The Politics of Global Warming

The day after winning more than 50 percent of the vote, Australia's new prime minister Kevin Rudd held meetings with government officials concerning the issue of global warming, including the signing of the Kyoto Protocol and the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions.

Rudd's appointment is just one of many recent events to highlight the building up of global climate change as a political force to be reckoned with. With the 2008 presidential race looming ever nearer, the importance of the issue among the candidates is rising exponentially, particularly among Democrats.

Grist, an online environmental magazine, sponsored The Presidential Forum on Global Warming and America's Energy Future Nov. 17, at which Democratic presidential hopefuls John Edwards, Hilary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich outlined their goals for fixing the world's reputed climate dilemma. Among the plans outlined at the forum was a proposal by Clinton calling for a $50 billion "strategic energy fund" to help cut greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050.

In his 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore outlined the worrisome state of global climate change and the potentially catastrophic consequences of humanity's inaction to curb our contribution, namely our excessive use of fossil fuels and the corresponding flux of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere.

"The scientists are virtually screaming from the rooftops now. The debate is over! There's no longer any debate in the scientific community about this," said Gore. "But the political systems around the world have held this at arm's length because it's an inconvenient truth, because they don't want to accept that it's a moral imperative."

Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cited as being "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted to combat global warming."

While it is true that vast amounts of time, money and energy have been spent promoting the awareness of the issue of global warming and its associated dangers to the future of our planet and our race, all it takes is someone with an average intelligence, a healthy mouse-clicking finger and about 15 seconds of free time to see the flaw in Gore's statement that there is "no longer any debate in the scientific community" about global warming.

A document titled The Heidelberg Appeal was publicly released at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro for the explicit purpose of dispelling the idea of an existent scientific consensus on the issue of global warming. Today, more than 4,000 signatories from 106 countries have signed the appeal, including hundreds of scientists and other intellectual leaders, as well as 72 Nobel Prize winners.

While The Heidelberg Appeal does not deny environmental problems as outlined by global warming proponents such as Gore, it begs for concern on behalf of its signatories "at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development."

Furthermore, the signatories identify with global warming proponents in that they "subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology for a universe whose resources must be taken stock of, monitored and preserved," but stress that "this stock-taking, monitoring and preservation be founded on scientific criteria and not on irrational preconceptions."

Michael Crichton, the best-selling novelist and medical doctor who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and has taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge. Crichton's 2004 bestseller "State of Fear," a thriller that challenges widely-held assumptions concerning global warming as a man-made phenomenon, took him several years to research and led to numerous interviews and speaking engagements where he had the opportunity to express his views.

In "The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming," a speech delivered to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 25, 2005, Crichton used published UN data to call into question claims for catastrophic global warming.

"In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment," he said. "We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence."

Crichton expressed doubt as to the validity of the data used by many who support the theory of man-made global warming as the best evidence for their beliefs, namely the "hockey stick" graph of temperature data for the last thousand years, compiled by climatologist Michael Mann. Now famous after its use by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth," the line graph shows a fairly steady rate of temperature fluctuation until around the 1950s, when the temperature spikes in a dramatic increase and creates the shape of a hockey stick.

"Mann's findings were a centerpiece of the last UN study, and they were the basis for the claim that the 20^th century shows the steepest temperature rise of the last thousand years. That was said in 2001," said Crichton. "No one would say it now."

Crichton refuted Mann's work, saying attempts to replicate the study using Mann's data and methods have led to the discovery of dozens of errors, and that even when the data are corrected, they cannot be trusted scientifically.

"It turns out that Mann and his associates used a non-standard formula to analyze his data, and this particular formula will turn anything into a hockey stick - including trendless data generated by a computer," said Crichton.

While one of the most public and outspoken critics of the scientific community's handling of the climate change issue, Crichton is by no means alone in his critiques.

The late John L. Daly, author of "The Greenhouse Trap," agreed with many of Crichton's findings and was an avid skeptic of the idea of man-made and catastrophic global warming. A radar service engineer and former merchant seaman with an honors degree in economics from the University at Aberystwyth, Wales, Daly set forth some of his ideas against Mann's data in his paper, "The 'Hocky Stick': A New Low in Climate Science."

In his paper, Daly laid forth several of what he considered to be errors in Mann's data, using multiple examples pointing to irregularities between Mann's hockey stick graph of temperature and scientifically verifiable temperature data from the same time periods.

"As a piece of science and statistics," said Daly, speaking of Mann's graph, "it was seriously flawed."

Gore's claim that there is "no longer any debate in the scientific community" about global warming seems to be at best premature, verified most readily through the response from the scientific community in papers written after Gore's documentary was released. Scientifically-supported papers such as Christopher Walter's, "35 Inconvenient Truths: The Errors in Al Gore's Movie," are in no short supply on the Internet.

Also, Gore's claim that "political systems around the world have held [the issue of global warming] at arm's length" is also a seemingly flawed statement when considering the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement adopted Dec. 11, 1997 to commit signees to lower their country's green house gas emission below a certain level by 2012.

Nearly every major country in the world, with the exception of the United States, has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, including India, China, Russia, Japan and the UK. The fact that so many countries are willing to recognize the potential threat of global warming, rationally or not, is witness to the fact that the world is paying attention to the issue.

With the increase in pressure on Washington from the new Australian prime minister-elect, it may be that the current administration takes steps to bypass a debate on global warming and commits to public policy action, as Gore believes, in tandem with the scientific consensus that global warming is a man-made, potentially catastrophic threat.

Or, it may be that the latest pressure, along with the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, will lead not only to a higher interest in global warming, but also to a higher interest in the surrounding debate of its validity as a threat.

Sources/For more information:

http://www.john-daly.com/

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html