readers response to global warming in todays wsj.
April 2, 2001
Hot Air + Flawed Science =
Dangerous Emissions
By Philip Stott, a professor of biogeography at the University of
London and co-author of "Political Ecology: Science, Myth and
Power" (Oxford University Press, 2000).
LONDON -- When Environmental Protection Agency Administrator
Christine Todd Whitman told reporters last week, "No, we have no
interest in implementing [the Kyoto] treaty," she unleashed a hysteria in
Europe unmatched even by the United Kingdom's current troubles with
foot-and-mouth disease. It was as if George W. Bush had pressed the
nuclear button. Why?
The reason is simple. In Europe, "global warming" has become a necessary
myth, a new fundamentalist religion, with the Kyoto protocol as its articles
of faith. The adherents of this new faith want Mr. Bush on trial because he
has blasphemed.
Emotional Energy
Nobody will understand this in the U.S. if they fail to grasp that "global
warming" has absorbed more of the emotional energy of European green
pressure groups than virtually any other topic. Even biotechnology fades
into insignificance by comparison. Americans must also understand that the
science of complex climate change has little to do with the myth. In the
U.S., the science is rightly scrutinized; in Europe, not so.
"Global warming" was invented in 1988, when it replaced two earlier
myths of an imminent plunge into another Ice Age and the threat of a
nuclear winter. The new myth was seen to encapsulate a whole range of
other myths and attitudes that had developed in the 1960s and 1970s,
including "limits to growth," sustainability, neo-Malthusian fears of a
population time bomb, pollution, anticorporate anti-Americanism, and an
Al Gore-like analysis of human greed disturbing the ecological harmony
and balance of the earth.
Initially, in Europe, the new myth was embraced by both right and left. The
right was concerned with breaking the power of traditional trade unions,
such as the coal miners -- the labor force behind a major source of
carbon-dioxide emissions -- and promoting the development of nuclear
power. Britain's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research was
established at the personal instigation of none other than Margaret
Thatcher.
The left, by contrast, was obsessed with population growth,
industrialization, the car, development and globalization. Today, the
narrative of global warming has evolved into an emblematic issue for
authoritarian greens, who employ a form of language that has been
characterized by the physicist P.H. Borcherds as "the hysterical
subjunctive." And it is this grammatical imperative that is now dominating
the European media when they complain about Mr. Bush, the U.S., and
their willful denial of the true faith.
Interestingly, the tension between science and myth characterizes the
"Third Assessment Report" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, to which Europe always turns for legitimation. The whole feel of
the report differs between its political summary (written by a group
powerfully driven by the myth) and the scientific sections. It comes as a
shock to read the following in the conclusions to the science (italics added):
"In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and
modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled
non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future
climate is not possible."
Inevitably, the media in Europe did not mention this vital scientific caveat,
choosing to focus instead on the political summary, which Richard S.
Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has described scathingly as "very much a children's exercise
of what might possibly happen," prepared by a "peculiar group" with "no
technical competence." This is a damning statement from a scientist with
impeccable credentials.
And here we come to the nub of the difference between Europe and the
U.S. For the past few years, the media in Europe have failed to
acknowledge the science that does not support and legitimize the myth. In
Britain, liberal newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent have
consistently ignored virtually all the evidence pointing to complexity and
uncertainty in climate change, preferring instead to present "global
warming" as Armageddon, a catastrophe produced by corporate
American gas-guzzling greed.
Yet, just in the past three months, there has appeared a whole suite of hard
science papers from major scientific institutions in major scientific journals,
including Nature, Climate Research, and the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society, all raising serious questions about the relationship
between gas emissions and climate.
The focus has been on the role of water vapor, unquestionably the most
important "greenhouse" gas (not carbon dioxide); the palaeogeological
relationships between carbon dioxide and temperature; the many missing,
or poorly known, variables in climate models; and the need to correct
certain temperature measurements fed into the models, especially those
taken over the oceans. One paper, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics, even concludes that "our review of the literature has
shown that GCMs [global climate models] are not sufficiently robust to
provide an understanding of the potential effects of CO2 on climate
necessary for public discussion."
Warming Waffle
The science of "global warming" is thus deeply flawed, but its caution and
rationality are drowned in the warming waffle now emanating so shrilly
from Europe. Yet, because the science is so flawed and uncertain, why
should anyone sign up to a treaty that clearly will not work? To put it
simply: The idea that we can control a chaotic climate governed by a billion
factors through fiddling about with a couple of politically selected gases is
carbon claptrap.
Kyoto, however, is ultimately more dangerous than this. It has taken our
eye, internationally, off the true way by which humans have always had to
cope with change, whatever its cause, direction or speed -- namely,
adaptation. Above all, we need a new international agenda for constant
technological adaptation to environmental change, whether gradual or
catastrophic, remembering always that it is the poor who suffer the most
from change.
The Kyoto protocol is not the answer. |
