Global warming is a complicated question. Is it our responsibility as citizens to form an opinion on it, or should we just leave it to the experts?

On questions of policy involving science or technology, it is particularly important that we resist the temptation to forsake our civic responsibility because of excessive trust in the capacity of "experts" to make decisions for us. We are not all scientists, but, we are still citizens of this republic. As such, we are obliged to exercise our judgment on science-based issues, especially when the experts disagree or when the issues have clear implications for the community as a whole. There are few purely "scientific" public policy questions because public policy questions by definition cannot be considered adequately in the light of scientific criteria alone. Our decisions about technology must always be kept in right relation to the economic, political and moral principles that alone can ensure that technology continues to serve the true good of the men who create it.

The left is adept at attempting to justify proposals for the wholesale restructuring of society by insisting that such proposals are just "what the doctor ordered." Environmental policy is particularly fertile soil for this deployment of supposed scientific expertise in the service of what Thomas Sowell calls "cosmic visions" -- fuzzily thought out but massively disruptive recipes for social change. But, while the doctor never really "orders" us to take our medicine, liberals do. That's why a citizenry that intends to preserve its liberty should pay close attention when elites begin telling us that supposed verdicts of science will require that we change important aspects of our lives.

One area where liberals are clearly using the authority of science to try to force us to take the medicine of social reorganization is "global warming." Accordingly, we should take great care to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate science on this topic and judge any verdict of the "scientists" by the criteria of common sense and political principle. The following is my own thinking on the matter.

I share the conviction of many that the earth is the Lord's and that we as God's stewards must care for its well being. However, translating this weighty obligation into good public policy is no simple task. We should avoid the temptation of assuming, without further ado, that if it is our duty to care about something, we must necessarily put that something under government control.

It is our duty to care about the poor; I do not believe that means that we should become socialists. It is our duty to care about the souls of our fellow men; I do not believe that means we should put the state in charge of religion. The conventional wisdom in environmental matters is that more government is always better. Yet recent bitter experience suggests otherwise. Russia and Eastern Europe suffer from some of the world's worst ecological disasters, precisely because the former Soviet system suppressed markets and property rights. Under communism, factory managers had no incentives to conserve resources and ordinary people had no legal standing to bring polluters to justice.

On the specific issue of global warming, I am impressed by a variety of empirical evidence that suggests we have little or nothing to fear. The earth seems to have warmed about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. However, that is only half the amount projected by the climate models underpinning the Kyoto Protocol. Moreover, much of that modest warming occurred prior to 1940, whereas 80 percent of the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide occurred after 1940. This suggests that much of this century's slight warming may be due to natural factors such as fluctuations in the output of solar energy. More important, in the troposphere, the critical atmospheric "weather zone" where the models predict the strongest "warming signal," highly accurate satellite and weather balloon measurements show almost no net warming over the past 20 years. From such facts, I conclude that the climate system is probably much less "sensitive" to "greenhouse forcing" than the climate models assume.

In contrast to the unverified projections of the climate models, literally hundreds of laboratory and field experiments demonstrate that virtually all food crops, trees, and plants raised in CO2-enriched environments grow faster, stronger, and more profusely with greater resistance to both temperature and pollution stress. One leading expert on plant biology believes that about 10 percent of the increase in world agricultural productivity over the past five decades should be attributed to the increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

As we know, all animal life depends, directly or indirectly, on plant life. For those who view the course of human events within a religious framework, it is not unreasonable to speculate that mankind, as if led by an invisible hand, has been engaged in a vast recycling project. Through our utilization of fossil fuels, we are taking the carbon dioxide plants removed from the air millions of years ago and putting it back into the atmosphere where it can once again be converted for the benefit of living things. In any event, I believe the balance of evidence suggests that man-made CO2 is not destabilizing the climate system but, rather, enhancing global food security and bio-diversity.

Even if global warming turns out to be a real problem, the Kyoto Protocol would be the wrong solution. Barring far more serious disasters -- like major military conflicts involving nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, mankind in 2050 or 2100 will enjoy far greater wealth and technological prowess than we do today. Posterity will be much better equipped than we are to mitigate, or adapt to, climate change, whether natural or human-induced.

However, posterity will not achieve the full resilience and security of superior wealth and technology if we sabotage economic growth through the imposition of costly regulatory schemes like the Kyoto Protocol. Bear in mind that Kyoto advocates view the Protocol as just a beginning -- the first of a series of energy-suppression treaties, each mandating stricter controls and encompassing more countries than its predecessor.

A question I hope all will ponder is whether the Kyoto agenda is compatible with the welfare of developing countries. Typhoons kill more people in Bangladesh than hurricanes do in Florida, not because typhoons are deadlier than hurricanes, but because the people of Bangladesh are among the world's poorest. Poverty always has been, and remains, the most lethal social pollutant. To a great degree, poverty is a function of limited energy supply. Indeed, there is an amazing correlation worldwide between per capita income and per capita electricity consumption.

For most people in most countries, fossil fuels provide the most abundant and affordable actual and potential source of electricity. That is why the prestigious International Energy Agency projects that 90 percent of all new energy demand worldwide over the next 20 years will be supplied by fossil fuels. The Kyoto Protocol is at loggerheads with one of the broadest and deepest trends of the global marketplace. This should tell us that the Protocol and its successor treaties could not be implemented without harming the poor. I fear that a Kyoto energy-starved world would be a world with more starving people.

I suspect behind the Kyoto Protocol is the age-old lust for power. Carbon dioxide is not only the fundamental nutrient of the planetary food chain, it is also the most ubiquitous byproduct of modern civilization. Manufacturing, electric power generation, farming, aircraft, and automobiles -- all are major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. To successfully control carbon dioxide emissions, government must regulate practically everything. The Kyoto Protocol would establish such regulation on a global scale.

Consider also that the climate forecasts fueling the Kyoto enterprise are all based, explicitly or otherwise, on long-term technological forecasts. That is, to know how human activity will change the climate over the next century, one must also know what kinds of energy technologies will be prevalent 50 to 100 years hence. Many of the same individuals and organizations who only 20 years ago were confidently predicting oil depletion and chronic energy shortages by the year 2000 are now confidently predicting what will happen to the climate in 50 or 100 years. This is hubris of a very high order.

The Kyoto Protocol is, thus, a scheme of global central planning based on claims of greater-than-human foresight and knowledge. Does it not bear a strong resemblance to the Tower of Babel?