The U.S. government has wisely refused to yield to pressure by other industrialized nations to enter into formal negotiations that would create new binding limits on so-called “greenhouse-gas” emissions to take effect in 2012. The government did, however, agree to engage in “open and nonbinding” discussions with 200 other nations on global warming and carbon dioxide emissions.
The Bush administration deserves enormous credit for resisting this thinly disguised attempt to disadvantage America economically under the pretext of environmentalism and the pseudo-science of global warming. Scientists cannot even agree on whether global temperatures are rising, falling or staying the same, much less find scientific consensus on what might account for any changes in average temperatures. The administration should use these discussions to unmask the hostile, anti-American agenda that lies beneath this nonsense.
According to Fred Singer, University of Virginia scientist and professor emeritus, the data on global temperature are ambiguous, at best. The climate clearly warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before modern industrial activity consumed much energy. Between 1940 and 1975, when industrial carbon emissions accelerated, the climate cooled and then warmed again for a brief five years. Since then, the most reliable data indicate the climate has been cooling just slightly.
“Certainly,” Singer says, “it has not been warming ... and there is no evidence that man is causing the warming.”
The most persuasive data on global temperature changes point to variable solar activity as the driving force in cyclical temperature changes on Earth. All of the “evidence” pointing to global warming comes from surface-temperature readings that are contaminated by other factors, such as urban “heat-island” effects.
Britain’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King bellows, “Global warming is a greater threat than terrorism” and “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked.” Yet the only basis for these claims - The Washington Post proclaimed that global warming constitutes “one of the world’s most far-reaching problems” - is a set of computer-model predictions.
The only problem is, the computer-model predictions are not backed up by independent data from weather satellites and balloons, which show no appreciable warming of the atmosphere. Worse yet, the same computer models that predict catastrophic global warming in the future also “predict” current climatic conditions almost the opposite of those that actually prevail. The computer models on which global-warming doomsayers rely insist the climate in the middle troposphere, i.e., above the surface, should be warming at the rate of about one degree Fahrenheit per decade right now.
If the models don’t even square with what’s going on now in the real world, how can any reasonable person place confidence in what they predict for the future, especially if taking action based on those dubious predictions means inflicting incredible damage on the economy and consigning people to a declining standard of living?
The calls for radical reductions in carbon emissions are a frontal attack on American global economic pre-eminence and a pretext for replacing the current international system of sovereign nation states with a global government possessing the far-reaching authority to engage in economic leveling and redistribution.
The best statement of this agenda can be found in a Harper’s magazine article by Bill McKibben titled “The Great Leap.” McKibben excoriates former President George H.W. Bush for announcing on his way to the international meetings in Rio that gave birth to the Kyoto Global Warming Accords that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.” That statement, according to McKibben, “defines a tragedy.”
McKibben revealed the real agenda behind Kyoto and its progeny when he said, “The goal of the 21st century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop those of the rich - to transfer enough technology and wealth that we’re able to meet somewhere in the middle.”
Global warming is not really about the global climate at all; it’s about global government turning the whole world into Old Europe or stagnating Japan. This most recent round of eco-hysteria - along with its predecessors - is simply a thinly veiled effort to do by international treaty, and eventually global government, what Communism failed to do, namely define global prosperity down in the name of “equality.” The Bush administration is doing the right thing by standing astride the rush to environmental extremism and calling “stop.”
