "political courage" to vote for a clean environment. Turner's ad series does not give even lip service to the truth about such issues as acid rain and nuclear energy, the subjects of other segments. The segments explicitly blame Western industrialization for Third World poverty, and suggest that economic success is shameful. Ted Turner is a brilliant entrepreneur who has displayed great vision in the development of his television business. Unfortunately he has not shown the same brilliance and vision in his treatment of global politics and science. For several years he misread the evidence with respect to communism and was cozy with the Reds in Moscow. Beijing and Havana. Now he is misreading the evidence with respect to the environment and is cozy with the radical Greens.
THE PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE (PBS) HAS ALSO DISPLAYED ITS CONTEMPT FOR fairness by doggedly refusing to air "The Greenhouse Conspiracy" despite pressure from Congress to do so. PBS said that "Greenhouse" was too one-sided, even though it interviews proponents as well as critics of the global warming scenario. The absurdity of this excuse was shown by the fact that the film on this subject chat it chose to air didn't acknowledge that there was room for disagreement. It presented a scenario showing the disaster that would befall the world if we didn't act immediately to curb the emission of greenhouse gases This helped persuade Senate minority leader Bob Dole and other Republicans to launch a long overdue effort to reform public broadcasting by amending the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's three-year, $1.1 billion authorization bill. Responding to criticisms of imbalance in PBS programming. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, complained that Reagan had vetoed and Bush has said he would veto a bill to restore the Fairness Doctrine. However, there is a special fairness requirement in the law governing public broadcasting that is stricter than the Fairness Doctrine. It is Sec. 396(g)(1)(A) of the Communications Act. All Congress has to do is provide penalties for failure to observe it.
OUR MEDIA ARE CENSORING AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE STORY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING. We have not seen a single report in our mainstream press about how the internationalists are trying to force the United States into surrendering an important part of our national sovereignty. You should keep some of these censored facts in mind when you read stories about the U.N. environmental conference in Brazil in June. The one-world crowd that dominates such meetings is pressing for tight restrictions on American industry. But media stories are devoted to bashing the Bush White House because of its refusal to accept global warming as fact, rather than a very "iffy" scientific proposition.
WHAT THE MEDIA HAVE NOT REPORTED IS HOW THESE CURBS WOULD BE ENFORCED. THE ecological extremists are pushing for nothing less than a "Global Environmental Protection Agency" which would have broad regulatory authority over business and industry in the U.S. and the rest of the world, under the guise of "protecting the world environment." AIM's Joe Goulden got an inside look at this scheme at a "Global Structures Convocation" in Washington on Feb. 7-9. (Any of the TV networks or any national newspaper that we saw did not cover the meeting.) The sponsoring groups included most major "environ- mental" groups, such "New World Order" organizations as the U.S. Association for the U.N. and the Center for War/Peace Studies, and assorted "peace" outfits. The meeting, jocularly subtitled "The Road to Rio," was called to draft plans for the U.N. meeting in Brazil. The argument for a global EPA was presented by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the tax-exempt foundation that wreaked havoc among apple growers with its 1989 campaign against Alar.
THE MOST INTERESTING SESSION FEATURED VLADIMIR PETROVSKY, A CAREER SOVIET diplomat who was recently named to be the U.N. undersecretary for political affairs. Petrovsky did not mince words. He said that laws for international environmental controls "need certain coercive action" to be workable. His proposal drew applause and some muted cheers from the audience. (Environmental reporters seem to be the only media people who are not ashamed to clap at press conferences.) I cannot muster much enthusiasm for "coercive action" against American industry that is orchestrated by a Russian apparatchik and a U.N. agency.
FORMER CONGRESSMAN JOHN ANDERSON OF ILLINOIS CHAIRED THE SESSION AS PRESIDENT of the World Federalist Association. Joe asked Anderson, as one of the few persons present who had faced an electorate, whether the U.S. Congress would ratify a treaty surrendering national sovereignty over the environment. Anderson thought it would, for "the people are ahead of their government" on the issue. He saw a "groundswell of public support" for international regulation. (The last time Anderson professed to be a master of public opinion was in 1980, when his quixotic campaign against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination never got beyond the low single digit figure.)
WHY HAVEN'T OUR MEDIA TOLD CITIZENS ABOUT THE PROSPECT OF A "GLOBAL ENVIRON- mental Protection Agency" being given Draconian powers over our industries? The domestic EPA has compiled an abysmal record of harassing industry and small business with its relatively limited authority. To turn an army of U.N. bureaucrats loose on every factory and shop in America is environmental extremism at its apex.
SEVERAL SCIENTISTS INTERVIEWED IN "THE GREENHOUSE CONSPIRACY" DOCUMENTARY told of financial and other pressures exerted against those who don't accept the warming theory. "A lot of people are getting very famous, very well-known and very well-funded as a result of promoting the disastrous scenario of greenhouse warming," said Dr. Sherwood Idso of the U.S. Conservation Service. "My suspicion is that if one has a crisis like this, it's easier to gain funds for the profession as a whole," commented Dr. Reginald Newell of MIT. When he wrote a paper pointing out discrepancies in climate models, he was warned, "that my funding would probably be cut, and in fact it has been cut." Prof. Tom Wigley of East Anglia University, prominent among warming advocates, argued, "I don't think funding directly influences the nature of the research or the approach." Narrator Hilary Lawson asked about the indirect effect. Wigley smiled and seemed to shift uncomfortably in his chair. "You are asking me a very difficult question here," he said. Wigley said he is the only permanently funded university scientist in his group: a dozen PhD researchers helping him "are all funded on so-called soft money." Dr. Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, whose anti-warming articles are regularly rejected by scientific journals, said he feels "I would have been more successful had I said the world is coming to an end."
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