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Eight Reasons Why ‘Global Warming’ Is a Scam
Written By: Joseph L. Bast
Published In: Heartlander
Publication Date: February 1, 2003
Publisher: The Heartland Institute |
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When Al Gore lost his bid to become the country’s first “Environment
President,” many of us thought the “global warming” scare would finally
come to a well-deserved end. That hasn’t happened, despite eight good
reasons this scam should finally be put to rest.
It’s B-a-a-ck!
Similar scares orchestrated by radical environmentalists in the
past–such as Alar, global cooling, the “population bomb,” and
electromagnetic fields–were eventually debunked by scientists and no
longer appear in the speeches or platforms of public officials. The New York Times
recently endorsed more widespread use of DDT to combat malaria, proving
Rachel Carson’s anti-pesticide gospel is no longer sacrosanct even with
the liberal elite.
The scientific case against catastrophic global warming is at least
as strong as the case for DDT, but the global warming scare hasn’t gone
away. President Bush is waffling on the issue, rightly opposing the
Kyoto Protocol and focusing on research and voluntary projects, but
wrongly allowing his administration to support calls for creating
“transferrable emission credits” for greenhouse gas reductions. Such
credits would build political and economic support for a Kyoto-like cap
on greenhouse gas emissions.
At the state level, some 23 states have already adopted caps on
greenhouse gas emissions or goals for replacing fossil fuels with
alternative energy sources. These efforts are doomed to be costly
failures, as a new Heartland Policy Study by Dr. Jay Lehr and
James Taylor documents. Instead of concentrating on balancing state
budgets, some legislators will be working to pass their own
“mini-Kyotos.”
Eight Reasons to End the Scam
Concern over “global warming” is overblown and misdirected. What
follows are eight reasons why we should pull the plug on this scam
before it destroys billions of dollars of wealth and millions of jobs.
1. Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate.
More than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition circulated by the
Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying, in part, “there is no
convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide,
methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the
foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s
atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (Go to www.oism.org for the complete petition and names of signers.) Surveys of climatologists show similar skepticism.
Petition Here.
2. Our most reliable sources of temperature data show no global warming trend. Satellite
readings of temperatures in the lower troposphere (an area scientists
predict would immediately reflect any global warming) show no warming
since readings began 23 years ago. These readings are accurate to
within 0.01ºC, and are consistent with data from weather balloons. Only
land-based temperature stations show a warming trend, and these
stations do not cover the entire globe, are often contaminated by heat
generated by nearby urban development, and are subject to human error.
3. Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes.
All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not
historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions
that are close to their designers’ expectations, modelers resort to
“flux adjustments” that can be 25 times larger than the effect of
doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global
warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says “climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”
4. The IPCC did not prove that human activities are causing global warming.
Alarmists frequently quote the executive summaries of reports from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations
organization, to support their predictions. But here is what the IPCC’s
latest report, Climate Change 2001, actually says about
predicting the future climate: “The Earth’s atmosphere-ocean dynamics
is chaotic: its evolution is sensitive to small perturbations in
initial conditions. This sensitivity limits our ability to predict the
detailed evolution of weather; inevitable errors and uncertainties in
the starting conditions of a weather forecast amplify through the
forecast. As well as uncertainty in initial conditions, such
predictions are also degraded by errors and uncertainties in our
ability to represent accurately the significant climate processes.”
5. A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization.
Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 800 to 1200 AD),
which allowed the Vikings to settle presently inhospitable Greenland,
were higher than even the worst-case scenario reported by the IPCC. The
period from about 5000-3000 BC, known as the “climatic optimum,” was
even warmer and marked “a time when mankind began to build its first
civilizations,” observe James Plummer and Frances B. Smith in a study
for Consumer Alert. “There is good reason to believe that a warmer
climate would have a similar effect on the health and welfare of our
own far more advanced and adaptable civilization today.”
6. Efforts to quickly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions would be costly and would not stop Earth’s climate from changing. Reducing
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990’s levels by the
year 2012–the target set by the Kyoto Protocol–would require higher
energy taxes and regulations causing the nation to lose 2.4 million
jobs and $300 billion in annual economic output. Average household
income nationwide would fall by $2,700, and state tax revenues would
decline by $93.1 billion due to less taxable earned income and sales,
and lower property values. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocol by
all participating nations would reduce global temperature in the year
2100 by a mere 0.14 degrees Celsius.
7. Efforts by state governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are even more expensive and threaten to bust state budgets.
After raising their spending with reckless abandon during the 1990s,
states now face a cumulative projected deficit of more than $90
billion. Incredibly, most states nevertheless persist in backing
unnecessary and expensive greenhouse gas reduction programs. New
Jersey, for example, collects $358 million a year in utility taxes to
fund greenhouse gas reduction programs. Such programs will have no
impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. All they do is destroy jobs
and waste money.
8. The best strategy to pursue is “no regrets.” The
alternative to demands for immediate action to “stop global warming” is
not to do nothing. The best strategy is to invest in atmospheric
research now and in reducing emissions sometime in the future if the
science becomes more compelling. In the meantime, investments should be
made to reduce emissions only when such investments make economic sense
in their own right.
This strategy is called “no regrets,” and it is roughly what the
Bush administration has been doing. The U.S. spends more on global
warming research each year than the entire rest of the world combined,
and American businesses are leading the way in demonstrating new
technologies for reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions.
Time for Common Sense
The global warming scare has enabled environmental advocacy groups
to raise billions of dollars in contributions and government grants. It
has given politicians (from Al Gore down) opportunities to pose as
prophets of doom and slayers of evil corporations. And it has given
bureaucrats at all levels of government, from the United Nations to
city councils, powers that threaten our jobs and individual liberty.
It is time for common sense to return to the debate over protecting
the environment. An excellent first step would be to end the “global
warming” scam.
Joseph L. Bast is president of The Heartland Institute.
Source Here.
Smoking, Not So Bad For You!!!!!
Junk Science
How harmful is smoking
to smokers? Public health advocates who claim one out of every three,
or even one out of every two, smokers will die from a smoking-related
illness are grossly exaggerating the real threat. The actual odds of a
smoker dying from smoking before the age of 75 are about 1 in 12. In
other words, 11 out of 12 life-long smokers don’t die before the age of
75 from a smoking-related disease.
In a 1998 article titled “Lies, Damned Lies, and 400,000 Smoking-related Deaths,”
Levy and Marimont showed how removing diseases for which a link between
smoking and mortality has been alleged but not proven cuts the
hypothetical number of smoking-related fatalities in half. Replacing an
unrealistically low death rate for never-smokers with the real fatality
rate cuts the number by a third.
Controlling for “confounding factors”—such as the fact that smokers
tend to exercise less, drink more, and accept high-risk jobs—reduces
the estimated number of deaths by about half again. Instead of 400,000
smoking-related deaths a year, Levy and Marimont estimate the number to
be around 100,000.
This would place the lifetime odds of dying from smoking at 6 to 1
(45 million smokers divided by 100,000 deaths per year x 75 years),
rather than 3 to 1. However, about half (45 percent) of all
smoking-related deaths occur at age 75 or higher. Calling these deaths
“premature” is stretching common usage of the word. The odds of a
life-long smoker dying prematurely of a smoking-related disease, then, are about 12 to 1.
Source Here.
