Nothing to fear?

By Henry Lamb

Despite a decade of hype and hysteria about global warming, the number of Americans who "worry a great deal" about it has declined from 35% in 1989 to 24% in 1997. These are the findings of Public Agenda, a non-profit group that conducted a review of public opinion surveys for the American Geophysical Union, a group of environmental scientists.

The decline in public concern roughly parallels the decline in the warming projections over the decade. The first estimates of human-induced global warming, produced by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicted that the global mean temperature would rise from 3.5 to 8 degrees C. by the year 2050.

This projection was based on computer models of what would happen if the developed nations continued to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the growing use of fossil fuels. It was the projection that caused the United Nations to produce the Framework Convention on Climate Change, a voluntary treaty that asked the developed nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.

When the first Conference of the Parties to the Convention assembled in Berlin in 1995, they agreed that the developed nations would not meet the target, and therefore, should be required to reduce their emissions through a legally binding Protocol to the Convention to be adopted in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.

Almost unnoticed by the American press, and ignored by the treaty makers, was a revised estimate of global warming which significantly lowered the predicted temperature increase, to a range of about 2 to 5 degrees C. by the year 2100.

By the time the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, the U.N. scientists had again revised downward, their projections of global warming, to a range of about 1 to 2.5 degrees C. by the year 2100.

During the same period, more than 140 of the world's most noted climatologists and astrophysicists met in Leipzig, Germany and issued the "Leipzig Declaration" which says, essentially, that there is insufficient scientific evidence of a cause-effect relationship between human activity and global warming to justify the policy requirements of the Kyoto Protocol.

In America, another group of more than 15,000 scientists signed a public petition that said flatly that there is "no scientific evidence that human activity is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause global warming."

The decline in public fear of global warming suggests that Americans may be listening to the scientists, rather than to the bureaucrats and special interest groups that are draining off billions of tax dollars to seek a cure for a malady that may not exist.

Rather than confront the reality of scientific evidence and waning public fear, these realities are ignored by the bureaucrats and special interest groups assembled in Bonn, Germany. Instead of scaling back the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, and focusing on understanding the climate system, and man's relationship to it, they are plowing forward as if their very jobs depended upon it.

Fluctuations of global mean temperature in excess of 2 degrees C. have been noted throughout history. History refers to the last warming period as the "Medieval Climate Optimum," back when Greenland was green. That period was followed by what history calls the "Little Ice Age," which bottomed out at about the same time America was getting settled. The global temperature increase that has been observed since the mid 1800s is seen by many scientists as natural recovery from the "Little Ice Age."

The last thousand years of rather dramatic global temperature fluctuations was not caused by industrial pollution, carbon dioxide emissions from automobile tail pipes, or from any other human activity. Since similar fluctuations have been traced back through millennia, it is reasonable to expect those fluctuations to continue.

If the American people fully understood the economic and behavioral consequences of the Kyoto Protocol, they would have far more to fear from the alleged cure, than from the perceived problem.

Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), and chairman of Sovereignty International.