FEVERS, FIRES, FLOODS, OH MY!

Like the pedestrians who walked down the middle of streets after the recent blizzard, Newsweek was not striking out on its own but rather following a route already well plowed. At a meeting of environmental-movement leaders last summer in New York, sponsored by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, a slogan was coined to encapsulate the global-warming-causes-everything approach: Fevers, Fires, Floods, and Famine.

Fevers — as temperatures rise, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue could invade the temperate latitudes. Fires — global warming could cause longer droughts, leading to massive fires like the ones that burned down half of Yellowstone Park in 1988. Floods — warmer temperatures could cause bigger rainstorms and also lead to higher sea levels, as the result of melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland. Famines — global hunger would worsen because the world’s breadbaskets would be blasted by years4ong droughts.

This alliterative slogan — to which we can now apparently add frostbite, freezer burn, and frozen pipes — was designed to launch a campaign to put global warming back on the public agenda. The results have been a flack’s dream — widespread, uncritical media acceptance of simplistic doom-saying.

All fall, the major media amplified the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s finding that humanity is having a “discernible” impact on climate. The crusade reached a peak of sorts in the Jan. 4 New York Times front-page headline “’95 Hottest Year on Record As the Global Trend Resumes.” The networks soon followed the Times’s lead, as did Newsweek. And the mainstream media aren’t alone in pushing global warming. Even the venerable $ IJournal of the American Medical Association got in on the act last week, coordinating the simultaneous publication by some 30 medical journals of special issues devoted to hyping the idea that climate change would make diseases more prevalent (Fevers, remember).

The hottest-year-ever stories were based on data from the British Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Only one problem — 1995 was $ Inot the hottest year on record. NASA satellite data say that 1995 was an average year temperature-wise, only the eighth warmest year on record.

Another problem: The East Anglia temperature record was for only 11 months — temperatures for December (generally a pretty cold month in the Northern Hemisp here) were “statistical estimates.” Why didn’t the scientists at East Anglia wait for the actual December numbers to come in, instead of rushing off to declare 1995 the hottest year on record? One climate scientist at NASA speculated that the East Anglia group was afraid that if they waited, December temperatures might plummet and they’d lose their opportunity for a scary headline. They were prescient. Global temperatures in December did a nosedive, the biggest one-month drop in the last 17 years, according to NASA.

What’s really been going on with the climate? The computers relied on by global warming proponents say that the planet’s average temperature should have increased slightly since 1979. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, the earth has been cooling by a tiny bit over that period, according to NASA satellites. NASA climate researchers Roy Spencer and John Christy, using these satellite data, calculate that the earth may warm almost imperceptibly (about a tenth of a degree per decade) in the years ahead.

And the real news in the UN panel’s report was barely noticed. Their estimates of global warming in the next century have been cut in half. Global warming skeptics have long argued that as computer climate models were improved, the amount of warming they predict would go down. The skeptics were right. The lower bound of the UN panel’s predictions — a warming of less than one degree Celsius by the year 2100- conforms with Spencer and Christy’s warming calculations based on satellite data.

This is far from the apocalyptic predictions of rapid warming bandied about at the 1992 Earth Summit, which persuaded world leaders to sign the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Under the convention, countries including the United States agreed to set as a goal cutting their carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. A proposal made at the March 1995 Berlin meeting of the climate convention signatories would have the industrial countries cut their carbon emissions to 80 percent of the 1990 level by the year 2005. Economist David Montgomery, who worked on the UN report, estimates that the cost of meeting the 2005 goal could be as much as $ 300 billion a year for the United States alone. An important new study published in the current issue of $ INature concludes that we needn’t take drastic action now to curb fossil fuel use, because technological innovations and judicious capital investment will likely reduce carbon dioxide emissions before they become a problem. This means no need for the huge taxes on coal, gas, and oil that some in the Clinton administration pressed for in 1993 and that are still being promoted by the World- watch Institute and other global warming activists.

In short, we now know that if the Times had not been so eager to jump on the global warming bandwagon, it could have run headlines like “’95 Eighth Warmest Year on Record” and “Global Warming Predictions Cut in Half.” And $ INewsweek could have profiled from a bit of Freudian skepticism: Sometimes a blizzard is only a blizzard.

Ronald Bailey is the producer of the national weekly public television series Think Tank.