From Free Life No 39, November 2001

Unlike the youngsters coming to University this year, I am slightly older. Not by much, but enough to remember that in the early 1980's, when I was at primary school, the dominant scientific view of the future of humanity was a gloomy one. The Soviets competed with the Americans in the production of nuclear weapons in order to make doubly sure that each of them was capable of destroying the world many times over. The Cold War arms race, as it was then known, was of human making and could thus be avoided [as it indeed was - hence me writing this article]. The true gloom had to do with a natural phenomenon that was beyond human ability to stop. This was called, I am not kidding, global cooling. Into the late 1980's, humanity was convinced, thanks to our infallible scientists and environmental activists, that the planet was cooling. The planet, it was reasoned, goes through cyclical periods of warming and cooling and we were in for that period of recurrent cooling, the so-called New Ice Age.

Within ten years, everything got turned upside down. Suddenly we were no longer going to freeze to death. Now, the infallible scientists told us, we were going to fry to death. Amazing what difference ten years can make! Except now, we could do something about it. We could, for example, limit our usage of electricity, cars and all other technological innovations that the West has so labouriously produced since the Industrial Revolution. Progress, in other words, became an enemy and therein rests the problem. Were the debate to continue on a purely scientific level, all would be fine. But, instead, the scientific debate regarding the planet's climate got taken over by groups with a political agenda; this political agenda is anti-capitalism.

Anti-capitalism around the world is constituted of a multifaceted and truly international body of greatly diverging groups. Some are concerned with domestic inequalities in wealth possession, while others are concerned with uneven distribution of wealth on a global scale. There are those who believe that industrialisation of the world and a departure from the bliss of agricultural lifestyle were to humanity's detriment and then there are those who believe that the greatest tragedy that happened to the world is the very existence of humanity itself. But, they are all tied together by one goal - destruction of the free market capitalism, which they blame for all the problems and imperfections in the world. The hey-day of these groups came in the 1960's, when the upsurge of revolutionary student movements protesting the US involvement in Vietnam truly did threaten the survival of the Western way of life. Vietnam was a period in history that most Americans would rather forget, but no matter how ill-advised the US involvement there was, the students in the 1960's were profoundly wrong in assuming that the natural alternative to the USA, Soviet communism, was in any way "better". The 1960's glorification of terrorists, such as Che Guevara, terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades and Red Army Faction, and tyrants like Lenin, Mao and Castro was naive. It was almost as naive as their belief that Ho Chi Min was just another Vietnamese patriot, that the Soviet Union cared for the well-being of its people and that the people behind the Iron Curtain wanted to remain behind it.

The 1980's saw dramatic changes as the reforms of Reagan and Thatcher re-invigorated Western values of democracy and free markets. Before the end of the decade, the people of Eastern Europe took to the streets and send their communist dictators packing. These seismic changes were re-affirmed by the Washington Consensus, which stipulated that the two pillars of the Western way of life, government by the people and enterprise economy, were indeed the ways for humanity to move forward. One thing was overlooked, though. The very same people, who in the 1960's protested against all that the West had stood for, were now in the position of power. They occupied important political positions, influential professorial chairs and, most importantly, editorial posts in major newspapers and on TV. Communism was dead in Eastern Europe and Russia, but it was alive and well in the minds and hearts of many of our decision-makers. Environmentalism and the apparent threat of global warming was, therefore, a Godsend. It has provided our Marxist elite with a perfect excuse to curtail the free markets under the false pretexts of imminent danger to humanity. But, is global warming truly as dangerous? According to the TV and newspaper reports, it is. Apparently, the "scientific consensus" has been reached and that is it - debate is finished; game over. Not so fast!

The International Symposium on the Greenhouse Controversy that took place in Leipzig in 1995, for example, maintains that global warming is a hoax! Unbelievable? No, you have just never heard of it. Why not? Remember what I have said about certain people dominating the Western media and intellectual debate? That is why! The views of the scholars at the Leipzig Conference simply do not conform to the dominant paradigm. So, what did these scientists say? Let the text of The Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change speak for itself:

As independent scientists concerned with atmospheric and climate problems, we - along with many of our fellow citizens - are apprehensive about emission targets and timetables adopted at the Climate Conference held in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997. This gathering of politicians from some 160 signatory nations aims to impose on citizens of the industrialized nations, - but not on others - a system of global environmental regulations that include quotas and punitive taxes on energy fuels to force substantial cuts in energy use within 10 years, with further cuts to follow. Stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide - the announced goal of the Climate Treaty -- would require that fuel use be cut by as much as 60 to 80 percent - worldwide!

Energy is essential for economic growth. In a world in which poverty is the greatest social pollutant, any restriction on energy use that inhibits economic growth should be viewed with caution. We understand the motivation to eliminate what are perceived to be the driving forces behind a potential climate change; but we believe the Kyoto Protocol - to curtail carbon dioxide emissions from only part of the world community - is dangerously simplistic, quite ineffective, and economically destructive to jobs and standards-of-living. More to the point, we consider the scientific basis of the 1992 Global Climate Treaty to be flawed and its goal to be unrealistic. The policies to implement the Treaty are, as of now, based solely on unproven scientific theories, imperfect computer models - and the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from an increase in greenhouse gases, requiring immediate action. We do not agree. We believe that the dire predictions of a future warming have not been validated by the historic climate record, which appears to be dominated by natural fluctuations, showing both warming and cooling. These predictions are based on nothing more than theoretical models and cannot be relied on to construct far-reaching policies.

As the debate unfolds, it has become increasingly clear that - contrary to the conventional wisdom - there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, most climate specialists now agree that actual observations from both weather satellites and balloon-borne radiosondes show no current warming whatsoever - in direct contradiction to computer model results.

Historically, climate has always been a factor in human affairs - with warmer periods, such as the medieval "climate optimum," playing an important role in economic expansion and in the welfare of nations that depend primarily on agriculture. Colder periods have caused crop failures, and led to famines, disease, and other documented human misery. We must, therefore, remain sensitive to any and all human activities that could affect future climate.

However, based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions. For this reason, we consider the drastic emission control policies deriving from the Kyoto conference - lacking credible support from the underlying science - to be ill-advised and premature.

This document was signed by 80 scientists from around the world. They include, professors from renowned universities of Oxford, London, Nurnberg, Kiel, Stockholm, Vienna, Berlin, Tubingen, Jena, Gent, Moscow, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Rice, Yale and Penn State as well as meteorologists from all over the USA. One such signatory is Professor S. F. Singer, the President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Fairfax, Virginia. According to Singer, humanity is called upon to make sacrifices that "are supposed to save the world from a global warming catastrophe that exists only in non-validated computers models and in the vivid imagination of environmental zealots". "Despite 50 percent increase in atmospheric green house gases in the last 150 years", Singer continues, "the climate refuses to show the warming trend predicted by theoretical computer models. The only truly global data, available since 1979 from weather satellites circling the Earth, actually show a slight cooling trend".

These facts are, of course, ignored by the report published by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is significant that this report, which forms the basis of environmentalist assertions, silently underwent some profound changes. While at the time of the Rio summit the IPCC claimed that global climate changes were consistent with the computer-model predictions, by 1996 the panel abandoned this claim. Moreover and contrary to the assertions made in the media, the IPCC is not constituted of 2,500 scientists and although it is true that the report "lists" hundreds of names as "contributors" and "reviewers", it does not show whether they agree with the report's conclusions. It is also important to note that the IPCC summary does not actually claim that temperature will rise between 1.8 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the next hundred years. These numbers are results of hypothetical scenarios and, again, computer-generated models. In fact, the report "specifically disclaims that studies of climate patterns can quantify the magnitude of a greenhouse gas effect on climate". Another profoundly misunderstood phenomenon is the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. With all the talk about "dangerous levels" of carbon dioxide it is easy to forget that no one has the faintest idea about what level is and what level is not dangerous. "Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide", Singer contents, "may well be beneficial"

Higher level of carbon dioxide is certainly one explanation for the improvement of tree growth and agricultural produce we have seen in the past. Similarly, the scare concerning the greenhouse effect on the sea levels is misplaced. "Ocean warming leads to more evaporation and subsequent precipitation and ice accumulation in the polar regions that cause a drop in sea level - not a rise".

I cannot but contend that some members of our society, especially those who are responsible for perpetrating the above myths, have a kind of Freudian death wish - a constant need to believe that the world is coming to a terrible end. These people, it is apparent, can only strive on crisis and crisis is what gives credence to their crackpot ideas that would normally have no place in a rational debate. And so, before you join yet another feel-good activist group at the University of St Andrews, I hope that you will remember that there are two sides to the story of global warming. I hope that you will see through the global gloom-mongers' agenda and appreciate that they are not immune from ideological bias - a charge they so often levy against others.

[You will find the text of the Leipzig Declaration at the following URL: www.sepp.org/leipzig.html]