PUBLICATION:
The Ottawa Citizen
DATE:
2003.06.23
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Editorial
PAGE:
A12
SOURCE:
The Ottawa Citizen
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Sound
science: Politicians should look at the facts, all of them, on global warming
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A
new report in Science magazine says Earth has become significantly greener over
the past two decades. Thanks to global warming, vegetation has more heat, light,
water and carbon dioxide and has responded by increasing its total bulk by six
per cent. According to lead author Ramakrishna Nemani, changes in cloud cover,
not carbon dioxide, seem to be responsible.
Only
to scientists locked into the dogma of the environmentalist movement could
either part of this report be news. Skeptics of the traditional cant have long
predicted that global warming (man-made, natural or some combination of the two)
would expand growing seasons and agricultural zones. Within limits, therefore,
it's not a bad thing when the Earth's population is still increasing and too
much of it is still hungry. It would still be foolish to heat the Earth on
purpose and hope it all worked out. But the really important part of the message
is the cloudy part.
Science's
report reveals an uncomfortable but important truth about global warming: that
much of the science behind the Kyoto Protocol and its notions about man's effect
on the planet have been under fire for decades, especially the idea that only
knaves and fools could doubt that man, through well-understood mechanisms, is
causing the climate to change and could fairly easily make it stop.
Scientists
such as Dr. Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, a past president of the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences, have demolished much of the science behind the
accepted wisdom on global warming. And they're not alone. More than 17,100
scientists -- including 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists,
meteorologists, oceanographers and environmental scientists, and 5,017
scientists who specialize in chemistry, biochemistry, biology and other life
sciences -- have signed a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol and the orthodoxy
behind it.
For
instance, while carbon dioxide levels have been rising since the Industrial
Revolution began 150 years ago and temperatures have risen slightly, it is part
of a warming trend that stretches back more than 300 years to the end of the
"Little Ice Age." In the Middle Ages, Earth was warm enough to support
Norse colonies in Greenland, abandoned when temperatures fell. Yet no one claims
man started, or ended, the medieval warm period.
Mr.
Nemani's contention in Science that carbon dioxide may not be responsible for
recent rising temperatures is also old news. As data from several studies have
shown, during the 20 years with the highest carbon dioxide levels, atmospheric
temperatures have decreased. A 1990 Nature paper reported that recent increases
in carbon dioxide have shown a tendency to follow a rise in global temperatures,
not lead them -- something many scientists attribute to oceans giving off the
gas as part of the 300-year-old warming trend, itself marked by fluctuations.
If
the argument over the science of global warming proves anything, it is that it's
foolish to take steps to solve a problem that doesn't exist. As commentator Alan
Caruba said earlier this year, "the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change literally offers 40 different scenarios to support its specious claim in
the hope that one of them might actually prove correct. That's not science.
That's science fiction."
Unfortunately,
that science fiction led to Canada's acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol, the costs
of which may outweigh its questionable benefits. Plank by plank, the dogma of
the environmentalist movement and its advocates in the science community are
being pulled up. Thousands of other, dissenting scientists are taking another
view.
It's
time to abandon the notion that such dissent is loathsome heresy, and start
listening to both sides in the debate.