The Science of Climate Change: Senate Floor Statement by U.S. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Oklahoma)
(Note: This is a great and true speech in its every fiber, well-researched and succinctly delivered by a man who knows how to use and use honorably the English Language. Long, but a must-read!) Chairman,
Committee on Environment and Public Works July
28, 2003 As
chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, I have a
profound responsibility, because the decisions of the committee have
wide-reaching impacts, influencing the health and security of every
American. That's
why I established three guiding principles for all committee work: it
should rely on the most objective science; it should consider costs on
businesses and consumers; and the bureaucracy should serve, not rule,
the people. Without
these principles, we cannot make effective public policy decisions. They
are necessary to both improve the environment and encourage economic
growth and prosperity. One
very critical element to our success as policymakers is how we use
science. That is especially true for environmental policy, which relies
very heavily on science. I have insisted that federal agencies use the
best, non-political science to drive decision-making. Strangely, I have
been harshly criticized for taking this stance. To the environmental
extremists, my insistence on sound science is outrageous. For
them, a "pro-environment" philosophy can only mean top-down,
command-and-control rules dictated by bureaucrats. Science is irrelevant
-- instead, for extremists, politics and power are the motivating forces
for making public policy. But
if the relationship between public policy and science is distorted for
political ends, the result is flawed policy that hurts the environment,
the economy, and the people we serve. Sadly
that's true of the current debate over many environmental issues. Too
often emotion, stoked by irresponsible rhetoric, rather than facts based
on objective science, shapes the contours of environmental policy. A
rather telling example of this arose during President Bush's first days
in office, when emotionalism overwhelmed science in the debate over
arsenic standards in drinking water. Environmental groups, including the
Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, vilified
President Bush for "poisoning" children because he questioned
the scientific basis of a regulation implemented in the final days of
the Clinton Administration The
debate featured television ads, financed by environmental groups, of
children asking for another glass of arsenic-laden water. The science
underlying the standard, which was flimsy at best, was hardly mentioned
or held up to any scrutiny. The
Senate went through a similar scare back in 1992. That year some members
seized on data from NASA suggesting that an ozone hole was developing in
the Northern Hemisphere. The Senate then rushed into panic, ramming
through, by a 96 to 0 vote, an accelerated ban on certain
chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants. Only two weeks later NASA produced new
data showing that their initial finding was a gross exaggeration, and
the ozone hole never appeared. The
issue of catastrophic global warming, which I would like to speak about
today, fits perfectly into this mold. Much of the debate over global
warming is predicated on fear, rather than science. Global warming
alarmists see a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, war, terrorism,
economic dislocations, droughts, crop failures, mosquito-borne diseases,
and harsh weather-all caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Hans
Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector, sounded both ridiculous and alarmist
when he said in March, "I'm more worried about global warming than
I am of any major military conflict." Science
writer David Appell, who has written for such publications as the New
Scientist and Scientific American, parroted Blix when he said global
warming would "threaten fundamental food and water sources. It
would lead to displacement of billions of people and huge waves of
refugees, spawn terrorism and topple governments, spread disease across
the globe." Appell's
next point deserves special emphasis, because it demonstrates the sheer
lunacy of environmental extremists: "[Global
warming] would be chaos by any measure, far greater even than the sum
total of chaos of the global wars of the 20th century, and so in this
sense Blix is right to be concerned. Sounds like a weapon of mass
destruction to me." No
wonder the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called global
warming alarmism the "mother of all environmental scares." Appell
and Blix sound very much like those who warned us in the 1970s that the
planet was headed for a catastrophic global cooling. On April 28, 1975,
Newsweek printed an article titled, "The Cooling World," in
which the magazine warned: "There are ominous signs that the
earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that
these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production -- with
serious political implications for just about every nation on
earth." In
a similar refrain, Time magazine for June 24, 1974 declared:
"However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to
time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the
globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler
for the past three decades." In
1974 the National Science Board, the governing body of the National
Science Foundation, stated: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world
temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the
last decade." Two years earlier, the board had observed:
"Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present
time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end...leading into the
next glacial age." How
quickly things change. Fear of the coming ice age is old hat, but fear
that man-made greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise to
harmful levels is in vogue. Alarmists brazenly assert that this
phenomenon is fact, and that the science of climate change is
"settled." To
cite just one example, Ian Bowles, former senior science director on
environmental issues for the Clinton National Security Council, said in
the April 22, 2001 edition of the Boston Globe: "the basic link
between carbon emissions, accumulation of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, and the phenomenon of climate change is not seriously
disputed in the scientific community." But
in fact the issue is far from settled, and indeed is seriously disputed.
I would like to submit at the end of my remarks a July 8 editorial by
former Carter Administration Energy Secretary James Schlesinger on the
science of climate change. In that editorial, Dr. Schlesinger takes
issue with alarmists who assert there is a scientific consensus
supporting their views. [Refer
to Chart 5] "There is an idea among the public that the science is
settled," Dr. Schlesinger wrote. "...[T]hat remains far from
the truth." Today,
even saying there is scientific disagreement over global warming is
itself controversial. But anyone who pays even cursory attention to the
issue understands that scientists vigorously disagree over whether human
activities are responsible for global warming, or whether those
activities will precipitate natural disasters. I
would submit, furthermore, that not only is there a debate, but the
debate is shifting away from those who subscribe to global warming
alarmism. After studying the issue over the last several years, I
believe that the balance of the evidence offers strong proof that
natural variability is the overwhelming factor influencing climate. It's
also important to question whether global warming is even a problem for
human existence. Thus far no one has seriously demonstrated any
scientific proof that increased global temperatures would lead to the
catastrophes predicted by alarmists. In fact, it appears that just the
opposite is true: that increases in global temperatures may have a
beneficial effect on how we live our lives. For
these reasons I would like to discuss an important body of scientific
research that refutes the anthropogenic theory of catastrophic global
warming. I believe this research offers compelling proof that human
activities have little impact on climate. This
research, well documented in the scientific literature, directly
challenges the environmental worldview of the media, so they typically
don't receive proper attention and discussion. Certain members of the
media would rather level personal attacks on scientists who question
"accepted" global warming theories than engage on the science.
This
is an unfortunate artifact of the debate-the relentless increase in
personal attacks on certain members of the scientific community who
question so-called conventional wisdom. I
believe it is extremely important for the future of this country that
the facts and the science get a fair hearing. Without proper knowledge
and understanding, alarmists will scare the country into enacting its
ultimate goal: making energy suppression, in the form of harmful
mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions,
the official policy of the United States. Such
a policy would induce serious economic harm, especially for low-income
and minority populations. Energy suppression, as official government and
non-partisan private analyses have amply confirmed, means higher prices
for food, medical care, and electricity, as well as massive job losses
and drastic reductions in gross domestic product, all the while
providing virtually no environmental benefit. In other words: a raw deal
for the American people and a crisis for the poor. THE
KYOTO TREATY
The
issue of global warming has garnered significant international attention
through the Kyoto Treaty, which requires signatories to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions by considerable amounts below 1990 levels. The
Clinton Administration, led by former Vice President Al Gore, signed
Kyoto on November 12, 1998, but never submitted it to the Senate for
ratification. The
treaty explicitly acknowledges as true that man-made emissions,
principally from the use of fossil fuels, are causing global
temperatures to rise, eventually to catastrophic levels. Kyoto
enthusiasts believe that if we dramatically cut back, or even eliminate,
fossil fuels, the climate system will respond by sending global
temperatures back to "normal" levels. In
1997, the Senate sent a powerful signal that Kyoto was unacceptable. By
a vote of 95 to 0, the Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which
stated that the Senate would not ratify Kyoto if it caused substantial
economic harm and if developing countries were not required to
participate on the same timetable. The
treaty would have required the U.S. to reduce its emissions 31% below
the level otherwise predicted for 2010. Put another way, the U.S. would
have had to cut 552 million metric tons of CO2 per year by 2008-2012. As
the Business Roundtable pointed out, that target is "the equivalent
of having to eliminate all current emissions from either the U.S.
transportation sector, or the utilities sector (residential and
commercial sources), or industry." The
most widely cited and most definitive economic analysis of Kyoto came
from Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, or WEFA. According to
WEFA economists, Kyoto would cost 2.4 million US jobs and reduce GDP by
3.2%, or about $300 billion annually, an amount greater than the total
expenditure on primary and secondary education. Because
of Kyoto, American consumers would face higher food, medical, and
housing costs-for food, an increase of 11%, medicine, an increase of
14%, and housing, an increase of 7%. At the same time an average
household of four would see its real income drop by $2,700 in 2010, and
each year thereafter. Under
Kyoto, energy and electricity prices would nearly double, and gasoline
prices would go up an additional 65 cents per gallon. Some
in the environmental community have dismissed the WEFA report as a
tainted product of "industry." I would point them to the 1998
analysis by the Clinton Energy Information Administration, the
statistical arm of the Department of Energy, which largely confirmed
WEFA's analysis. Keep
in mind, all of these disastrous results of Kyoto are predicted by
Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, a private consulting company
founded by professors from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton
Business School. In
July, the Congressional Budget Office provided further proof that
Kyoto-like carbon regulatory schemes are regressive and harmful to
economic growth and prosperity. As
the CBO found, "The price increases resulting from a carbon cap
would be regressive -- that is, they would place a relatively greater
burden on lower-income households than on higher-income ones." As
to the broader, macroeconomic effects of carbon cap and trade schemes,
CBO said, "A cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions could
impose significant costs on the economy in the form of welfare losses.
Welfare losses are real costs to the economy in that they would not be
recovered elsewhere in the form of higher income. Those losses would be
borne by people in their roles as shareholders, consumers, and
workers." Now
some might respond that government can simply redistribute income in the
form of welfare programs to mitigate the impacts on the poor. But the
CBO found otherwise: "The government could use the allowance value
to partly redistribute the costs of a carbon cap-and-trade program, but
it could not cover those costs entirely." And further:
"Available research indicates that providing compensation could
actually raise the cost to the economy of a carbon cap." Despite
these facts, groups such as Greenpeace blindly assert that Kyoto
"will not impose significant costs" and "will not be an
economic burden." Among
the many questions this provokes, one might ask: Won't be a burden on
whom, exactly? Greenpeace doesn't elaborate, but according to a recent
study by the Center for Energy and Economic Development, sponsored by
the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the United States Hispanic
Chamber of Commerce, if the U.S. ratifies Kyoto, or passes domestic
climate policies effectively implementing the treaty, the result would
"disproportionately harm America's minority communities, and place
the economic advancement of millions of U.S. Blacks and Hispanics at
risk." Among
the study's key findings: Kyoto will cost 511,000 jobs held by Hispanic
workers and 864,000 jobs held by Black workers; poverty rates for
minority families will increase dramatically; and, because Kyoto will
bring about higher energy prices, many minority businesses will be lost.
It
is interesting to note that the environmental left purports to advocate
policies based on their alleged good for humanity, especially for the
most vulnerable. Kyoto is no exception. Yet Kyoto, and Kyoto-like
policies developed here in this body, would cause the greatest harm to
the poorest among us. Environmental
alarmists, as an article of faith, peddle the notion that climate change
is, as Greenpeace put it, "the biggest environmental threat facing
... developing countries." For one, such thinking runs contrary to
the public declaration of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable
Development-a program sponsored by the United Nations -- which found
that poverty is the number one threat facing developing countries. Dr.
John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the
University of Alabama, Huntsville, passionately reiterated that point in
a May 22 letter to House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo
(R-California). As an addendum to his testimony during the committee's
hearing on the Kyoto Protocol, Christy, an Alabama State climatologist,
wrote eloquently about his service as a missionary in Africa. For
Christy, "poverty is the worst polluter," and as he noted,
bringing modern, inexpensive electricity to developing countries would
raise living standards and lead to a cleaner environment. Kyoto, he
said, would be counterproductive, and as I interpret him, immoral, for
Kyoto would divert precious resources away from helping those truly in
need to a problem that doesn't exist, and a solution that would have no
environmental benefit. The following is an excerpt from the letter, and
worth quoting at length: "The
typical home was a mud-walled, thatched-roof structure. Smoke from the
cooking fire fueled by undried wood was especially irritating to breathe
as one entered the home. The fine particles and toxic emissions from
these in-house, open fires assured serious lung and eye diseases for a
lifetime. And, keeping such fires fueled and burning required a major
amount of time, preventing the people from engaging in other less
environmentally damaging pursuits. "I've
always believed that establishing a series of coal-fired power plants in
countries such as Kenya (with simple electrification to the villages)
would be the best advancement for the African people and the African
environment. An electric light bulb, a microwave oven and a small heater
in each home would make a dramatic difference in the overall standard of
living. No longer would a major portion of time be spent on gathering
inefficient and toxic fuel. The serious health problems of hauling heavy
loads and lung poisoning would be much reduced. Women would be freed to
engage in activities of greater productivity and advancement. Light on
demand would allow for more learning to take place and other activities
to be completed. Electricity would also foster a more efficient transfer
of important information from radio or television. And finally, the
preservation of some of the most beautiful and diverse habitats on the
planet would be possible if wood were eliminated as a source of energy. "Providing
energy from sources other than biomass (wood and dung), such as
coal-produced electricity, would bring longer and better lives to the
people of the developing world and greater opportunity for the
preservation of their natural ecosystems. Let me assure you,
notwithstanding the views of extreme environmentalists, that Africans do
indeed want a higher standard of living. They want to live longer and
healthier with less burden bearing and with more opportunities to
advance. New sources of affordable, accessible energy would set them
down the road of achieving such aspirations. "These
experiences made it clear to me that affordable, accessible energy was
desperately needed in African countries. [INSERT AKPALI EXPERIENCE] "As
in Africa, ideas for limiting energy use, as embodied in the Kyoto
protocol, create the greatest hardships for the poorest among us.
As I mentioned in the Hearing, enacting any of these noble-sounding
initiatives to deal with climate change through increased energy costs,
might make a wealthy urbanite or politician feel good about themselves,
but they would not improve the environment and would most certainly
degrade the lives of those who need help now." Some
in this body have introduced Kyoto-like legislation that would hurt
low-income and minority populations. Last year, Tom Mullen, president of
Cleveland Catholic Charities, testified against S. 556, the Clean Power
Act, which would impose onerous, unrealistic restrictions, including a
Kyoto-like cap on carbon dioxide emissions, on electric utilities. He
noted that this regime would mean higher electricity prices for the
poorest citizens of Cleveland. For
those on fixed incomes, as Mr. Mullen pointed out, higher electricity
prices present a choice between eating and staying warm in winter or
cool in summer. As Mr. Mullen said, "The overall impact on the
economy in Northeast Ohio would be overwhelming, and the needs that we
address at Catholic Charities in Ohio with the elderly and poor would be
well beyond our capacity and that of our current partners in government
and the private sector." In
addition to its negative economic impacts, Kyoto still does not satisfy
Byrd-Hagel's concerns about developing countries. Though such countries
as China, India, Brazil, South Korea, and Mexico are signatories to
Kyoto, they are not required to reduce their emissions, even though they
emit nearly 30 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. And within a
generation they will be the world's largest emitters of carbon, methane
and other such greenhouse gases. Despite
the fact that neither of Byrd-Hagel's conditions has been met,
environmentalists have bitterly criticized President Bush for abandoning
Kyoto. But one wonders: why don't they assail the 95 senators, both
Democrats and Republicans, who, according to Byrd-Hagel, oppose Kyoto as
it stands today, and who would, presumably, oppose ratification if the
treaty came up on the Senate floor? And
why don't they assail former President Clinton, or former Vice President
Gore, who signed the treaty but never submitted it to the Senate for
ratification? To
repeat, it was the unanimous vote of this body [the Senate] that
Kyoto was and still is unacceptable. Several of my colleagues who
believe that humans are responsible for global warming, including Sen.
Jeffords, Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Boxer, Sen. Moseley-Braun, Sen. Lieberman,
and Sen. Kerry, all voted for Byrd-Hagel. Again,
all of these senators, the most outspoken proponents of Kyoto, voted in
favor of Byrd-Hagel. Remember,
Byrd-Hagel said the Senate would not ratify Kyoto if it caused
substantial economic harm and if developing countries were not required
to participate on the same timetable. So, if the Byrd-Hagel conditions
are ever satisfied, should the United States ratify Kyoto? Answering
that question depends on several factors, including whether Kyoto would
provide significant, needed environmental benefits. First,
we should ask what Kyoto is designed to accomplish. According to the
U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Kyoto will achieve
"stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere
at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with
the climate system." What
does this statement mean? The IPCC offers no elaboration and doesn't
provide any scientific explanation about what that level would be. Why?
The answer is simple: thus far no one has found a definitive scientific
answer. Dr.
S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Virginia,
who served as the first Director of the US Weather Satellite Service
(which is now in the Department of Commerce) and more recently as a
member and vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans
and Atmosphere (NACOA), said that "No one knows what constitutes a
'dangerous' concentration. There exists, as yet, no scientific basis for
defining such a concentration, or even of knowing whether it is more or
less than current levels of carbon dioxide." One
might pose the question: if we had the ability to set the global
thermostat, what temperature would we pick? Would we set it colder or
warmer than it is today? What would the optimal temperature be? The
actual dawn of civilization occurred in a period climatologists call the
"climatic optimum" when the mean surface temperature was 1-2º
Celsius warmer than today. Why not go 1 to 2 degrees Celsius higher? Or
1 to 2 degrees lower for that matter? The
Kyoto emissions reduction targets are arbitrary, lacking in any real
scientific basis. Kyoto therefore will have virtually no impact on
global temperatures. This is not just my opinion, but the conclusion
reached by the country's top climate scientists. Dr.
Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, found that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by all
signatories -- now I will note here that this next point assumes that
the alarmists' science is correct, which of course it is not -- if Kyoto
were fully implemented it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07
degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100. What does
this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based thermometers
cannot reliably measure it. Dr.
Richard Lindzen, an MIT scientist and member of the National Academy of
Sciences, who has specialized in climate issues for over 30 years, told
the Committee on Environment and Public Works on May 2, 2001 that there
is a "definitive disconnect between Kyoto and science. Should a
catastrophic scenario prove correct, Kyoto would not prevent it." Similarly,
Dr. James Hansen of NASA, considered the father of global warming
theory, said that Kyoto Protocol "will have little effect" on
global temperature in the 21st century. In a rather stunning follow-up,
Hansen said it would take 30 Kyotos -- let me repeat that -- 30 Kyotos
to reduce warming to an acceptable level. If one Kyoto devastates the
American economy, what would 30 do? So
this leads to another question: if the provisions in the Protocol do
little or nothing measurable to influence global temperatures, what does
this tell us about the scientific basis of Kyoto? Answering
that question requires a thorough examination of the scientific work
conducted by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
provides the scientific basis for Kyoto, international climate
negotiations, and the substance of claims made by alarmists. IPCC
Assessment Reports
In
1992, several nations from around the globe gathered in Rio de Janeiro
for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The
meeting was premised on the concern that global warming was becoming a
problem. The U.S., along with many others, signed the Framework
Convention, committing them to making voluntary reductions in greenhouse
gases. Over
time, it became clear that signatories were not achieving their
reduction targets as stipulated under Rio. This realization led to the
Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which was an amendment to the Framework
Convention, and which prescribed mandatory reductions only for developed
nations. [By the way, leaving out developing nations was an explicit
violation of Byrd-Hagel.] The
science of Kyoto is based on the "Assessment Reports"
conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
Over the last 13 years, the IPCC has published 3 assessments, with each
one over time growing more and more alarmist. The
first IPCC Assessment Report in 1990 found that the climate record of
the past century was "broadly consistent" with the changes in
Earth's surface temperature, as calculated by climate models that
incorporated the observed increase in greenhouse gases. This
conclusion, however, appears suspect considering the climate cooled
between 1940 and 1975, just as industrial activity grew rapidly after
World War II. It has been difficult to reconcile this cooling with the
observed increase in greenhouse gases. After
its initial publication, the IPCC's Second Assessment report in 1995
attracted widespread international attention, particularly among
scientists who believed that human activities were causing global
warming. In their view, the report provided the proverbial smoking gun. The
most widely cited phrase from the report -- actually, it came from the
report summary, as few in the media actually read the entire report --
was that "the balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human
influence on global climate." This of course is so vague that it's
essentially meaningless. What
do they mean by "suggests?" And, for that matter, what, in
this particular context, does "discernible" mean? How much
human influence is discernible? Is it a positive or negative influence?
Where is the precise scientific quantification? Unfortunately
the media created the impression that man-induced global warming was
fact. On August 10, 1995, the New York Times
published an article titled "Experts Confirm Human Role in Global
Warming." According to the Times account, the IPCC showed that
global warming "is unlikely to be entirely due to natural
causes." Of
course, when parsed, this account means fairly little. Not entirely due
to natural causes? Well, how much, then? 1 percent? 20 percent? 85
percent? The
IPCC report was replete with caveats and qualifications, providing
little evidence to support anthropogenic theories of global warming. The
preceding paragraph in which the "balance of evidence" quote
appears makes exactly that point. It
reads: "Our ability to quantify the human influence on global
climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still
emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are
uncertainties in key factors. These include the magnitude and patterns
of long-term variability and the time evolving pattern of forcing by,
and response to, changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and
aerosols, and land surface changes." Moreover,
the IPCC report was quite explicit about the uncertainties surrounding a
link between human actions and global warming. "Although these
global mean results suggest that there is some anthropogenic component
in the observed temperature record, they
cannot be considered compelling evidence of a clear
cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and changes in the
Earth's surface temperature." Remember,
the IPCC provides the scientific basis for the alarmists' conclusions
about global warming. But even the IPCC is saying that [its] own science
cannot be considered compelling evidence. Dr.
John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth
System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and a
key contributor to the 1995 IPCC report, participated with the lead
authors in the drafting sessions, and in the detailed review of the
scientific text. He wrote in the Montgomery
Advertiser on February 22, 1998 that much of what passes for
common knowledge in the press regarding climate change is
"inaccurate, incomplete or viewed out of context." Many
of the misconceptions about climate change, Christy contends, originated
from the IPCC's six-page executive summary. It was the most widely read
and quoted of the three documents published by the IPCC's Working Group,
but, Christy said -- and this point is crucial -- it had the "least
input from scientists and the greatest input from non-scientists." IPCC
Releases Third Assessment on Climate Change
Five
years later, the IPCC was back again, this time with the Third
Assessment Report on Climate Change. In October of 2000, the IPCC
"Summary for Policymakers" was leaked to the media, which once
again accepted the IPCC's conclusions as fact. Based
on the summary, the Washington Post wrote on October 30, "The
consensus on global warming keeps strengthening." In a similar
vein, the New York Times confidently declared on October 28, "The
international panel of climate scientists considered the most
authoritative voice on global warming has now concluded that mankind's
contribution to the problem is greater than originally believed." Note
again, look at how these accounts are couched: they are worded to
maximize the fear factor. But upon closer inspection, it's clear that
such statements have no compelling intellectual content. "Greater
than originally believed"? What is the baseline from which the
Times makes such a judgment? Is it .01 percent, or 25 percent? And how
much is greater? Double? Triple? An order of magnitude greater? Such
reporting prompted testimony by Dr. Richard Lindzen before the Committee
on Environment and Public Works, the committee I now chair, in May of
2001. Lindzen said, "Nearly all reading and coverage of the IPCC is
restricted to the highly publicized Summaries for Policymakers, which
are written by representatives from governments, NGO's and business; the
full reports, written by participating scientists, are largely
ignored." As
it turned out, the Policymaker's Summary was politicized and radically
differed from an earlier draft. For example the draft concluded the
following concerning the driving causes of climate change: "From
the body of evidence since IPCC (1996), we conclude that there has been
a discernible human influence on global climate. Studies are beginning
to separate the contributions to observed climate change attributable to
individual external influences, both anthropogenic and natural. This
work suggests that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are a substantial
contributor to the observed warming, especially over the past 30 years. However,
the accuracy of these estimates continues to be limited by uncertainties
in estimates of internal variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing,
and the climate response to external forcing." The
final version looks quite different, and concluded instead: "In the
light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining
uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is
likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas
concentrations." This
kind of distortion was not unintentional, as Dr. Lindzen explained
before the EPW Committee. He said, "I personally witnessed
coauthors forced to assert their 'green' credentials in defense of their
statements." In
short, some parts of the IPCC process resembled a Soviet-style trial, in
which the facts are predetermined, and ideological purity trumps
technical and scientific rigor. The
predictions in the summary went far beyond those in the IPCC's 1995
report. In the Second Assessment, the IPCC predicted that the earth
could warm by 1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The "best
estimate" was a 2-degree-Celsius warming by 2100. Both are highly
questionable at best. In
the Third Assessment, the IPCC dramatically increased that estimate to a
range of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius, even though no new evidence had
come to light to justify such a dramatic change. In
fact, the IPCC's median projected warming actually declined from 1990 to
1995. The IPCC 1990 initial estimate was 3.2°C, then the IPCC revised
1992 estimate was 2.6°C, followed by the IPCC revised 1995 estimate of
2.0°C. What
changed? As it turned out, the new prediction was based on faulty,
politically charged assumptions about trends in population growth,
economic growth, and fossil fuel use. The
extreme-case scenario of a 5.8-degree warming, for instance, rests on an
assumption that the whole world will raise its level of economic
activity and per capita energy use to that of the United States, and
that energy use will be carbon intensive. This scenario is simply
ludicrous. This essentially contradicts the experience of the
industrialized world over the last 30 years. Yet the 5.8-degree figure
featured prominently in news stories because it produced the biggest
fear effect. Moreover,
when regional climate models, of the kind relied upon by the IPCC,
attempt to incorporate such factors as population growth "the
details of future climate recede toward unintelligibility,"
according to Jerry Mahlman, Director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory. Even
Dr. Stephen Schneider, an outspoken believer in catastrophic global
warming, criticized the IPCC's assumptions in the journal Nature
on May 3, 2001. In his article, Schneider asks, "How likely is it
that the world will get 6 degrees C hotter by 2100?" That, he said,
"depends on the likelihood of the assumptions underlying the
projections." The
assumptions, he wrote, are "'storylines' about future worlds from
which population, affluence and technology drivers could be
inferred." These storylines, he wrote, "gave rise to radically
different families of emission profiles up to 2100 -- from below current
CO2 emissions to five times current emissions." Schneider
says that he "strongly argued at the time that policy analysts
needed probability estimates to assess the seriousness of the implied
impacts." In other words, how likely is it that temperatures would
go up by 5.8 degrees Celsius, or 1.4 degrees Celsius, which represent
the IPCC's respective upper and lower bounds? But
as Schneider wrote, the group drafting the IPCC report decided to
express "no preference" for each temperature scenario. In
effect, this created the assumption that the higher bound of 5.8 degrees
Celsius appeared to be just as likely as the lower of 1.4 degrees
Celsius. "But this inference would be incorrect," said
Schneider, "because uncertainties compound through a series of
modeling steps." Keep
in mind here that Schneider is on the side of the alarmists. Schneider's
own calculations, which cast serious doubt on the IPCC's extreme
prediction, broadly agree with an MIT study published in April of 2001.
It found that there is a "far less" than one percent chance
that temperatures would rise to 5.8 degrees C or higher, while there is
a 17 percent chance the temperature rise would be lower than 1.4
degrees. That
point bears repeating: even true believers think the lower number is 17
times more likely to be right than the higher number. Moreover, even if
the earth's temperature increases by 1.4 degrees Celsius, does it really
matter? The IPCC doesn't offer any credible science to explain what
would happen. Gerald
North of Texas A&M University in College Station, agrees that the
IPCC's predictions are baseless, in part because climate models are
highly imperfect instruments. As he said after the IPCC report came out:
"It's extremely hard to tell whether the models have improved"
since the last IPCC report. "The uncertainties are large."
Similarly, Peter Stone, an MIT climate modeler, said in reference to the
IPCC, "The major [climate prediction] uncertainties have not been
reduced at all." Dr.
David Wojick, an expert in climate science, recently wrote in Canada's
National Post, "The computer models cannot ... decide among the
variable drivers, like solar versus lunar change, or chaos versus ocean
circulation versus greenhouse gas increases. Unless and until they can
explain these things, the models cannot be taken seriously as a basis
for public policy." In
short, these general circulation models, or GCMs as they're known,
create simulations that must track over 5 million parameters. These
simulations require accurate information on two natural greenhouse gas
factors -- water vapor and clouds -- whose effects scientists still do
not understand. Even
the IPCC conceded as much: "The single largest uncertainty in
determining the climate sensitivity to either natural or anthropogenic
changes are clouds and their effects on radiation and their role in the
hydrological cycle ... at the present time, weaknesses in the
parameterization of cloud formation and dissipation are probably the
main impediment to improvements in the simulation of cloud effects on
climate." Because
of these and other uncertainties, climate modelers from four separate
climate modeling centers wrote in the October 2000 edition of Nature
that, "Forecasts of climate change are inevitably
uncertain." They go on to explain that, "A basic problem with
all such predictions to date has been the difficulty of providing any
systematic estimate of uncertainty," a problem that stems from the
fact that "these [climate] models do not necessarily span the full
range of known climate system behavior." Again,
to reiterate in plain English, this means the models do not account for
key variables that influence the climate system. Despite
this, the alarmists continue to use these models and all the other
flimsy evidence I've cited to support their theories of man-made global
warming. The
20th Century: Satellite data, Weather balloons, CO2, and Glaciers
Now
I want to turn to temperature trends in the 20th Century. GCMs predict
that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will cause temperatures in
the troposphere, the layer from 5,000 to 30,000 feet, to rise faster
than surface temperatures -- a critical fact supporting the alarmist
hypothesis. But
in fact, there is no meaningful warming trend in the troposphere, and
weather satellites, widely considered the most accurate measure of
global temperatures, have confirmed this. To
illustrate this point, just think about a greenhouse. The glass panes
let sunlight in but prevent it from escaping. The greenhouse then warms
from the top down. As is clear from the science, this simply is not
happening in the atmosphere. Satellite
measurements are validated independently by measurements from NOAA
balloon radiosonde instruments, whose records extend back over 40 years.
If
you look at this chart of balloon data extremists will tell you that
warming is occurring, but if you look more closely you see that
temperature in 1955 was higher than temperature in 2000. A
recent detailed comparison of atmospheric temperature data gathered by
satellites with widely-used data gathered by weather balloons
corroborates both the accuracy of the satellite data and the rate of
global warming seen in that data. Using
NOAA satellite readings of temperatures in the lower atmosphere,
scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) produced a
dataset that shows global atmospheric warming at the rate of about 0.07
degrees C (about 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since November
1978. "That
works out to a global warming trend of about one and a quarter degrees
Fahrenheit over 100 years," said Dr. John Christy, who compiled the
comparison data. Christy concedes that such a trend "is probably
due in part to human influences," but adds that "it's
substantially less than the warming forecast by most climate models,
and" -- here is the key point -- "it isn't entirely out of the
range of climate change we might expect from natural causes." To
reiterate: the best data collected from satellites validated by balloons
to test the hypothesis of a human-induced global warming from the
release of C02 into the atmosphere shows no meaningful trend of
increasing temperatures, even as the climate models exaggerated the
warmth that ought to have occurred from a build-up in C02. Some
critics of satellite measurements contend that they don't square with
the ground-based temperature record. But some of this difference is due
to the so-called "urban heat island effect." This occurs when
concrete and asphalt in cities absorb -- rather than reflect -- the
sun's heat, causing surface temperatures and overall ambient
temperatures to rise. Scientists have shown that this strongly
influences the surface-based temperature record. In
a paper published in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society in 1989, Dr. Thomas R.
Karl, senior scientist at the National Climate Data Center, corrected
the U.S. surface temperatures for the urban heat-island effect and found
that there has been a downward temperature trend since 1940. This
suggests a strong warming bias in the surface-based temperature record. Even
the IPCC finds that the urban heat island effect is significant.
According to the IPCC's calculations, the effect could account for up to
0.12 degrees Celsius of the 20th century temperature rise, one-fifth of
the total observed. When
we look at the 20th century as a whole, we see some distinct phases that
question anthropogenic theories of global warming. First, a strong
warming trend of about 0.5 C began in the late 19th century and peaked
around 1940. Next, the temperature decreased from 1940 until the late
1970s. Why
is that decrease significant? Because about 80% of the carbon dioxide
from human activities was added to the air after 1940, meaning the early
20th Century warming trend had to be largely natural. Scientists
from the Scripps Institution for Oceanography confirmed this phenomenon
in the March 12, 1999 issue of the journal Science. They addressed the
proverbial "chicken-and-egg" question of climate science,
namely: when the Earth shifts from glacial to warm periods, which comes
first: an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, or an increase
in global temperature? The
team concluded that the temperature rise comes first, followed by a
carbon dioxide boost 400 to 1,000 years later. This contradicts
everything alarmists have been saying about man-made global warming in
the 20th century. Now
we can even go back 400,000 years and see this phenomenon occurring, as
this chart clearly shows. Yet
the doomsayers, undeterred by these facts, just won't quit. In February
and March of 2002, the New York Times and the Washington Post,
among others, reported on the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in the
Antarctic Peninsula, causing quite a stir in the media, and providing
alarmists with more propaganda to scare the public. Although
there was no link to global warming, the Times
couldn't help but make that suggestion in its March 20 edition.
"While it is too soon to say whether the changes there are related
to a buildup of the 'greenhouse' gas emissions that scientists believe
are warming the planet, many experts said it was getting harder to find
any other explanation." The
Times,
however, simply ignored a recent study in the journal Nature,
which found the Antarctic has been cooling since 1966. And another study
in Science recently found the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been
thickening rather than thinning. University
of Illinois researchers also reported "a net cooling on the
Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000." In some regions, like
the McMurdo Dry Valleys, temperatures cooled between 1986 and 1999 by as
much as two degrees centigrade per decade. In
perhaps the most devastating critique of glacier alarmism, the American
Geophysical Union found that the Arctic was warmer in 1935 than it is
now. "Two distinct warming periods from 1920 to 1945, and from 1975
to the present, are clearly evident ... compared with the global and
hemispheric temperature rise, the high-latitude temperature increase was
stronger in the late 1930s to early 1940s than in recent decades." Again,
that bears repeating: 80% of the carbon dioxide from human activities
was added to the air after 1940 -- yet the Arctic was warmer in 1935
than it is today. So,
not only is glacier alarmism flawed, but [also] there is no evidence, as
shown by measurements from satellites and weather balloons, of any
meaningful warming trends in the 20th Century. Now
Global Warming Health Risks/Benefits
Even
as we discuss whether temperatures will go up or down, we should ask
whether global warming would actually produce the catastrophic effects
its adherents so confidently predict. What
gets obscured in the global warming debate is the fact that carbon
dioxide is not a pollutant. It is necessary for life. Numerous studies
have shown that global warming can actually be beneficial to mankind. Most
plants, especially wheat and rice, grow considerably better when there
is more CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 works like a fertilizer and higher
temperatures usually further enhance the CO2 fertilizer effect. In
fact the average crop, according to Dr. John Reilly, of the MIT Joint
Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, is 30 percent higher
in a CO2 enhanced world. I want to repeat that: PRODUCTIVITY IS 30
PERCENT HIGHER IN A CO2-ENHANCED WORLD. This is not just a matter of
opinion, but a well-established phenomenon. With
regard to the impact of global warming on human health, it is assumed
that higher temperatures will induce more deaths and massive outbreaks
of deadly diseases. In particular, a frequent scare tactic by alarmists
is that warmer temperatures will spark malaria outbreaks. Dr. Paul
Reiter convincingly debunks this claim in a 2000 study for the Center
for Disease Control. As Reiter found, "Until the second half of the
20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate
regions,"-this next point is critical- with
major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle." Reiter
also published a second study in the March 2001 issue of Environmental
Health Perspectives showing that "despite spectacular
cooling [of the Little Ice Age], malaria persisted throughout
Europe." Another
myth is that warming increases morbidity rates. This isn't the case,
according to Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, an environmental economist from Yale
University. Mendelsohn argues that heat-stress deaths are caused by
temperature variability and not warming. Those deaths grow in number not
as climates warm but as the variability in climate increases. The
IPCC Plays Hockey
I
would now like to go back to the IPCC's Third Assessment. In addition to
trying to predict the future, the Third Assessment report looked back
into the past. The IPCC released a graph depicting global temperatures
trending slightly downward over the last ten centuries, and then rather
dramatically increasing beginning around 1900. The cause for such a
shift, of course, is attributed to industrialization and man-made
greenhouse gas emissions. The
now-infamous "hockey stick" graph was enthusiastically
embraced by the IPCC, which used it as a basis of the Third Assessment.
Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Virginia was its principal author.
The study, which Mann and others conducted, examines climate trends over
the past 1,000 years. As many scientists have pointed out since its
publication, it contains many flaws. First,
Mann's study focuses on temperature trends only in the Northern
Hemisphere. Mann extrapolated that data to reach the conclusion that
global temperatures remained relatively stable and then dramatically
increased at the beginning of the 20th century. That leads to Mann's
conclusion that the 20th century has been the warmest in the last 1000
years. As is obvious, however, such an extrapolation cannot provide a
reliable global perspective of long-term climate trends. Moreover,
Mann's conclusions were drawn mainly from 12 sets of climate proxy data,
of which nine were tree rings, while the remaining three came from ice
cores. Notably, some of the ice core data was drawn from the Southern
Hemisphere-one from Greenland and two from Peru. What's left is a
picture of the Northern Hemisphere based on 8 sets of tree ring
data-again, hardly a convincing global picture of the last 1,000 years. Mann's
hockey stick dismisses both the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300) and
the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1900), two climate events that are fairly
widely recognized in the scientific literature. Mann believes that
"the 20th Century is "nominally the warmest" of the past
millennium and that the decade of the 1990s was the warmest decade on
record. The
Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are replaced by a largely benign
and slightly cooling linear trend in climate until 1900. But as is clear
from a close analysis of Mann's methods, the hockey stick is formed by
crudely grafting the surface temperature record of the 20th century onto
a pre-1900 tree ring record. This
is a highly controversial and scientifically flawed approach. As is
widely recognized in the scientific community, two data series
representing radically different variables (temperature and tree rings)
cannot be grafted together credibly to create a single series. In simple
terms, as Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia explained,
this is like comparing apples to oranges. Even
Mann and his coauthors admit that if the tree ring data set were removed
from their climate reconstruction, the calibration and verification
procedures they used would undermine their conclusions. A
new study from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which I
will comment on shortly, strongly disputes Mann's methods and
hypotheses. As coauthor Dr. David Legates wrote, "Although [Mann's
work] is now widely used as proof of anthropogenic global warming, we've
become concerned that such an analysis is in direct contradiction to
most of the research and written histories available," Legates
said. "Our paper shows this contradiction and argues that the
results of Mann ... are out of step with the preponderance of the
evidence." That's
worth repeating: Mann's theory of global warming is out of step with
most scientific thinking on the subject. More
Scientists Reject Kyoto
Based
in part on the data supporting the IPCC's key reports, thousands of
scientists have rejected the scientific basis of Kyoto. Recently, 46
leading climate experts wrote an open letter to Canada's National Post
on June 3 claiming that the Kyoto Protocol "lacks credible
science." I would ask that the entire text of the letter be
reprinted in the record at the end of my remarks. The
scientists wrote that the Canadian Prime Minister essentially ignored an
earlier letter they drafted in 2001. In it, they wrote: "Many
climate science experts from Canada and around the world, while still
strongly supporting environmental protection, equally strongly disagree
with the scientific rationale for the Kyoto Accord." In
their June 3 letter, the group wrote to Paul Martin, a Canadian Member
of Parliament, urging him to consider the consequences of Kyoto
ratification: "Although
ratification has already taken place, we believe that the government of
Canada needs a far more comprehensive understanding of what climate
science really says if environmental policy is to be developed that will
truly benefit the environment while maintaining the economic prosperity
so essential to social progress." Many
other scientists share the same view. I mentioned several of the
country's leading climate scientists earlier in this speech. In
addition, over 4,000 scientists, 70 of whom are Nobel Prize winners,
signed the so-called Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling
evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions. I
want to repeat that: over 4,000 scientists, 70 of whom are Nobel Prize
winners, signed the so-called Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no
compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions. I
also point to a 1998 recent survey of state climatologists, which
reveals that a majority of respondents have serious doubts about whether
anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases present a serious threat to
climate stability. Then
there is Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy
of Sciences, and a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, who
compiled the Oregon Petition, which reads as follows: "We
urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement
that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other
similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm
the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and
damage the health and welfare of mankind. "There
is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon
dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the
foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere
and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial
scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce
many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments
of the Earth." Again,
that was Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former past president of the National
Academy of Sciences. The
petition has 17,800 independently verified signatures, and, for those
signers holding the degree of PhD, 95% have now been independently
verified. Environmental groups have attacked the credibility of this
petition based on one false name sent in by green pranksters. Several
names are still on the list even though biased press reports have
ridiculed their identity with the names of famous personalities. They
are actual signers. Perry Mason, for example, is a PhD Chemist. Harvard-Smithsonian
1,000-Year Climate Study
The
IPCC's hockey stick represents a radical departure from the
well-established scientific literature. I urge this body to reject the
IPCC and instead rationally examine the best available science on
climate change before pursuing drastic measures that address climate
change. Let
me turn to an important new study by researchers from the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The
study, titled "Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past
1,000 Years," offers a devastating critique of Mann's hypothesis,
calling into question the IPCC's Third Assessment, and indeed the entire
intellectual foundation of the alarmists' views. It draws on extensive
evidence showing that major changes in global temperatures largely
result not from man-made emissions but from natural causes. Smithsonian
scientists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, with co-authors Craig Idso,
Sherwood Idso and David Legates, compiled and examined results from more
than 240 peer-reviewed papers published by thousands of researchers over
the past four decades. In contrast to Mann's flawed, limited research,
the Harvard-Smithsonian study covers a multitude of geophysical and
biological climate indicators. While
Mann's analysis relied mostly on tree-ring data from the Northern
Hemisphere, the researchers offer a detailed look at climate changes
that occurred in different regions around the world over the last 1000
years. The
range of climate proxies is impressive and worth recounting here. The
authors examined borehole data; cultural data; glacier advances or
retreats; geomorphology; isotopic analysis from lake sediments or ice
cores, tree or peat celluloses (carbohydrates), corals, stalagmite or
biological fossils; net ice accumulation rate, including dust or
chemical counts; lake fossils and sediments; river sediments; melt
layers in ice cores; phenological (recurring natural phenomena in
relation to climate) and paleontological fossils; pollen; seafloor
sediments; luminescent analysis; tree ring growth, including either ring
width or maximum late-wood density; and shifting tree line positions
plus tree stumps in lakes, marshes and streams. Based
on this proxy data drawn from 240 peer-reviewed studies, the authors
offer highly convincing evidence to support the Little Ice Age and the
Medieval Warm Period. As co-author Dr. Sallie Baliunas explained,
"For a long time, researchers have possessed anecdotal evidence
supporting the existence of these climate extremes." Baliunas
notes that, during the Medieval Warm Period, "the Vikings
established colonies in Greenland at the beginning of the second
millennium that died out several hundred years later when the climate
turned colder." And in England, she found that, "vineyards had
flourished during the medieval warmth." In their study, the authors
accumulated reams of objective data to back up these cultural
indicators. The
Medieval Warm Period, or Medieval Optimum, occurred between 800 to 1300.
Among the studies surveyed by the authors, 112 contain information about
the warm period. Of these 103 showed evidence for the MWP, 2 did not,
and 7 had equivocal answers. Looking just at the Southern Hemisphere,
the authors found 22 studies, 21 of which confirmed the warm period and
only one that did not. The
authors also looked at the 20th century, and examined 102 studies to
determine whether it was the warmest on record. Three studies answered
yes, 16 had equivocal answers, and of the remaining 83, 79 show periods
of at least 50 years that were warmer than any 50-year period in the
20th century. I
must say, to any reasonable person, these ratios appear very convincing,
and undoubtedly rest on a solid scientific foundation. Again, remember,
the conclusions of this study are based on 240 peer-reviewed
studies, and this chart here shows what the Harvard-Smithsonian
researchers concluded. Peer
review means they were rigorously reviewed and critiqued by other
scientists before they were published. This climate study, published in
March of 2003, is the most comprehensive of its kind in history. According
to the authors, some of the warming during the 20th century is
attributable to the climate system recovering from the Little Ice Age.
Global warming alarmists, however, vehemently disagree, and pull a
scientific sleight-of-hand by pointing to the 140-year direct
temperature record as evidence of warming caused by humans. But as the
authors note, "The direct temperature measurement record is too
short ... to provide good measures of natural variability in its full
dynamic range." This
research begs an obvious question: if the earth was warmer during the
Middle Ages than the age of coal-fired power plants and SUVs, what role
do man-made emissions play in influencing climate? I think any person
with a modicum of common sense would say, "Not much." How
did the media report on the Harvard-Smithsonian study? The big dailies,
such as the New York Times
and the Washington Post, basically ignored it. I was impressed by a fair
and balanced piece in the Boston Globe.
Unfortunately, some in the media couldn't resist playing the politics of
personal destruction. I
would refer my colleagues to a May 29 story by Jeff Nesmith of Cox News
Service, which was marred by errors and an alarmist bias. Rather than
focusing on the scientific merits of the study, Nesmith reported that
petroleum companies were behind it, thereby corrupting its conclusions. Nesmith
writes that the "research was underwritten by the American
Petroleum Institute, the trade association of the world's largest oil
companies." This is simply false. API funded less than 10 percent
of the research. Had Nesmith read the Harvard-Smithsonian press release
announcing the study, he would have learned that most of the funding
came from federal grants through NASA, the Air Force Office of
Scientific Research, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Even
so, what if API funded the whole study? If that automatically means, as
it apparently does to Nesmith, that the science lacks credibility, then
at least he could offer some proof to those who think differently --
that is, no matter who funds such studies, their merits hinge on the
quality of the science. Nesmith instead offers no proof and dismisses
the science. Moreover,
is he suggesting that Harvard and the Smithsonian can be unduly
influenced by oil companies, or by any organization for that matter? Nesmith
also attacks Dr. Sallie Baliunas and Dr. Willie Soon, two of the
report's authors, because of their ties to the George C. Marshall
Institute. Nesmith noted that institute gets some of its funding from
Exxon Mobil. Again, for Nesmith, this is proof positive that the
Marshall Institute is inherently suspect, though he offers no evidence
to support that case. In
another stunning sentence, Nesmith writes, "most climate scientists
think the rise [of global temperatures] results from the atmospheric
buildup of heat-trapping 'greenhouse gases,' especially released by the
combustion of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum." Most
climate scientists? I think that based on the extensive record of
climate skeptics I've outlined today, that statement is outlandish. The
Ice Ages
Before
I move on, I would like to add another point about climate history. For
the last several minutes I have been talking about natural climate
variability over the past 1,000 years. But we can go back even further
in history to see dramatic changes in climate that had nothing to do
with SUVs or power plants. During
the last few hundred thousand years, the earth has seen multiple and
repeated periods of glaciation. Each of these "Ice Ages" has
ended because of dramatic increases in global temperatures, which had
nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions. Indeed
the last major glacial retreat, marking the end of the Wurm Glaciation,
was only 12,000 years ago. At its end, the temperature was 14 degrees
Celsius lower than today and climbed rapidly to present day
temperatures-and did so in as little as 50 years in some regions. Thus
began our current "Holocene Age" of warm climates and glacial
retreat. These
cycles of warming and cooling have been so frequent and are often so
much more dramatic than the tiny fractional degree changes measured over
the last century that one has to wonder if the alarmists are simply
ignorant of geological and meteorological history or simply ignore it to
advance an agenda. The
Real Story Behind Kyoto
As
I have pointed out, the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol has been
thoroughly discredited. Yet for some reason the drive to implement Kyoto
continues apace, both here in the United States and, most fervently, in
Europe. What is going on here? The
Europeans continue to insist that the U.S. should honor its
international responsibilities and ratify Kyoto. In June of 2001,
Germany released a statement declaring that the world needs Kyoto
because its greenhouse gas reduction targets "are
indispensable." Similarly,
Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson in June 2001 said flatly, and
without explanation, that "Kyoto is necessary." The question I
have is: indispensable and necessary for what? Certainly
not for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as Europe has proven.
According to news reports earlier this year, the EU has failed to meet
its Kyoto targets. And as we know, according to the best scientific
evidence, Kyoto will do nothing to reduce global temperatures. As
it turns out, Kyoto's objective has nothing to do with saving the globe.
In fact it is purely political. A case in point: French President
Jacques Chirac said during a speech at The Hague in November of 2000
that Kyoto represents "the first component of an authentic global
governance." So, I wonder: are the French going to be dictating
U.S. policy? Margot
Wallstrom, the EU's Environment Commissioner, takes a slightly different
view, but one that's instructive about the real motives of Kyoto
proponents. She asserted that Kyoto is about "the economy, about
leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide." To
me, Chirac's and Wallstrom's comments mean two things: 1) Kyoto
represents an attempt by certain elements within the international
community to restrain U.S. interests; and 2) Kyoto is an economic weapon
designed to undermine the global competitiveness and economic
superiority of the United States. The
Next Steps
I
am mystified that some in this body, and in the media, blithely assert
that the science of global warming is settled -- that is, fossil fuel
emissions are the principal, driving cause of global warming. In a
recent letter to me concerning the next EPA administrator, two senators
wrote that "the pressing problem of global warming" is now an
"established scientific fact," and demanded that the new
administrator commit to addressing it. With
all due respect, this statement is baseless, for several reasons. As I
outlined in detail above, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of
those who don't see global warming posing grave harm to the planet and
who don't think human beings have significant influence on the climate
system. This
leads to another question: why would this body subject the United States
to Kyoto-like measures that have no environmental benefits and cause
serious harm to the economy? There are several pieces of legislation,
including several that have been referred to my committee, that
effectively implement Kyoto. From a cursory read of Senate politics, it
is my understanding that some of these bills enjoy more than a modicum
of support. I
urge my colleagues to reject them, and follow the science to the facts.
Reject approaches designed not to solve an environmental problem, but to
satisfy the ever-growing demand of environmental groups for money and
power and other extremists who simply don't like capitalism,
free-markets, and freedom. Climate
alarmists see an opportunity here to tax the American people. Consider a
July 11 op-ed by J.W. Anderson in the Washington Post.
In it, Anderson, a former editorial writer for the Post, and now a
journalist in residence with Resources for the Future, concedes that
climate science still confronts uncertainties. But his solution is a
fuel tax to prepare for a potentially catastrophic future. Based on the
case I've outlined today, such a course of action fits a particular
ideological agenda, yet is entirely unwarranted. It
is my fervent hope that Congress will reject prophets of doom who peddle
propaganda masquerading as science in the name of saving the planet from
catastrophic disaster. I urge my colleagues to put stock in scientists
who rely on the best, most objective scientific data and reject fear as
a motivating basis for making public policy decisions. Let
me be very clear: alarmists are attempting to enact an agenda of energy
suppression that is inconsistent with American values of freedom,
prosperity, and environmental progress. Over
the past 2 hours, I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic
global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the
painstaking work of the nation's top climate scientists. What
have those scientists concluded? The Kyoto Protocol has no environmental
benefits; natural variability, not fossil fuel emissions, is the
overwhelming factor influencing climate change; satellite data,
confirmed by NOAA balloon measurements, confirms that no meaningful
warming has occurred over the last century; and climate models
predicting dramatic temperature increases over the next 100 years are
flawed and highly imperfect. Climate
Experts I
want to recount who these scientists are: Dr. S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Virginia, who served as the first Director of the US Weather Satellite Service (which is now in the Department of Commerce) and more recently as a member and vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA) Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who found that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by all signatories, it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100. What does this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based thermometers cannot reliably measure it. Dr. Richard Lindzen, an MIT scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has specialized in climate issues for over 30 years. Jerry Mahlman, Director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, who points out that when regional climate models, of the kind relied upon by the IPCC, attempt to incorporate such factors as population growth "the details of future climate recede toward unintelligibility." Gerald North of Texas A&M University in College Station, agrees that the IPCC's predictions are baseless, in part because climate models are highly imperfect instruments. As he said after the IPCC report came out: "It's extremely hard to tell whether the models have improved" since the last IPCC report. "The uncertainties are large." Peter Stone, an MIT climate modeler, said in reference to the IPCC, "The major [climate prediction] uncertainties have not been reduced at all." Dr. David Wojick, an expert in climate science, who recently wrote in an article in Canada's National Post, "The computer models cannot ... decide among the variable drivers, like solar versus lunar change, or chaos versus ocean circulation versus greenhouse gas increases. Unless and until they can explain these things, the models cannot be taken seriously as a basis for public policy." Climate modelers from four separate climate modeling centers who wrote in the October 2000 edition of Nature that, "Forecasts of climate change are inevitably uncertain." They go on to explain that, "A basic problem with all such predictions to date has been the difficulty of providing any systematic estimate of uncertainty," a problem that stems from the fact that "these [climate] models do not necessarily span the full range of known climate system behavior." NASA scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy whose satellite data, validated independently by measurements from NOAA balloon radiosonde instruments, show that the atmosphere has not warmed as alarmists theorize. Dr. Thomas R. Karl, senior scientist at the National Climate Data Center, who corrected the U.S. surface temperatures for the urban heat-island effect and found that there has been a downward temperature trend since 1940. This suggests a strong warming bias in the surface-based temperature record. Scientists from the Scripps Institution for Oceanography who concluded that the temperature rise comes first, followed by a carbon dioxide boost 400 to 1,000 years later. This contradicts everything alarmists have been saying about man-made global warming in the 20th century. University of Illinois researchers who reported "a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000." In some regions, like the McMurdo Dry Valleys, temperatures cooled between 1986 and 1999 by as much as two degrees centigrade per decade. Dr. Paul Reiter who convincingly debunks the claim that higher temperatures will induce more deaths and massive outbreaks of deadly diseases in a 2000 study for the Center for Disease Control. Dr. David Legates, a renowned professor at the University of Delaware and world's leading expert in the hydrology of climate. Over 4,000 scientists, 70 of whom are Nobel Prize winners, who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. I also point to a 1998 recent survey of state climatologists, which reveals that a majority of respondents have serious doubts about whether anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases present a serious threat to climate stability. Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who have just completed the most comprehensive review of temperature records ever. Then there is Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University. Over 17,000 independently verified signers of the Oregon Petition, which reads as follows: "We
urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement
that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other
similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm
the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and
damage the health and welfare of mankind. "There
is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon
dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the
foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere
and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial
scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce
many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments
of the Earth." Kenneth Green, D. Env., is Chief Scientist and Director of the Risk and Environment Centre at The Fraser Institute. He most recently wrote Global Warming: Understanding the Debate. George H. Taylor, who is the State Climatologist for Oregon, and a faculty member at Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, manages the Oregon Climate Service, the state repository of weather and climate information. Mr. Taylor is a member of the American Meteorological Society and is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists. Pat Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels has authored tests on climate and is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. According to Nature magazine, Pat Michaels may be the most popular lecturer in the nation on the subject of global warming. Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, since 1953, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, and has received numerous international awards; Robert Balling, Jr., Professor & Director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University who received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, has authored three books on climate; Professor Chris Essex of the University of Western Ontario and of the Niels Bohr Institute's Orsted Laboratory and the Canadian Climate Center co-authored Taken by Storm with Professor Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and the Fraser Institute in Vancouver; Dr. John Reilly, of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, who established the benefits of CO2 on flora; and many, many others. Finally
I will return to the words of Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of
the National Academy of Sciences, and a professor emeritus at
Rockefeller University, who compiled the Oregon Petition: "There
is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon
dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the
foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere
and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial
scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce
many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments
of the Earth." These
are sobering words, which the extremists have chosen to ignore. So what
could possibly be the motivation for global warming alarmism? Since I've
become chairman of the EPW Committee, it's become pretty clear:
fundraising. Environmental extremists rake in million of dollars, not to
solve environmental problems, but to fuel their ever-growing fundraising
machines, part of which are financed by federal taxpayers. So
what have we learned from the scientists and economists I've talked
about today? The claim that global warming is caused by man-made emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science. C02 does not cause catastrophic disasters -- actually it would be beneficial to our environment and our economy. Kyoto would impose huge costs on Americans, especially the poor. The motives for Kyoto are economic not environmental -- that is, proponents favor handicapping the American economy through carbon taxes and more regulations. With
all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it
be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on
the American people? It sure sounds like it. Copyright U.S. Senator James M. Inhofe
http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/contactus.htm (website form)
For the Senator’s Oklahoma constituents: http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/concasework.htm
|