Global Warming Fundamentalists This is nuclear winter without the nukes

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post, 05 December 1997

The world is meeting in Kyoto, Japan, to decide how much wreckage to visit upon the Western
economies to prevent global warming. Kyoto aims to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
which would seriously curtail energy use and, with it, economic growth. All under the premise
that humans produce global warming and that global warming will produce a human catastrophe.
Is this true?

There has been a very slight warming of the earth’s atmosphere in this century (although one
still has to explain why satellite and balloon data show no net temperature rise in the past 19
years). But first, it is not clear how much is caused by natural variation only. Second, even
assuming a substantial human contribution, it is not clear what, say, a doubling of carbon dioxide
(CO 2 ) emissions would do to temperatures.

You get can get answers by modeling. But scientific models are notoriously subject to the
tweaking of underlying assumptions. The predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change have already been significantly modified. In 1990 it predicted a 6-degree (F) rise by 2100.
The prediction now is down to a 3 -degree rise, a 40 percent drop. And there is a huge range of
uncertainty: The lower-end estimate is less than 2 degrees F.

But uncertainty is a feeling foreign to global warming fundamentalists, many of them now
gathered in Kyoto. Take that great American evangelist, Vice President Gore, a last-minute
attendee. Now, Gore may turn out to be the environmentalists’ villain because he fears infuriating
his labor allies at home if he agrees to serious curbs on U.S. CO 2 (and thus energy) production.
But whatever he ends up doing for personal political reasons, it is clear what he believes. Just two
months ago, he likened those who question global warming to tobacco executives who with a
“straight face” denied that smoking causes cancer. This is a serious charge: not just error, but bad
faith.

This attitude is echoed by many scientists. Stephen Schneider, a Stanford scientist and
participant at Clinton and Gore’s Global Climate Change Roundtable last July, has said that when
it comes to global warming it is “journalistically irresponsible to present both sides.”

It is worth noting that 25 years ago this same Schneider was vociferously denying global
warming. Even a tenfold increase in human production of carbon dioxide, he wrote, “which at the
present rate of input is not expected within the next several thousand years” is “unlikely to
produce a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth.” Indeed, “the doubling of carbon dioxide” —
which is what Kyoto is trying so desperately to prevent — “would produce a temperature change
of less than one degree [centigrade].”

Schneider argued then that the real threat was global cooling: The production of aerosols
screening earth from the sun could produce “a decrease of the mean surface temperature by as
much as 3.5 degrees centigrade,” which “if sustained over a period of several years . . . could be
sufficient to trigger an ice age.”

This is nuclear winter without the nukes. And this was no offhanded comment. This was a paper
in the prestigious journal Science, complete with equations containing a gaudy excess of
exponents and Greek subscripts.

Nor was Schneider alone. In the 1970s, which were — surprise! — cold, global cooling was the
vogue. Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, said in 1975 that “the threat of a new ice age
must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for
mankind.” And Science Digest declared that “how carefully we monitor our atmospheric pollution
will have direct bearing on the arrival and nature of this weather crisis” — i.e., a new “ice age.”

All this doom-saying provoked J. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration to remark in 1976 that “whenever there is a cold wave, they [the media] seek out a
proponent of the ice-age-is-coming school and put his theories on page one. . . . Whenever there
is a heat wave . . . they turn to his opposite number [for a prediction of] a kind of heat death of
the earth.”

It is one thing to change your mind. It is another to then, with the zeal of the convert, write the
view you have just abandoned out of polite society, as does Schneider by saying that journalists
shouldn’t even present the non-global warming view, and as does Gore when he makes skeptics
into the moral equivalent of tobacco executives. Ironically, as climate change predictions become
more malleable and contingent, climate change activists become more inflexible and intolerant.

The ease with which politicians, popularizers and even scientists can be caught up in popular
enthusiasms for one doomsday or another should give us pause. This is not a call for ignoring
climate change. It is a call for a modicum of humility before we go ahead and wreck the good life
we’ve developed over 200 years in the name of a theory.