Standing in the middle of the road

Tension is rising in the Bush White House: Meet America’s energy needs, or meet Kyoto targets? The two goals are mutually exclusive. The United States cannot meet its energy requirements without expanding the supply and use of fossil fuels. Kyoto targets cannot be met without reducing the use of fossil fuels. The Bush administration is sending mixed signals about which of the two goals it will pursue.

Energy Secretary Spence Abraham has made the rounds of Sunday talk shows, assuring the nation that a new energy policy is being developed, which will feature expanded exploration and utilization of American fossil fuel resources.

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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, however, told the G-8 Summit ministers that the Bush administration is not "backing away from Kyoto." She said that Bush views global warming as the "greatest environmental challenge that we face."

If Whitman is correct in her assessment of Bush’s attitude about global warming, America is in deep, deep trouble. We know that Whitman and Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, are influenced more by global warming hype than by global warming science. If the hype -- and international political pressure -- push Bush into accepting the Kyoto Protocol, get ready for California’s blackouts to roll across the country, while gasoline and diesel prices plunge a roller-coaster economy into chaos.

It went virtually unnoticed during the campaign but, even then, in a September 29 position paper on energy, Bush said he would seek legislation to "establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants," one of which is carbon dioxide.

Of course, carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than is oxygen. Both are natural gases upon which all life depends. But if Congress -- or the administration -- declares carbon dioxide to be a pollutant, then it becomes subject to EPA regulation under the authority of the Clean Air Acts. Once government has the authority to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide, it has the authority to regulate the production of carbon dioxide. This is precisely the goal of the Kyoto Protocol.

A draft of Bush’s budget speech was released the day before it was to be presented to Congress. It contained a single reference to a "multi-pollutant strategy." A barrage of phone calls and e-mails to various Bush officials throughout the day on Tuesday, persuaded advisers to remove the phrase before the speech was delivered.

The bigger picture

Almost lost in the struggle to find ways to control the use of fossil fuel is the reason controls were thought to be desirable in the first place: to prevent catastrophic global warming. But after more than ten years of intense scientific study and endless debate, there is little agreement on whether the planet is warming or cooling and whether or not the changes that are being observed have anything at all to do with human activity.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released a summary of its Third Assessment Report, which said that global warming followed an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution and may be much worse over the next century than had first been thought.

Almost simultaneously, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) issued an appeal to assist Mongolians who are experiencing their second consecutive disastrous winter known locally as a "dzud," or mass death of rural livestock herds.

Peter Harris, a consultant for the U.N. FAO, said "This current dzud is very serious, it is the most serious in 50 years. Temperatures are lower, and the snow is deeper." Temperatures as low as minus 56-degrees F have been recorded.

When observable reality differs from the pronouncements of the IPCC, those realities are often ignored, or incorporated into the IPCC propaganda as examples of anomalous "climate change" caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. Scientific evidence to support such claims, however, is rarely provided.

The evidence presented by the IPCC in support of its claims is not valid according to many of the scientists whose work is cited by the IPCC. One of the more outspoken critics of the IPCC process is Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a lead author of the Third Assessment Report.

Lindzen says that the IPCC uses summaries to "misrepresent" what the scientists say in their full report. The policy makers who write the summaries, deliberately use language that means different things to scientists and laymen; exploit public ignorance over quantitative matters; exploit what scientists can agree on while ignoring disagreements that may detract from the global warming agenda; and exaggerate the scientific accuracy, certainty and authority of undistinguished scientists.

Lindzen’s stinging criticism of the IPCC process and work product, debunked the widely-held view that the IPCC report represented a "consensus" of 2000 scientists. "None of the scientists were asked if they agreed with anything in the report, except for the one or two pages they worked on," Lindzen said.

The IPCC isn’t interested in getting the world’s best climate scientists but, rather, getting representation from 100 countries -- only a handful of which do significant research. "It is no small matter," said Lindzen, "that routine weather service functionaries from New Zealand to Tanzania are referred to as the world’s leading climate scientists."

The IPCC report was carried by all the major media and amplified through the press releases of dozens of environmental organizations without reference to the criticism offered by Lindzen and others.

Nor has there been recognition by the IPCC, or the mainstream media, of three recent scientific studies that shred the conventional global warming theory. A March 2000 report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, demonstrates that the climate models used by the IPCC have the cloud physics all wrong. "We found that there were terrible errors about clouds in all the models. If the clouds are wrong, there’s no way you can get water vapor right. They’re both intimately tied to each other," the article concludes.

Another study published in Nature (February 8, 2001), says the IPCC’s explanation as to why the earth has not warmed over the last 100 years as the climate models say it should have warmed, is all wet. The IPCC says that its models did not take into account the effect of aerosols that reflect solar radiation. Were it not for the aerosols (black soot particles), the IPCC says the planet would have warmed according to the computer models’ projections. The study’s author, Mark Jacobson, of Stanford University, says -- not so. Black soot particles actually absorb solar radiation, thereby forcing temperatures upwards. Still, the observed warming in the last century failed to conform to the climate models.

Here’s the simple fact: If the computer models are adjusted to conform to the observed warming patterns of the last century, there is no catastrophic warming projected for the next century. If the computer models forecast catastrophic warming for the next century, those models overstate the observed reality of the last century by several degrees.

Despite the IPCC’s erroneous claim that a global consensus has been reached on global warming science, no such consensus exists. Despite the IPCC’s claim that the use of fossil fuels will cause the earth’s temperature to rise by as much as 11 degrees F, the actual scientific studies fail to support such claims. Despite the IPCC’s claims of catastrophic weather events resulting from rising temperatures, the actual scientific studies fail to provide evidence.

Nevertheless, the Bush team, at least Whitman and O’Neill, are issuing statements suggesting that they have bought into the IPCC claims -- rather than the weigh the objective evidence offered by Lindzen, Jacobson, and a host of other climate scientists whose credentials are above reproach.

The U.N. has announced that it will resume the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in July. The talks, which collapsed at the Hague in November, were on hold until the recent statements made by Whitman. Apparently, the U.N. has been led to believe that the Bush administration will not scuttle the talks when they resume.

With the Bush people, as well as Republican Senator Bob Smith, Chair of the Senate Energy Committee, ready to support legislation to regulate carbon dioxide -- whether it needs regulating or not -- the Kyoto Protocol is far from dead. The Whitman-O’Neill branch of the Bush team appears ready to take control of carbon emissions, with or without Kyoto --exactly what the Clinton-Gore administration tried to do.

Energy Secretary Abraham, Senator Murkowski, and others, are working to develop an energy policy that will expand the use of fossil fuel to meet America’s needs in the 21st century. Whitman, O’Neill, Senator Smith, and others, are working to block the use of fossil fuel energy in the 21st century. George W cannot straddle this fence much longer.