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REEDINGS
. . .
Notes
on Books by Gerard Reed
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GLOBAL WARMING, FORESTS BURNING
My
father worked as a meteorologist for the United States Weather Bureau.
He occasionally joked that it helped, now and then, when compiling a
weather report, to look out the window rather than stay buried in the papers
cranked out by various machines. Somewhat
the same goes for the current concern for global warming.
That the globe is dramatically warming is an article of faith for most
environmentalists and many politicians. But
scores of those who best understand what’s actually happening—looking at
the evidence rather than computer projections—urge us to disregard TV
snippets or Greenpeace press releases and study the facts.
So argues Patrick J. Michaels, research professor of environmental
sciences at the University of Virginia and past president of the American
Association of State Climatologists, in Meltdown:
The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists,
Politicians, and the Media (Washington, D.C.: Cato
Institute, c. 2004). We can
either rely on computer projections or factual observations, simulated
scenarios or substantiated facts.
Truly the globe has warmed slightly during the past few decades.
But it has, in the more distant past, been considerably warmer, and
there is no reason to think the current warming is caused by human activity.
Such warming will change some things, but the changes will be modest—nothing
remotely like that described by alarmists who control the major media.
For example: an article in Nature
magazine (one of the most prestigious scientific journals) recently
predicted that a single degree (C) increase would destroy 15 percent of all
species on earth. But the earth
warmed by more than a degree (C) a century ago and the planet’s species
fared quite nicely! Summarizing
his position, Michaels insists: “Global
warming is real, and human beings have something to do with it. We don’t have everything to do with it; but we can’t stop
it, and we couldn’t even slow it down enough to measure our efforts if we
tried” (p. 9).
NASA’s James Hansen, whose 1988 congressional testimony launched
public concerns for global warming, recently (2001) noted that we can now more
accurately assess the threat, and in the next 50 years the earth will probably
warm up by less than one degree (C). Hansen’s
projection “is about four times less than the lurid top figure widely
trumpeted by the United Nations in its 2001 compendium on climate change and
repeated ad infinitum in the press” (p. 20).
In part this is because only one-third of the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are climate scientists.
Even worse, its publications are not peer reviewed.
The IPCC’s influential 1996 Assessment
relied on ground-measured temperatures, but utterly ignored the highly
significant satellite data (which indicate absolutely no global warming of the
atmosphere!). Many ground
temperature measurements are taken in areas that have experienced dramatic
urban sprawl during the past century. Thus,
for example, Washington D.C. is significantly warmer than it was 50 years ago,
but a measuring station in rural Virginia shows no increase at all.
It’s quite possible that much “warming” is simply the warming of
areas adjacent to large cities, whose artificial environment (heat absorbing
asphalt and heat producing factories and homes) falsifies the picture.
It’s even possible that the surface-warming trend will be reversed
within a few decades.
The public knows little of this truth because the press is uncritical
(or scientifically illiterate) and many scientists are locked into a funding
network that discourages dissent. Consider,
for example, “the truth about icecaps.”
In 2001 a Washington Post headline
screamed: “The End is Near.”
Rising water would soon flood seaside cabins on the Chesapeake Bay, the
story declared. Senator Joseph
Lieberman, in that year, repeated the alarmist mantra that melting polar
icecaps would raise sea levels by “35 feet, submerging millions of homes
under our present-day oceans” (p. 33).
If he wasn’t reading the Post,
he could easily have taken this scenario from a similar article in the New
York Times based upon “the
observations of two passengers on a Russian cruise ship” that sailed through
the Artic Ocean. The passengers
took pictures of the ice-free water and wondered if
“’anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by
water, not ice’” (p. 43). Though
a bit of fact checking by the Times
would have demonstrated the normality of this, headlines favor the abnormal
and the story fueled the political agenda favored and financed by
environmentalists. But the truth
is, as Michaels shows—with numerous graphs and scholarly citations—Greenland’s
icecap is growing and there’s no cause for alarm.
And there’s especially no cause for alarm regarding the higher ocean
levels predicted by Senator Lieberman! “In
fact, the North Polar icecap is a floating mass, and melting that will have
absolutely no effect on sea level; a glass of ice water does not rise when the
cubes have melted. With regard to
that other polar ice—Antarctica—most climate models predict little or no
change” (p. 203).
Michaels applies the same scrutiny to allegations of species
extinction. Alarmist studies of
butterflies (one of which was the foundation for the Kyoto Accord so sacred to
politicians like Al Gore), toads, penguins, and polar bears simply do not
survive careful scrutiny. Though
earth’s surface temperatures have slightly increased, there is no evidence
that such warming has led to species’ extinctions.
So too hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and floods, disease and
death, though often attributed to global warming by impulsive journalists such
as Dan Rather, simply cannot have been caused by it.
A case study for alarmism is the island of Tuvalu.
For years environmentalists like Lester Brown and local officials of
this tiny Pacific island nation have been issuing warnings, asking for “environmental
refugee status in New Zealand” for its 11,000 people (p. 203).
Tuvalu’s prime minister declared (a decade ago) that “the
greenhouse effect and sea-level rise threaten the very heart of our existence”
(p. 204). London’s Guardian, just in time for an important United Nations conference,
certified such fears. “In fact,”
Michaels says, the “sea level in Tuvalu has been falling—and
precipitously so—for decades” (p. 204).
Not to be bothered by the facts, however the Washington Post irresponsibly spread the word that melting ice caps
in polar regions would soon engulf the island nation!
Perhaps more distressing than Michael’s factual presentation is his
critique of the scientific community responsible for promoting the myth of
impending doom. Just in time for
the 2000 election, the U.S. National
Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change was published. Guided
to publication by President Clinton’s Assistant for Science and Technology,
John Gibbons, the report was carefully wrapped with all the ribbons of solid
science. “Gibbons was a popular
speaker on the university circuit, lecturing on the evils of rapid population
growth, resource depletion, environmental degradation and, of course, global
warming. His visual aids included
outdated population and resource projections from Paul Ehrlich in which ‘affluence’
was presented as the cause of environmental degradation, a notion that has
been discredited for decades” (p. 207). Equally dated were his data on climate change!
Gibbons guided the various bureaucratic committees that led to the
publication of the influential National
Assessment. These committees,
“larded with political appointees,” were designed to deliver a document
satisfactory to Vice President Al Gore, gearing up for his presidential
campaign. “The resultant document was so subject to political
pressure that it broke the cardinal ethic of science:
that hypotheses must be consistent with facts” (p. 208).
The National Assessment
embraced the most extreme computer projections regarding global warming—one
of which would have erred by 300 percent if applied to the past century!
It ignored that fact that the most of the past century’s warming took
place in the U.S. before there was any significant accumulation of greenhouse
gasses in the atmosphere. It even
endorsed a Canadian study that predicted temperatures in the Southeast would
soar to 120 degrees (F) by the year 2100—a totally ludicrous notion that
could only occur if the Gulf of Mexico (and its moderating influence)
evaporated!
Michael’s final chapter, “The Predictable Distortion of Global
Warming,” alerts us to the insidious role played by popular theoretical
paradigms and the lure of federal funding in shaping contemporary science.
Today’s climatological paradigm reigns in powerful centers and
encourages alarmist studies. It’s
the paradigm underlying various laws, for legislators quickly trumpet what’s
taken to be conventional wisdom and public concern.
It’s also responsible for the fact that scientific journals rarely
consider the possibility that “global warming is exaggerated” (p. 228).
Add dollars to the equation—a grand total of $20 billion granted
scientists since 1990 to “research” global warming—and you begin to
understand why it’s promoted! The
most prestigious journals—Science,
Scientific American, Nature—simply will not tell the “obvious truth”
that only minimal global warming is at all possible during the century to
come! Sad to say, money talks in
the allegedly “objective” scientific community as surely as it does in
politics!
What Michaels hopes, writing this book, is that a small but courage
coterie of scientists and journalists will begin to challenge the dominant
paradigm. And certainly this book
takes a step in that direction.
*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
For a fictional version of Meltdown,
pick up a copy of Michael Crichton’s recent thriller, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins,
2004). I’ve never before read a
novel that has scores of graphs, footnotes to scholarly articles, and a 10
page annotated bibliography at the end! But they’re here, and it’s obvious he wanted to write
more than a popular novel, which he’s certainly done many times! The novel pits a handful of dedicated,
scientifically-informed heroes struggling to save the earth from the
machinations of fanatical environmentalists, nominally led by a Hollywood
actor, who are manipulated by professional environmentalists who are more
concerned with money and power than environmental integrity.
The environmentalists plan to trigger various global disasters and
attribute them to global warming, coldly indifferent to their catastrophic
results. There’s riveting
action and snitches of romance. The
plot’s suspenseful, and the pages turn quickly as one sinks into the story.
And along with the dialogue and adventure, there’s the message!
So read the story and enjoy it. Then
think about the book’s message, which was summed up by Crichton in a speech
he gave in San Francisco in 2004 wherein he decried “the disinformation age”
that results from “a secular society in which many people—the best people,
the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion” and embrace
environmentalism. They cite their
scriptures (environmental classics by Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and Paul
Ehrlich), recite their creeds (mantras regarding the plight of the planet and
the evils of capitalism), join their cults (Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Earth
First!), and denounce any challenges to their faith, especially including
questions concerning global warming.
But they are—like the Hollywood character in State of Fear—misinformed at best and Machiavellian at worst.
In the “author’s message” at the end of the book, Crichton says
he spent three years reading environmental texts before writing the novel.
What astonished him was how little we actually know about the state of
the world. Some things are
obvious: carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and the surface temperatures have both increased.
But, “Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be
man-made” (p. 569). The
computer models generally cited in global warming scenarios vary enormously,
and the best estimates suggest it will take 100 years to increase one degree
centigrade. He believes things
will be much better for earth’s inhabitants in 2100, and he thinks “that
most environmental ‘principles’ (such as sustainable development . . . )
have the effect of preserving the economic advantages of the West and thus
constitute modern imperialism towards the developing world” (p. 571).
Environmental activists—Sierra Club and Environmental Defense League
types—generally promote the antiquated scientific views of their youth. Dramatic breakthroughs, such as nonlinear dynamics, chaos
theory, and catastrophe theory, have fundamentally changed science without
sinking into “the thinking of environmental activists” (p. 571). He finds the ideas of “wilderness advocates” routinely
spurious, declaring them no better than those propounded by “developers and
strip miners” (p. 572). What’s
desperately needed is “more people working in the field . . . and fewer
people behind computer screens” (p. 572).
And we need honest, independent scientists whose research isn’t
funded by special interests, especially environmental organizations and
bureaucracies such as the EPA!
Read in conjunction with Meltdown,
Crichton’s novel effectively quiets (or at least permits questioning) some
of the fears fanned by fanatical environmentalists.
*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In the summer of 2003, the Hayman Fire, the largest in Colorado
history, started about 10 miles west of my summer home in the mountains.
Subsequently it crept five miles closer.
We were evacuated from our place for two weeks, and suddenly “forest
fire” took on a whole different meaning!
The Hayman blaze was started by a Forest Fire employee (now in prison)
who apparently wanted to gain fame by first reporting and then extinguishing
it! The fire burned so
voraciously, many analysts believed, because of forest service policies which
make such fires inevitable. Thus
I was drawn to read Robert H. Nelson’s A
Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service (Boulder:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c, 2000).
Nelson worked in the Department of the Interior for 15 years and knows
the way Washington works! He is
now professor of environmental policy in the School of Public Affairs at the
University of Maryland and has earlier written Public
Lands and Private Rights: The
Failure of Scientific Management.
The Forest Service has evolved in accord with the various political
agendas that shaped it. During
the first half of the 20th century, it mainly worked with timber
companies to extract lumber from the nation’s forests.
This fit the philosophy of Gifford Pinchot and the Progressives who
constructed the “administrative state” (p. 2).
The service also worked to suppress fires, to save the trees for
harvesting. Lumber companies cut
roads and cleared sections of the forest, helping to limit the expanse of
fires that erupted. Cutting trees
for lumber saved trees from burning. More
recently, especially following the Wilderness Act of 1964, recreation has
assumed a major role in shaping forest policy, and “preserving wilderness
areas” has been promoted. There
are now some 100 million acres reserved as national wilderness, and various
kinds of preserved lands have expanded “from 51 million acres in 1964 to 271
million acres in 1993” (p. 9). To
keep increasingly large areas “untrammeled by man” has become the
objective of powerful interests, and there have, consequently, been “sharp
declines in timber harvesting, mining, and other traditional uses of the
national forests. The Clinton
administration has actively sought to instill this ethos as the new core value
defining the institutional culture of the Forest Service” (p. xiv).
Millions of acres, unless mechanically harvested, will vanish when “catastrophic
fires” ignite them.
In the midst of
these policy shifts, the Forest Service steadfastly fought fires and allowed
“the buildup of brush and dense thickets of smaller trees in many forests”
that became powder kegs awaiting a spark to explode (p. 6).
State and private forests have not suffered similarly, for they “have
in general been more intensively managed, involving higher timber harvest
levels per acre and greater application of labor and capital for thinning,
disease control, reforestation, and other purposes.
Yet, contrary to a common public impression, the more intensively
managed state and private forests ‘appear to be healthier than [the]
unmanaged forests,’ mostly in the national forest system” (p. 19).
The national forests, however, were increasingly “preserved.”
By 1996, the Sierra Club had moved to a radical position, pushing for a
ban on all timber harvesting in national forests, even if it removed excess
fuels in an effort to reduce forest fires!
Thus the radical reduction in timber harvest results not from a wood
shortage but from “changing environmental values and shifting government
policies” dictated by fervent environmentalists (p. 58).
These values, Nelson argues, are primarily religious. “Environmentalism now claims in effect a unique access to
the mind of God, reflecting the common substitution in the modern age of
scientific truth for the earlier role of Judeo-Christian religion” (p. 131).
President Clinton’s Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, said “’we
need not sacrifice the integrity of God’s creation on the altar of
commercial timber production” (p. 67). He follows the lead of secular prophets, a long list headed
by Gifford Pinchot who envisioned conservation as a means of realizing “’the
Kingdom of God on earth’” (p. 69). Today’s
faithful tend to see preservation as a means of regaining the Garden of Eden!
Wilderness areas are frequently referred to as “’cathedrals,’ ‘sacred
places,’ and other religious terms” (p. 73).
Thus the Wilderness Society motto is a Thoreau declaration:
“in Wildness is he preservation of the world.” Consequently, says “Thomas Bonnicksen, a respected
professor at Texas A&M University, perceives that ‘zealots within the
agencies, encouraged by some preservations groups and ideologues in
universities, have taken over our National Park and Wilderness areas and
converted them into their own quasi-religious temples.’
They have renounced the ‘original purpose of providing for “the
enjoyment of the people’’ and instead are now aiming to “satisfy the
spiritual needs of a small but influential subculture”’” (p. 129).
To deliver the nation’s forests from this influential subculture,
Nelson suggests, we should abolish the U.S. Forest Service and decentralize
its functions. To allow states
and smaller communities to decide what to do with forested lands would lead,
he thinks, to better management, restored lumber harvests, healthier trees,
less destructive fires. It would
also diminish the influence of powerful environmental groups, with the
Washington D.C. headquarters, that lobby politicians and finance “scientific
studies” to sustain their power.