Global Warming: The Worst of All Environmental Scares — Part II

Continued from Global Warming: The Worst of All Environmental Scares - Part I

The following is the second half of a speech given on the Senate Floor by Sen. James Inhofe (R.-Okla.) on Monday, July 28, 2003, during the debate on the McCain-Lieberman bill that, following the lead of the unratified Kyoto Protocol, would severely damage the U.S. economy by drastically reducing the amount of power available to businesses.

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."

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 scie ntific 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 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. That 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, 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% of the research. Had Nesmith read the Harvard-Smithsonian press release announcing the study, he would have found 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 United States 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 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, then argues for 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.

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.

They include:

Dr. S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Virginia, who served as the first Director of the U.S. 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.

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.