A Treaty Built on Hot Air, Not Scientific Consensus
by S. Fred Singer
Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1997
Yesterday, in opening a White House conference on global warming, President Clinton announced, "The overwhelming balance of evidence and scientific opinion is that it is no longer a theory but now a fact that global warming is real." In support of this contention, the president and other politicians have been busy citing the "2,500 scientists" who supposedly endorse the U.N.'s 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and thus a forecast of catastrophic global warming.
Actual climate observations, however, show that global warming is mostly a phantom problem. Perhaps that's why Mr. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore harp so much on a "scientific consensus"—which sounds so impressive to nonscientists. Yet science doesn't operate by vote.
How did the IPCC come up with 2,500 scientists? If one were to add up all contributors and reviewers listed in the three IPCC reports published in 1996, one would count about 2,100. The great majority of these are not conversant with the intricacies of atmospheric physics, although some may know a lot about forestry, fisheries or agriculture. Most are social scientists -- or just policy experts and government functionaries. Every country in the world seems to be represented -- from Albania to Zimbabwe -- though many are not exactly at the forefront of research. The list even includes known skeptics of global warming -- much to their personal and professional chagrin.
The IPCC report has some 80 authors for its 11 chapters, but only a handful actually wrote the Policymakers' Summary; most of the several hundred listed "contributors" are simply specialists who allowed their work to be cited, without necessarily endorsing the other chapters or the summary. Contrast these numbers with the nearly 100 climate scientists who signed the Leipzig Declaration in 1996, expressing their doubts about the validity of computer-driven global warming forecasts. It takes a certain amount of courage to do this -- given that it could jeopardize research grants from U.S. government agencies that have adopted climate catastrophe as an article of faith, and managed to convince Congress to ante up about $2 billion a year.
Even some IPCC climate scientists, in the report itself or in a May 16 Science article headlined "Greenhouse Forecasting Still Cloudy," have expressed doubts about the validity of computer models and about the main IPCC conclusion, that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate" -- whatever that ambiguous phrase may mean. A Dec. 20, 1995, Reuters report quoted British scientist Keith Shine, one of IPCC's lead authors, discussing the IPCC Policymakers’ Summary: "We produce a draft, and then the policymakers go through it line by line and change the way it is presented.... It's peculiar that they have the final say in what goes into a scientists' report." The Science and Environmental Policy Project conducted a survey of IPCC scientific contributors and reviewers; we found that about half did not support the Policymakers' Summary. Parallel surveys by the Gallup organization and even by Greenpeace International produced similar results.
Of course, scientists do accept the existence of a natural greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, which has been known since the 19th century and is not to be confused with any influence from human activity. Another accepted fact is that greenhouse gases have been increasing as a consequence of an expanding world population: carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, for instance, and methane from raising cattle. But the climate warming of the past 100 years, which occurred mainly before 1940, in no way supports the results of computer models that predict a drastic future warming. Even IPCC Chairman Bert Bolin has admitted that the pre-1940 warming is likely a natural recovery from a previous, natural cooling. Most important, though, is the fact -- not mentioned in the IPCC summary -- that weather satellite observations, independently backed by data from balloon-borne sensors, have shown no global warming trend whatsoever in the past 20 years.
The discrepancy between calculated predictions of warming and the actual observations of no warming has produced a crisis for many scientists. Those who believe in global warming keep hoping that proof is just around the corner. Consider this passage from the May 16 Science article: "[M]any scientists say it will be a decade before computer models can confidently link the warming to human activities."
It is ironic that an environmental lobbying group, the Environmental Defense Fund, would admit in a brochure on global warming: "Scientists need to do considerably more work to sort out which [hypotheses] are most likely to be true." The EDF complains, however, that the "skepticism and constant questioning that lie at the heart of science" sometimes "cloud the debate." Perhaps so; but more often they advance the science.
http://www.sepp.org/glwarm/hotair.html
