WASHINGTON — Since hurricanes hardly happen in Hartford,
Hereford and Hampshire, British Prime Minister Tony Blair seems
well out of his element in linking the recent storms in the
Caribbean to global warming.
But English politicians, like their North American counterparts,
have never been shy about playing to the mobs — especially when
polls show them in a popularity freefall.
Blair’s tirade ignores the fact that numerous new studies by
respected scientists at institutions like Harvard, MIT, and the
University of Virginia have thoroughly discredited the concept of
man-made global warming in the last few years. So thoroughly,
indeed, that proponents of this dubious “sky is falling” theory are
now aiming their sound bites at aficionados of disaster movies and
the scanners of gaudy supermarket tabloids with Nostradumus’ latest
predictions of The End on the cover.
Their desperation shows in their attempt to claim that every
adverse bit of weather that makes it onto the Weather Channel is
triggered by carbon dioxide emitted from the exhaust pipes of SUVs
and the smokestacks of electric utilities. Yet hurricanes vary in
intensity and frequency from one year to the next — and science
long ago established that they are caused by the colossal forces of
nature rather than the relativity feeble activities of
humankind.
As Roy W. Spencer, the principal research scientist at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville, points out, numerous
hurricanes devastated America’s Atlantic and Gulf coastlines from
the 1930s through the 1950s. The National Hurricane Center, he
notes, has “been warning for many years the U.S. coast has had a
long run of relatively good luck” and that it was only a matter of
time before that streak ran out.
Hurricanes depend on a number of natural and interacting weather
actions, including weak shear (the change in wind speed and wind
direction at appropriate heights), high sea surface temperatures
that build up during the summer, and rapidly forming easterly waves
generated off the coast of Africa just south of the Sahara Desert.
All hurricanes are unpredictable until they actually start
happening. Spencer observes that we tend to forget “that unusual
weather is, well, usual.”
Yet the punches leveled by Charley, Frances and Ivan have
brought the doomsayers out of their caves, eager to blame these
catastrophic events on global warming. That phenomenon, they bleat,
is mostly the fault of Americans consuming more than their fair
share of the world’s energy supply — and because of their reckless
appetite for SUVs.
But blaming SUVs for “global climate change” is about as
scientifically sound as pawing through the entrails of a chicken to
divine the future. The ongoing multi-million dollar campaign to
enact costly controls of carbon dioxide emissions has nothing to do
with protecting the environment and everything to do with profiting
the European Union at the expense of the United States.
IN TRUTH, TONY BLAIR’S URGENT warning about the need to combat
“alarming and unsustainable” global warming is really a crude and
cynical attempt to fill the coffers of British companies like
energy giant BP — which now likes to style itself as being “Beyond
Petroleum.”
Under both the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the
McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act companies with low carbon
dioxide emissions with be allowed to sell “emissions credits” to
help other companies offset their higher emissions. The scheme is
worth tens of billions of dollars — so lucrative, in fact, that
Enron once tried to corner the trading market by as a near-monopoly
broker of the emission credits.
While rigid climate controls would add the stagnant economies of
the so-called “old” nations of Western Europe, most notably Blair’s
UK, France, and Germany, they would put a brake on full-throttle
economies in Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland,
among others. And they undoubtedly would plunge the United States
into a deep and prolonged recession imposing costs ranging from
$1,300 to more than $6,000 a year on every American household,
without affecting the slight amount of current global warming.
Seniors living on fixed incomes would be especially hard-hit by
this unwarranted and unwise federal intrusion into the market
place.
In order to comply, Americans would have to reduce their energy
use by nearly a third. In the first year alone, the price of
electricity would shoot up by 7 to 17 percent, the price of
gasoline by 12 to 29 percent, and the cost of coal — America’s
energy ace in the hole — by a staggering 51 to 140 percent,
according to the economic forecasting firm of Charles River
Associates.
That’s far too high a price for Americans to pay merely to
indulge Blair’s re-election fantasies. When the prime minister
brings his global warming proposal up for a vote at the G8 meeting
of the advanced industrialized nations in Scotland next year, the
U.S. should vigorously reject it.
Conquering growing global epidemics of AIDS, malaria and
tuberculosis and ending widespread starvation and chronic hunger
ought to be the G8’s top priorities. Blair can make his own case to
the British electorate without sabotaging the U.S. economy.
