It's not PC to blame Mother Nature

In a scientific establishment 50-percent financed by the government few can resist the cult of human-caused global warming.

Now the global warming debate reveals that what Bob Tyrrell calls the plutomores (from the Greek plutos, "riches," and moros, "fools") have reached high positions in the Bush administration. Fooled entirely by the copious press and television coverage of the Democratic victory in Florida, for example, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill seems to believe he was summoned to Washington to serve as a token Republican in the administration of Al Gore. The Alcoa corpocrat devoted his first presentation to the Cabinet to an earnest plutomoronic tract on global warming, urging his baffled companions to save the planet from Republican religionists (apparently awaiting the Second Coming in rubber boots on Long Island beaches and golf courses). He all but said the Earth is in the Balance.

O'Neill and his Cabinet colleague Christie Whitman had provided the high point of this comic opera until the recent assault on Exxon Mobil by a group of angry shareholders, including a medley of nuns and Capuchin friars from New Jersey, inspired by Lloyd Keigwin, a good scientist panicked by pressures of political correctness. Collaborating in the panic is a writer from the Wall Street Journal named Thaddeus Herrick, who reports lugubriously that Exxon Mobil is "increasingly isolated on the issue, not only from the international scientific community, but also from European competitors...which largely accept the premise that the Earth is warming because of heat-trapping greenhouse gases."

Hardly heroic is Exxon Mobil, backpedaling from its denial of global warming risks. Its own plutomores seem increasingly ready to capitulate to the idea that their energy products imperil the planet.

Keigwin, though, is the more intriguing case. A 54-year-old oceanographer at Woods Hole Observatory near the Massachusetts Cape, he found a way to concoct a 3,000-year record of the temperatures of the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda through analyzing thermally dependent oxygen isotopes in fossils on the ocean floor. He discovered that temperatures a thousand years ago, during the so-called medieval climate optimum, were two degrees Celsius warmer than today's and that the average temperature over the last three millennia was slightly warmer than today's. Roughly confirming this result are historical records -- the verdancy of Greenland at the time of the Vikings, the little ice age of the mid-1700s, a long series of temperature readings collected in Britain over the last 300 years documenting a slow recovery from the ice age, reports of medieval temperatures from a variety of sources, and records of tree rings and ice cores.

These previous findings, echoed by Keigwin's, are devastating to the theory of human-caused global warming. If the Earth was significantly warmer a thousand years ago, if we have been on a re-warming trend for three centuries, if, as other even more voluminous evidence suggests, the Earth has repeatedly seen mini-cycles of warming and cooling of about 1,500 years duration, then any upward drift in temperatures we may be seeing now -- included scattered anecdotes of thinning arctic ice -- is likely to be the result of such cycles.

Thus the case for human-caused global warming can no longer rest on the mere fact of contemporary warming. To justify drastic action like the Kyoto treaty requiring a reduction in U.S. energy consumption of some 30 percent, unfeasible without destroying the U.S. economy, the human-caused global warming advocates would have to demonstrate a persuasive mechanism of human causation. This they show no sign of being able to do. Grasping the point, scientists at Exxon Mobil recently used the Keigwin data in a Wall Street Journal ad and the PC bees hit the fan.

By all reasonable standards, Keigwin is a hero. Not only did he invent an ingenious way to compile an early temperature record, but he made a giant contribution to discrediting a movement that would impose a deadly energy clamp on the world economy. But soon enough his government-financed colleagues began to exert pressure. Was he a tool of the oil companies? Lordy no, he wrote, in an indignant letter to Exxon Mobil, denying that his findings had anything much to do with the global warming issue.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Dr. Keigwin warns that the results are not representative of the Earth as a whole. He says that the importance of his research isn't in the data per se, but rather that marine geologists can undertake such a study at all.... He wants to put the issue behind him." Hey, he's got a new government grant to find out "what's causing a substantial warming in the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia." He has not reached any conclusion -- but according to the Journal, "he gives a nod to global warming concerns, saying 'I'd take a guess.'"

Scores of scientists have been pressured to embrace the cult pressures that befall any critic of the cult of human-caused global warming. In a scientific establishment 50 percent financed by government, few can resist. An eminent scientist who was once the leading critic of global warming had to stop writing on the subject in order to continue his research. The source of the pressure that ended his publications was then-Senator Al Gore. Later this scientist coauthored a key paper with Arthur Robinson -- organizer of a petition against Kyoto signed by 17,000 scientists -- but had to remove his name under pressure from Washington.

Keigwin's denials of his own significance are all pathetically misleading. The temperature pattern he found in the Sargasso Sea is indeed a global phenomenon. Sallie Baliunas and Willi Soon of Harvard have uncovered a new oxygen isotope study that extends this temperature record another 3,000 years based on six millennia of evidence from peat bogs in northeastern China. The peat bog records both confirm Keigwin and demonstrate an even warmer period that lasted for 2,000 years. During this era, beginning some 4,000 years ago and running until the birth of Christ, temperatures averaged between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius higher than they do today.

Summing up the case is an article published earlier this year by Wallace Broecker in the prestigious pages of Science entitled "Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?" His answer is a resounding yes. As Craig and Keith Idso report in a March 7 editorial on their Webpage, Broecker recounts substantial evidence for a series of climatic warmings spaced at roughly 1,500-year intervals. Broecker explains the science of reconstructing the histories of surface air temperatures by examining temperature data from "boreholes." From some 6,000 boreholes on all continents, this evidence confirms that the Earth was significantly warmer a thousand years ago and two degrees Celsius warmer in Greenland. This data, Robinson warns, is less detailed and authoritative than the evidence from the Sargasso Sea and from the Chinese peat bogs. But together with the independent historical record, the collective evidence is irrefutable. Thousands of years of data demonstrate that in the face of a few hundred parts per million increase in CO2, temperatures today, if anything, are colder than usual. Temperatures in Antarctica, for example, have been falling for the last 20 years. The global satellite record of atmospheric temperature, confirmed by weather balloons, shows little change one way or another for the last three decades. Terrestrial temperature stations, on average, show more warming over the past century, but many are located in areas that were rural when the stations were established and are densely urban today, a change which causes local warming. The dominance of natural cycles globally is not surprising since, as Baliunas and Soon report, the impact of changes in sun energy output are some 70,000 times more significant than all human activity put together.

In the end, the global warming panic will take its place in the history books next to other environmental chimeras, such as the threat of DDT (but not of pandemic malaria), the peril of nuclear power (but not of coal mining), the brain-curdling effect of cellphones (but not of far more potent sun rays), the menace of powerlines (but not of poverty), the poison of alar (though not of rotten apple juice), the danger of asbestos in walls (but not of fire), the carcinogenic impact of PCBs (but not of carrots, peanut butter, coffee and other items that test more toxic in the same way) and the horror of radon and other sources of low-level radiation (despite its beneficial effect on health through a process called hormesis).

Overall, the situation is simple. Politicized scientists with government grants and dubious computer temperature models persuaded the world's politicians to make pompous fools of themselves in Kyoto. Socialist politicians were happy to join an absurd movement to impose government regulations over the world energy supply and thus over the world economy. The scientific claims and computer models have now blown up in their faces. But rather than admit error they persist in their fear-mongering. When this happened with DDT, hundreds of millions of people died of malaria. They continue to die. How many people would die as a result of an energy clamp on global capitalism?