Wow, that Scheer guy is certainly uninformed. He appears uneducable.
Thank goodness that President Bush is acting on science, not politics:
April 2, 2001
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Commentary
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.
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