CO2 Downplayed

Article by Lorne Gunter
For the Calgary Herald
Tuesday October 31, 2000

As I have written before, about two months ago, the father of the modern global warming crusade, NASA scientist James Hansen, backed away from the histrionics of the campaign he started, if not the science.

Hansen, while still arguing man-made global warming was due to Occur over the next century, seemed to leave room about just how much or how fast. Moreover, he downplayed significantly the role of carbon dioxide --the principal fossil fuel exhaust-- in the warming.

Hansen argued methane, soot, nitrous oxide and other pollutants were more likely causes of warming. The implications were immense. Global warming might be stopped without tuning advanced economies on their heads, if Hansen's revised theory holds.

The threat of warming would still have to be countered but without threatening millions of jobs and the standard of living in industrialized nations.

In many ways, it was the ideal sawoff.

Businesses, workers and consumers would no longer be under the threat of enormous economic upheaval. Meanwhile, since the threat of warming would still exist, the bureaucrats, lobbyists and scientists who have turned global warming predictions into a lucrative industry would still be needed, thus their budgets. grants and contracts would keep flowing.

But some true believers may have been unimpressed with Hansen's new warming theory, and are striking back.

This week, The Associated Press obtained a copy of the executive summary of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a UN organization, the vaunted "thousands of scientists" who insist global warming is real, and really scary. The TAR is their five-year summary of developments in climate science since their second assessment in 1995.

But the executive summary is a separate document, almost entirely. The summary is drafted by political appointees.

Even the scientists on the committee are selected by politicians, not their peers.

The executive summary of the 1995 assessment report concluded famously "a discernible human influence" on the Earth's climate and set in motion negotiations for the Kyoto Accord, not to mention hundreds of national and international efforts to increase government and UN regulation over industry.

But the executive summary and the assessment it supposedly summarizes can differ wildly. In many ways the 1995 versions are like night and day.

While the politically crafted summary charged that human activity was dangerously heating up the planet, the assessment itself conceded, "In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible."

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling," versus "Ah, we're not really sure what is going to happen or why," in the same document.

So just what does the 2000 summary obtained by AP say? After twice revising downward its predictions of future warming, from about six degrees Celsius to around two, the IPCC, its Crusade under scientific attack, now claims warming will be much worse than ever before projected. "There is stronger evidence," the summary charges, that manmade greenhouse gases "have contributed substantially to the observed warming over the last 50 years."

In an odd way, that might be sort of true. Since the political panel that drafted the summary five years ago had very little evidence, any evidence at all this time might honestly constitute "stronger evidence."

However, from the portions of the draft released so far, it appears the IPCC still fails to account for evidence against manmade warming; against the notion warming is actually occurring (hundreds of thousands of hyperaccurate daily satellite temperature readings over the past two decades disagree with surface temperature readings that any warming has occurred) or for the idea that some cause other than humans is behind what warming may be occurring.

Just in the past month, scientists at the European Space Agency have joined numerous other astrophysicists in claiming increased solar activity in the past 100 to 150 years is the main cause, and will continue to be over the next century as the sun continues one of its periodic cycles of warming and brightening.

The IPCC cannot be suspected of altering its main assessment report to counter Hansen's new, softer warming theory. But the summary, which is what AP obtained, is much easier to amend quickly and to make more rhetorically forceful.

Coming so soon after Hansen's mid-course correction (not to mention during a U.S. presidential election between environmentalist Al Gore and oilman George W Bush) the leaking of the summary may not be coincidental.