Facts, not feelings on global warming...
San Francisco Examiner
February 4, 2001
Global Warming Suffers a Chilling Effect
by Sally C. Pipes
Major media dedicated massive resources to the election, inauguration, and confirmation hearings, but the latest scoop, with policy implications, belongs to the Weather Channel.
The last two months of the year 2000 were the coldest since the United States federal government started keeping records more than a century ago, in 1895. The two-month average was 33.8 degrees Fahrenheit, down from 34.2 degrees in 1898. The only time it was nearly as cold was 1985, with averages of 34.8 in November and 34.6 in December.
The World Climate Report of January 8, 2001 argues that these figures are likely to go down even further when the final data come in. In Siberia, an area which, like North America, is supposed to be getting warmer, people are experiencing life threatening cold.
On January 7, the city of Barnaul recorded its lowest temperature in 100 years, a full 67 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Patients had to be evacuated from poorly-heated hospitals. In Krasnoyarsk the temperature never rose above minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit the entire the month of December, forcing people to keep gas ovens running around the clock just to keep their homes around 50 degrees. Forecasters expect January to be even worse.
This news should cast a chilling effect on an orthodoxy of the liberal left, that the world is inexorably getting warmer. The prophets of global warming warn that that this warming threatens life on earth as we know it, and supply visions of melting polar ice caps and flooded coastal cities.
The cause for this warming, we are told with Calvinist certainty, is commercial and industrial activity, the automobile, modern life itself. Therefore, this is a crisis and the wise planners of the state must intervene by regulating commerce and restricting industry.
This orthodoxy, it should be noted, allows for no other point of view. Bruce Babbit, former Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton Administration, said that those who doubt global warming are "un-American," a kind of environmental McCarthyism that went unchallenged in the press.
As it happens, the period from January through October of 2000, according to the same federal sources, was the warmest since 1895. The global warming chorus seized upon this data as but the latest confirmation that they are right, that warming is no longer a theory, and that we are all going to fry. But the news, from government sources, that this winter is the coldest since 1895 drew no similar response.
Global warming gurus such as Stephen Schneider did not immediately convene conferences and issue a statement. Former Vice President Al Gore did not hold a press conference to explain changes in the next edition of Earth in the Balance. Bruce Babbit did not apologize for charges of un-Americanism. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club made no announcements that they were studying the new data. The press ignored the revelation, betraying a short attention span, a politicized selection process, and a distaste for facts.
As Lowell Ponte, author of The Cooling, points out, modern thermometers read slightly higher than older models. The way temperatures are taken at sea is also different. "Heat islands," such as cities, can easily read higher than open areas several miles away. Regular temperature readings ignore vast tracks of the earth's surface.
Robert Balling, a climatologist at the University of Arizona and author of Pacific Research Institute’s The Heated Debate, points out that the sun is not a regular star. Sometimes it burns hotter than others, and these fluctuations coincide with temperature shifts on earth.
This winter's big chill has given global warming enthusiasts some explaining to do. Whether global warming, if it occurs at all, would be a good or bad thing, is another debate entirely. Those currently shivering in Krasnoyarsk, or even Chicago, would surely welcome a few extra degrees.
Politicians, the public, and the media, should welcome the facts, however upsetting they may be to their agendas. Facts, not dogmatism and apocalyptic visions, should govern this important issue, and any policy flowing from it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sally C. Pipes is president of the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute. |
