As billions of little light bulbs brighten America this holiday
season, Al Gore is calling for thousands across the nation to
interrupt their regularly scheduled activities and hold house
parties showing his environmental cri de coeur.
Gore announced recently on the Oprah Winfrey Show that Americans
should congregate this Saturday, December 16, to watch and discuss
his DVD, An Inconvenient Truth, advertised as “a true
story about the hard science and real threats of global
warming.”
The idea is to demonstrate that “action” is wanted on climate
change.
If climate alarmists are to be believed, Americans must cut
their electricity use substantially, and soon, to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions associated with fossil-fuel combustion.
Celebratory holiday lighting — what doomsayer Paul Ehrlich once
called “garish commercial Christmas displays” — would surely be
the first to go, coming before indoor lighting, cooking, heating,
and air conditioning.
But are these changes really necessary for the United States,
the world’s most prolific user of energy? The good news — and a
reason for holiday cheer — is that the science behind rapid,
disruptive global warming scenarios is murky at best. Though the
debate is highly politicized and emotionally charged, good science
is beginning to drive out bad.
The Kyoto Protocol and other sledgehammer approaches to cutting
greenhouse-gas emissions in the advanced countries are coming under
intellectual, not just political, assault.
A sampling of recent issues of Science, the journal of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shows that
peer-reviewed studies dispute virtually all the tenets behind
climate alarmism. A November 17 feature, “False Alarm: Atlantic
Conveyor Belt Hasn’t Slowed Down After All,” rebuts the hyped
hypothesis that melting ice from global warming (read: man-made
global warming) would disrupt ocean currents and plunge Europe into
an Ice Age.
The same Science report takes on the idea that warming
causes drastic cooling, the complicated, and ironic scenario Al
Gore said “some scientists are seriously worried about.”
Science comments that even if global warming were
cooling specific regions (a big if), “it would be decades before
the change would be noticeable above the noise.”
And here, in a nutshell, is what the climatology debate is
about: if and how much the human influence on climate is detectable
above natural variability.
For instance, rapid rises in sea level produced by global
warming is another popular alarm, one very relevant for residents
of the Texas Gulf Coast area. But as the November 24 issue of
Science says, “It remains unclear whether the recent rate
increase [since 1993] reflects an acceleration in sea-level rise or
a natural fluctuation.”
Indeed, sea level has been rising for well over a century for
the same natural reasons that brought the end of a little ice age.
What scientists are measuring and debating concerns not feet but
inches, and fractions thereof, over many decades. This hardly seems
the crisis scenario that Al Gore portrays.
Gore claims, “There is now a strong, new emerging consensus that
global warming is indeed linked to a significant increase in both
the duration and intensity of hurricanes.”
But hurricane specialists disagree. The November 10
Science says, “The best theory and modeling still indicate
the ocean temperature has only a minimal effect on storms.”
Exaggerated forecasts of disrupted ocean circulation, rapid
sea-level rise, and more intense hurricanes make for splashy
headlines, but sober science suggests that these scares du
jour may go the way of yesterday’s alarms over global cooling,
the population bomb, and mineral-resource exhaustion.
Nonetheless, one part of these scare stories is genuinely
frightening: the heavy-handed government intervention that
advocates always look to as the source of salvation. Yesterday’s
foes of the free market were socialists, communists, and
Keynesians. Today’s are greens who want government engineering to
“stabilize” the climate and ensure “sustainability.”
I will not be watching Al Gore’s quasi-sci-fi horror movie this
Saturday night. I’ll probably be driving through neighborhoods of
people I don’t even know, enjoying the gift of their holiday
lights. And to them I say: Don’t fall for exaggerations. Enjoy your
regularly scheduled activities, and keep the lights on.
