Investor's Business Daily, September 28th, 2007
Global Warming: The White House goes green at a climate conference, presenting a false choice between economic and planetary health. Man's impact on temperatures is overrated. The world's need for energy is not.
Not that long ago, the Bush administration was challenging Al Gore's fictitious scientific consensus on imminent planetary doom caused by man-made greenhouse gases. But speaking last week at a climate change conference in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seemed to reverse the administration's course.
But then, we were surprised the Bush administration would host such a conference in the first place, asking 18 of the world's biggest emitters, accounting for 80% of man-made greenhouse gases, to set goals and targets for reducing emissions. Isn't that what Kyoto tried and failed to do?
Rice told the conference: "It is our responsibility as global leaders to forge a new international consensus on how to solve climate change. ... If we stay on our present path, we face an unacceptable choice: Either we sacrifice global economic growth to secure the health of our planet, or we sacrifice the health of our planet to continue with fossil-fueled growth."
International consensus? Solve climate change? Are those really our choices?
One of Gore's climate-change "deniers," Robert Giegengack, chairman of the department of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, says: "In terms of (global warming's) capacity to cause the human species harm, I don't think it makes it into the top 10."
Of Gore's claim that temperatures are increasing solely because man-made CO2 is trapping the sun's heat, Giegengack says: "That's plain wrong. ... It's a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. It's hard for us to say CO2 drives temperature. It's easier to say temperature drives CO2."
R. Timothy Patterson, a professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales. ... It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada."
Patterson says he and his colleagues "are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."
"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again."
Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the department of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, says the new study shows "you can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."
Bryson agrees that the Earth's temperature is rising, but says man has little to do with it. "Of course it's going up," he says. "It has gone up since the early 1800s, because we're coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air."
In his new book "Cool It," economist Bjorn Lomborg reckons that Kyoto would have cost developed nations such as those attending the conference about $9 trillion to lower the Earth's temperature by a mere one-third of a degree by 2100.
So all this weeping and gnashing of teeth abut man-made emissions may be quite irrelevant. Except for the harm it might do. As we've said before, Kyoto is a recipe for global poverty, and the money spent on fighting climate change would be better spent on things like sanitation and clean drinking water.
