Does global warming exist? If so, is it caused by man-made pollutants, or by some natural phenomenon? And if the earth’s temperature really is rising, is there anything that can be done to reverse it? Questions like these are debated by responsible scientists all over the world. But you would never know it from listening to Al Gore. Repeatedly over the last several weeks, the vice president has insisted that there is no longer a legitimate debate over the existence and effects of global warming. Indeed, those who question the administration’s position that global warming is a dire problem that can and must be addressed immediately are not simply wrong, as Gore sees it, they are morally equivalent to the tobacco executives who once “said with a straight face and seemingly no embarrassment, there is no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.”
For an administration attempting to pitch a costly program based on dubious science to a skeptical public, this may be the only effective political strategy. (Look for Gore’s speech at the next Democratic convention to contain a poignant anecdote about a close relative killed by global warming.) In less than two months, members of the administration will travel to Kyoto, Japan, to sign an international anti-global-warming treaty. In all likelihood, the treaty will require the United States to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, a “greenhouse gas” that is a byproduct of fossil-fuel use. The effect of imposing such a limit on the American economy is apt to be profound, since just about everything productive that Americans do, from turning on the lights to manufacturing software, produces carbon dioxide. The treaty will be a hard sell, particularly in the Senate, where it must be ratified by a two-thirds vote. The administration is worried. The result has been a public-relations campaign nastier and more desperate than anything seen in Washington since the 1993 health-care debate.
Earlier this month, Gore summoned more than 100 television weathermen to the White House for a lecture on the importance of global warming. “You’re in the business of saving lives,” he told the group solemnly. “Thank you for your profoundly important work. . . . Thank you for your leadership.” The weathermen were flattered, if perhaps a little confused. “I was somewhat skeptical that human beings were really doing anything to affect the weather,” Barry Finn, a forecaster at WYOU in Scranton, told the Washington Post. ” But hearing the president and vice president state emphatically that the scientific debate is over, well, that went a long way toward convincing me.”
Not everyone is so easily impressed. For those who required more than a photo-op on the West Lawn, the administration hosted a day-long “teach-in” on global climate change last week at Georgetown University. The event was simulcast to dozens of similar forums around the country and attended by Gore, both Clintons, Madeleine Albright, EPA administrator Carol Browner, and the heads of half a dozen federal agencies, White House officials listened intently as a group of administration-approved scientists outlined “what we know” about global warming. The picture the scientists painted made cigarette smoking look healthy by comparison.
John Holdren, a longtime nuclear-disarmament activist who heads the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, kicked things off with a prediction that unconstrained global warming will cause a rash of heatstroke deaths throughout the land. Diana Liverman, head of the Latin American studies program at the University of Arizona, followed and raised the stakes by warning that rising temperatures will turn America into a tropical petri dish, complete with “increases in diseases such as dengue fever, cholera, and malaria.” Sound unlikely? Not at all, said Gore, who pointed out that at least one case of malaria has already been reported, in Detroit of all places. Troubling, agreed Clinton, but that’s not all. In some parts of the country, the president said, the heat and mosquitoes have gotten so bad, people have had to flee their homes. (Clinton claimed to have met a mosquito refugee during his vacation this summer on Martha’s Vineyard.) True, nodded Liverman, and for those who cannot relocate, the future will be stifling. “There are many people in the southern states who can’t afford increased air conditioning,” she said sadly.
As if heatstroke, mosquitoes, and cholera weren’t enough to make every American want to give up greenhouse gases for good, the scientists agreed that things will soon get a lot worse. “Sea level has increased by four to six inches over the last 100 years,” warned Holdren. As he spoke, a screen next to him showed an artist’s depiction of what the state of Florida will look like once it is submerged by an Atlantic Ocean swollen with runoff from melting glaciers (wet, in case you were wondering). Thomas Karl, a scientist at the National Climatic Data Center, said that global warming has been responsible for an unusually high number of “catastrophic floods” over the past five years. Donald Wilhite of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln took the microphone soon after to blame global warming for widespread drought conditions, as well as for the forest fires they cause.
Wait a second. Droughts and floods? How could global warming be responsible for both? Perhaps sensing the growing bewilderment in the room, Clinton stepped up to explain this “apparent contradiction.” “When the temperatures warm,” said the president, sounding unsure of himself, “they dry the soil and create the conditions for the floods simultaneously.” Understand? Well, in any case, said Robert Watson of the World Bank, “the large majority of scientists do believe that this is a very, very important issue.”
In fact, about the only aspect of global-warming theory that most climate specialists seem to agree on is that land temperatures have risen during this century. Much has been made of this fact. “The five warmest years on record began in 1991,” writes Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat is On, a recent book about global warming that has been influential with environmentalists in the Clinton administration. (Clinton himself reportedly read the book during his last vacation.) “The warmest year ever recorded was 1995.”
Interesting as these factoids may be, they do not, from a scientific point of view at least, come remotely close to establishing a trend, much less prove the existence of global warming. As the Washington Post pointed out recently, temperatures around the world have fluctuated dramatically throughout history. (As recently as 1975, Newsweek reported that scientists were “almost unanimous” in their belief that the earth was cooling — enough to “reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”) In Greenland 10,000 years ago, according to ice cores extracted there, temperatures shot up more than 12 degrees in only 10 years. By contrast, even proponents of the most alarmist global warming theories concede that if carbon-dioxide levels were to double over the next century, the earth’s temperature probably would increase by no more than about 2.3 degrees.
Scientists aren’t sure why temperatures have risen and fallen over time — fossil fuels can’t be the culprit, since most fluctuations took place long before the internal-combustion engine was invented — and for all the effort now being focused on global warming, most scientists freely admit that important questions can’t be answered. For instance, why have temperatures in the lower atmosphere been falling at the same time those on Earth’s surface have risen slightly? The computer models used to forecast global warming have long predicted that surface and air temperatures would rise and fall together — so this is not an unimportant question. So far, no one has been able to answer it.
Equally inconvenient is the fact that the rise in surface temperatures has been only about half as steep as that predicted by early champions of the global-warming theory. “Many climate experts caution that it is not at all clear yet that human activities have begun to warm the planet — or how bad greenhouse warming will be when it arrives,” explained an article, ” Greenhouse Forecasting Still Cloudy,” published in the May issue of Science. “Indeed, most modelers now agree that the climate models will not be able to link greenhouse warming unambiguously to human actions for a decade or more.”
If ever. According to the New York Times, some research suggests that changes in the intensity of the sun could “account for virtually all of the global warming measured to date.” It turns out there is a legitimate debate over global warming after all. As for the theory that global warming has caused the destructive weather patterns that those who attended the Georgetown teach-in heard so much about — it may be true. But at this point, there seems to be precisely no evidence to prove such a claim.
Shaky science or not, the administration appears committed to signing a treaty that will be very costly to the United States. And probably only to the United States The Kyoto agreement will almost certainly require the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse emissions below 1990 levels. It’s not clear how this would be done, although dramatic increases in energy taxes are an obvious solution. And what will other members of the U.N. do to reduce emissions? In most cases, not much. In Eastern Europe, smoke-belching Soviet-era power plants are being replaced anyway, making reduction goals much less costly to reach. Most Third World nations militantly oppose abiding by any restrictions. The U.S. emits the greatest volume of greenhouse gases, the argument goes; therefore, the Americans should foot most of the bill for reducing them.
It’s an argument that hasn’t gone over well with American businesses or the groups that represent their interests. “Of course we emit the most,” says Jonathan Adler of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “We produce the most. And emissions levels are directly tied to productivity.” An energy- industry lobbyist puts it simply: “We see this as a trade war.”
This fall, the Global Climate Information Project, a lobby group funded by the energy industry, began running a television spot it called “U.N. Map.” ” The U.S. is preparing to sign a United Nations treaty on global climate,” the ad began. “But their global agreement isn’t global. One hundred thirty-two of 166 countries are exempt. So while the United States is required to make drastic reductions in energy use, countries like India, China, and Mexico are not.” Polling showed the spot was having a devastating effect. “The idea that once again the world is beating up on America was a theme that resonated,” says one of the people responsible for the ad. Within weeks, CNN took the spot off the air, refusing to run it under orders from owner Ted Turner, an enthusiastic supporter of the Kyoto treaty. (The network recently reversed its decision following days of terrible press.)
For all the gamesmanship over the treaty, it’s not yet clear which proposal the administration will bring to Kyoto. Gore, along with environmentalists like Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and the EPA’s Browner, has pushed hard for dramatic limits on U.S. emissions. (During a radio interview in July, Babbitt accused energy companies that are lobbying for lower restrictions of being “un-American in the most basic sense.”) On the other side are Treasury secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy secretary, Lawrence Summers, both of whom have argued privately that tough emissions restrictions would damage the economy. According to one Gore aide, Rubin and Summers have made a compelling case. The proposal “is going to be something very moderate and market- oriented from the business perspective,” he says. “I know that’s a priority.”
Maybe. The administration — and Gore in particular — has been under pressure for months from environmentalists angry over perceived capitulations to business interests. A draft of the Kyoto proposal will probably be released in the last week of October, and it may be as intemperate as most of the rhetoric surrounding global warming. There is a theory afloat around Washington that the Clinton administration will go to Kyoto with a treaty it knows the Senate will never approve. A signed but unratified treaty would soothe both business and environmental interests. For Democrats, a thumbs down from the Republican Senate might also make an effective campaign issue in 1998 and 2000. Would the White House do something so cynical? “We’re not that sophisticated,” protests a Gore adviser. For once, the Clinton administration may be being too modest.
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
