Global Warming COP-Out
Friday, November 17, 2000

By Steven Milloy

Global warming is the hot topic at a meeting of 150 countries this week and next at The Hague. At stake at the sixth so-called Conference of the Parties (COP-6) is probably the last opportunity to hammer out an agreement to implement the 1997 accord on global warming signed three years ago in Kyoto, Japan.

Some scientists say that more than a quarter of the world's 
coral reefs have been destroyed by pollution and global 
warming — but are the satistics that show global warming 
being gathered properly?
 

President Clinton remains the cheerleader-in-chief for taking global warming seriously. But the Clinton administration's position at COP-6 exposes the scare as a bunch of hot air.

Clinton said in his last State of the Union address, "The greatest environmental challenge of the new century is global warming. The scientists tell us the 1990s were the hottest decade of the entire millennium. If we fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will flood, and economies will be disrupted."

During a special Internet address last weekend, President Clinton warned, "Scientists project that continued growth in greenhouse-gas emissions could raise temperatures across the country by 5 to 9 degrees over the next hundred years. The Earth has not seen a temperature change of that magnitude since the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago."

Scary stuff. And considering that about one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions is attributed to the U.S., you might think the Clinton administration would take the lead in advocating serious measures to avert the dreaded meltdown. 

Instead, the Clinton administration advocates that countries be allowed to factor so-called "carbon sinks" into calculations of greenhouse gas emissions — a virtual "do-nothing" approach to global warming. 

The Clinton administration issued a report last August estimating that about 310 million metric tons of carbon dioxide are absorbed annually in U.S. forests and in soil used for crops and livestock grazing. 

These "carbon sinks" represent more than one-half of the 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emission reductions the U.S. would be expected to make beginning in 2008 under the Kyoto protocol.

So without so much as turning off a light bulb, the U.S. has already met most of its would-be obligations to reduce global warming, according to the Clinton administration. This begs the question: Is global warming a real problem, or just another phony eco-scare promoted by those with dubious motives?

The most recent assessment of global warming by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released last spring. The report, which didn't make the news until the end of October, claims that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases may cause global temperatures to rise by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.

But the IPCC report contains systematic errors and omissions bordering on scientific fraud, according to 14 international experts who gathered on Capitol Hill in June to review the report. 

The U.K.'s Richard Courtney said the data and climate models were "no good," and that "[w]e should stop trying to predict the weather 100 years from now." Norway's Tom Segalstad said the report omitted mention of studies reporting that carbon dioxide was actually more prevalent in the pre-industrial era than it is today. 

The report also cherry-picks data favorable to the global-warming theory. Temperatures measured on the Earth's surface indicate some warming. But these measurements are skewed upwards by the "urban heat island effect," the phenomenon of concrete and asphalt absorbing heat and raising urban temperatures.

In contrast, satellite and balloon records indicate no significant warming. "The IPCC tries to prove that the satellite and balloon records are wrong. It is much more likely that these records are correct and the surface data are wrong," said New Zealand's Vincent Gray. 

Germany's Peter Dietze said the report's temperature estimates are easily demonstrated to be at least four times too high. "If the [IPCC report] would be corrected for these errors, there would hardly be any justification for writing it," he said. 

Temperature data estimated by examining the width of tree rings indicates no significant change over the last 1,000 years. But the IPCC report combined the tree-ring data with the surface data of rising temperatures over the last 140 years to show an alarming trend.

U.S. climate expert Fred Singer says, "Combining selected data in this way is simply dishonest." 

None of this dishonesty is surprising. The IPCC is an arm of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — the group pushing the Kyoto global warming treaty. The report's science chapters were overseen by UK scientist Sir John Houghton — who very publicly made up his mind about global warming in the early 1990s. 

Other parts of the report were financed and overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, whose $1.7 billion budget depends on keeping the global-warming scare going.

Global-warming activists from the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council characterized the Clinton administration's plan as "doing nothing and calling it progress." 

I wouldn't argue with them except to add that "doing nothing" is the perfect solution for what remains a phony problem.

— Steven Milloy is a biostatistician, lawyer, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of Junkscience.com.