Everyone has a pet peeve. And mine is this: If scientists think they can predict the weather a century from now, why can't they tell if it's going to rain next week?
Local forcasting hasn't changed much since Mark Twain spoofed it in 1876: "Probable nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward and points in between; high ans low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; and probable areas of rain, snow hail and drought, succeeded or preceeded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning." Like astrologers, climatologists often couch their prophecies vaguely, so they'll seem right no matter what happens.The track record of greenhouse gurus -- those who warn that apocalyptic global warming will supposedly result from burning fossil fuels -- is far worse. These hubristic folk who call themselves global-climate modelers issue "greenhouse" pronouncements of Delphic vagueness and devise ingenious rationalizations when their spurious claims don't fit the facts. For they can't afford to admit fallibility. The political stakes are too high.
The greenhouse industry -- consisting of environmental groups, international bureaucracies, U.S. regulatory agencies, federally supported climate researchers, media empires and grandstanding politicians -- is running scared. Evidence against its favorite calamity is mounting.
But rather than admit error, this establishment resorts to Twain-like forecasting, while continuing to push its agenda reguardless. Consider: Ballons and satellites reveal that last year was the cooldest in a decade and last winter among the chilliest on record. Global temperatures have been dropping for 20 years. Ground-based measurements haven't detected statistically significant warming in ten years.
Naturally, such good news distresses climate modelers, who contort science in efforts to reject this data. At first, these theorists blamed the "Pinatubo effect" for the lack of warming. Dust from the 1991 Phillipine volcano, they insisted, cooled the Earth, offsetting global warming. When the cold continued long after Pinatubo, they then claimed that emissions from industrial smokestacks were preventing warming by filtering sunlight.
And when skeptics noted that the Southern Hemisphere, which has little industry, also hadn't warmed -- these scientific spin-doctors had to come up with yet another excuse. And they did. The Earth may not be warming, they conceeded, but "extreme events" are multiplying.
By this act, American weather science had returned to Mark Twain. Extreme events -- tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and record cold and heat -- have been occuring for more than 4 billion years. And since they happen at random intervals, it's not possible to test if they're increasing or not. And what isn't testable isn't science.
Indeed, another gambit makes clear how far some defenders of the official theory will go to save their cherished hypothesis. Like shooting the messenger who brings bad news, two scholars now argue that the satellite measurements are simply wrong. And how do they know? Their computers told them so.
That's right: Since satellite data show computer projections are false, these modelers simply reject the data.
Ignoring facts that don't fit is theology, not science. Besides, baloons independently confirm the satellite results. So not everyone is fooled. Increasing numbers of climatologists are harboring doubts. And other countries are beginning to question the need to take drastic action to avert what may be a non threat. At last summer's international conference on warming in Geneva, Switzerland, many nations refused to sign the declaration pushed by the Clinton administration which calls for drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
As forcing reductions in energy use requires imposing draconian "carbon taxes" that would cost families hundreds of dollars annually, the AFL-CIO last February joined the skeptics' camp. The Rio Treaty on Climate Change, the union noted, exempts the dirtiest polluters, such as China, and thus would cause "the loss of high-paying U.S. jobs."
But such doubts don't deter warming bandwagoneers. International bureaucrats ar working overtime to put a binding agreement in place, and Vice Preasident Al Gore, who's already made a good living on global warming, will soon launch an agressive campaign to sell this accord to the public. While a senator chairing the House Science, Technology and Space Committee, Gore turned the federal research establishment into his personal feifdom, producing polically correct hypotheses on demand. Now he hopes to ride this Trojan Horse into the presidency.
Thus, the real dangers we face are not melting ice caps and spreading deserts, but policies designed to avert fictional calamities. If carbon taxing and/or energy rationing become a reality, living standards will drop, liberties will be lost and science will have found it traded its birthright -- the independent quest for truth -- for a mess of Al Gore's pottage."
Meanwhile, count on hearing global warming scare stories indefinately. As Mark Twain said, "One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives."
This article was written in 1997.