CIVIL DEFENSE PERSPECTIVES

July 2007 (vol. 23, #5)
1601 N Tucson Blvd #9, Tucson AZ 85716
c 2007 Physicians for Civil Defense

The victims are voluntary, and the only sanction is social disapproval. But the show illustrates the “global warming alarmists' eagerness to reach into the smallest details of our private existence and re-arrange our lifestyle to fit the austere requirements of their political ideology,” writes Robert Tracinski (www.realclearpolitics.com 6/29/07).

As Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who lived most of his life under a Communist tyranny, declared: global warming hysteria had replaced Communism as “the biggest threat to freedom,...the market economy, and prosperity.” Radical environmentalism and Communism have much in common.

Top-down, Global Central Planning
Unlike SO₂, the model for emissions trading, CO₂ is the inevitable product of complete combustion. Any serious reduction in emissions will require a suppression of fuel combustion. All industry, not just one sector, is involved.

The most ambitious plan to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, measured in CO₂ equivalents, below 535 ppm would require an estimated 3% reduction in global GDP by 2030, according to Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which met behind closed doors in Bangkok (Bohannon J, Science 2007;316:812-814). That would be $300 billion in the U.S. with a GDP of $14 trillion.

Costs would not be evenly distributed; massive redistribution of wealth is contemplated. Industries are jockeying for position. Under the proposed Low Carbon Economy Act, about $1.34 trillion would be handed out to global-warming special interests between 2012 and 2030, notes Steven Milloy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (foxnews.com 7/16/07).

Under the noses of most national antitrust laws, giant oil, grain, auto, and genetic engineering corporations are consolidating research, production, processing, and distribution chains for food and fuel under one industrial roof (Holt-Giménez E, Int Herald Tribune 7/10/07).

Despite posturing about the “ethics of allocation between richer and poorer people” (Stern N, Taylor C, Science 2007;317: 203-204), constraints on the use of hydrocarbon fuels will be most harmful to nations now trying to lift themselves from misery and poverty. At the DDP annual meeting, John Meredith spoke eloquently about the devastating effect of the Green agenda on African aspirations to develop.

With Communism, chronic shortages were a constant embarrassment. But to the Greens, privation is a virtue–a necessary aspect of reducing one's “carbon footprint.”

But while the great change in governments' attitudes during the preparation of the 2007 IPCC report gives advocates of carbon rationing “grounds for optimism,” there's a problem: “[C]hanges may be opposed by various vested interests, as well as by the desires of consumers–who are also, in many countries, voters” (Hopkin M, Nature 2007;447:120-121).

The Role of Propaganda, under a Cloak of Science
The intensity of efforts to persuade the public is cranking up, and it's paying off. In his book and movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has accomplished something “even harder than modeling climate.” He has helped “bring about a change of opinion in a resistant public.” He does make “provisional conclusions sound more definite than a practicing scientist might.” And he “shows graphs with hardly a mention of the numbers on the axes” (Holt R, Science 2007;317:198-199).

In fact, he sometimes omits the numbers altogether. Noah Robinson supplied the missing temperature scale–conclusively showing that the 650,000-year ice-core record disagrees with the human-caused global warming hypothesis.

But Gore succeeded, admirably, where researchers have failed for years to “draw any attention to the matter” (ibid.).

Yet “[t]he influence of the denial machine remains strong,” writes Sharon Begley (Newsweek 8/13/07). Just last year, polls found that 64% of Americans thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement on climate change; 39% still think so.

Any scientist who speaks out against the human-caused global warming orthodoxy–and the pogrom against affordable, abundant energy for which it is the rationale–is targeted for character assassination. Fred Singer, for example, was once paid for writing a report in which he expressed skepticism about claims concerning the dangers of second-hand smoke. This taints him forever as a tool of “polluters” and Big Tobacco.

Newsweek is not alone in attacking those who hold a politically incorrect view. In a favorable review of Chris Mooney's book The Republican War on Science, Naomi Oreskes justifies lumping together “outliers” on global warming, CFCs and ozone depletion, abortion and breast cancer, adult stem-cell research, ballistic missile defense, sex education, intelligent design, and other unrelated subjects. All “involve promotion of a right-wing political agenda, and...grotesque misrepresentations of scientific evidence” (Science 2005;310:5745).

Actually, all involve questions of freedom of thought, informed consent, scientific rigor–and the defense of Americans and their rights to life, liberty, and property.

“Denialists” and Coercion
Comparing opponents of radical environmentalism with Holocaust deniers is not a random slur. James Hansen writes: “If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains–no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.” There are costs, but “[w]hat did World War II cost us economically?” asks Martin Hoffert of NYU. “Does the question even make sense?” (Bohannon).

Are Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for “denialists” an extremist fantasy? Our flagship journals ask: How can we make “people choose something they don't want”? (ibid.) “It's about what governments are willing to do....” (Hopkin, op cit.).

A Well-Funded Machine

Recent decades have seen “the largest peacetime outpouring of government propaganda, all devoted to convincing us that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing a global warming catastrophe,” writes Robert Tracinski. The German government “has begun paying authors to inundate Wikipedia with articles boosting `renewable resources.' So much for the Internet as the ultimate free marketplace for ideas: now one cartel will be supported by government subsidies.”

Australian journalist Margo Kingston wrote: “David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offense–it is a crime against humanity after all.”

Al Gore brands dissent from elite opinion an “assault on reason” that has “broken” the marketplace of ideas–and must be “fixed” by government (Tracinski, realclearpolitics 5/23/07).

Michael Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) sent a threat letter to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute: “If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is asking the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy, and the EPA to reconsider their membership in ACORE (McCaslin J, Wash Times 7/27/07).

Despite dozens of articles in top journals and an important discovery on extrasolar planets, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University, probably because he also coauthored a book, The Privileged Planet, that contains arguments for intelligent design. Physicist Robert Park of the Univ. of Maryland said, “He has established that he does not understand the scientific process” (Nature 2007;447:364).

Climate Modelers Proved Wrong

In his talk on the 2007 IPPC report at the DDP meeting, S. Fred Singer explained that all the greenhouse models predict that warming is maximal in mid altitudes at low latitudes. The expected increase is by a factor of about three at 10 km in the tropics. This is the “human fingerprint.” Observations by radiosonde, however, do not show this pattern; in fact, there is a slight decrease over the equator.

The IPCC announced–shamelessly–that there would be a 3-month delay in the release of the report so that the body of the report could be made to conform to the [politically driven] summary. This report is in some ways more honest than previous reports, Singer said–it has not blatantly doctored graphs–but it is still wrong. It claims a 90—99% certainty that there is human-caused global warming, but presents no evidence to back up this assertion. The fraudulent hockey-stick graph has simply disappeared from the report, without comment.

Temperature reconstructions from proxies other than tree rings show no unusual 20th century warming, Singer said. Tree growth is affected by many factors other than temperature, including CO₂ fertilization, other nutrients, and precipitation.

Expert review comments on the IPCC report, released for the first time, show that literally thousands of responses critical of the report were ignored or rejected by IPCC lead authors (Hoare J, Environ Climate News, September 2007).

Surface Weather Station Data Questioned

The greatest positive temperature trend of any station in the U.S. Historic Climate Network (USHCN) is recorded in Tucson, Arizona. The site is called the “worst station ever” in location and configuration, and thus primarily documents the urban heat island effect. It's in an asphalt-covered parking lot on the campus of the University of Arizona, and the thermometer is located too close to the ground (DuHamel J, People for the West Newsletter, August 2007).

Other questionable sites are located a few feet from air-conditioning exhaust vents, near burn barrels, over the effluent grates for wastewater, or between buildings that restrict air flow (Spencer R, TCSDaily 8/15/07).

Many surface stations have been closed down, Dr. Singer noted. A large fraction of the remaining ones are at airports.

Is There a Sun-Climate Link?

“No solar hiding place for greenhouse skeptics,” announces the headline for a news article (Nature 2007;448:8-9). “A study has confirmed that there are no grounds to blame the Sun for recent global warming.” The analysis by Lockwood and Fröhlich “shows that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays.”

In a Newsweek poll, “only 17%” got the “correct” answer to the question: “Which of these is not causing global warming today?” Thus, 83% picked SUVs or rice fields, rather than the sun. Maybe it warmed us in the past, but not now. People haven't yet gotten the message that Lockwood and Fröhlich, “galvanized“ to do their study by media reports such as the BBC's The Great Global Warming Swindle, have “driven the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the sun responsible for present global warming” (Nature, op. cit.).

Since 1990, solar influences are downward; therefore, recent global warming can't be caused by the sun. But note: there is also no warming trend in the past decade, writes David Whitehouse (Telegraph 7/15/07, cited in TWTW 7/21/07).

Geoengineering Making a Comeback

If the earth became too warm, some long-marginalized ideas could be revived to cool it. One method, compared to an artificial volcano, would inject tiny sulphate particles high into the atmosphere. Mount Pinatubo might have cooled the earth by 0.7 C had there not been a simultaneous El Niño. The cooling would occur immediately, rather than over decades, and last only a year or two. Aerosols cool only during the day, and more in summer than winter (Morton O, Nature 447:132-136). Another idea is to launch orbital sunshades or mirrors–16 trillion of them. But that would cost around $5 trillion, compared with about $400 million/y for the sulphates (Wall St J 6/22/07). The “climate community” tends to be hostile, Morton reports. Geoengineering would permit us to continue to use evil hydrocarbon fuels, and it was suggested by Lowell Wood and Edward Teller. Anyway, he said, we don't understand enough about the climate to tamper with it!