Lie Back and Enjoy It

If you think that the globe is not getting warmer, you could be closer to the inconvenient truth than most academic and media elites. “Bruce Hall [2007] has reviewed climate data for the 50 US states; his chart of the number of record-high temperatures by year goes back to 1884,” the Science and Environmental Policy Project reports. “The chart shows 25 extreme high temperature records set in 1934 and 29 in 1936, but none in 2001, 2003, 2004, or 2005.”

“There is no evidence from U. S. records that extreme high temperatures are on the increase.” The SEPP was founded by climatologist S. Fred Singer, the first director of the National Weather Service.

Even when temperatures have risen in world history, Dr. Singer and associates point out, man-made gases are probably not the reason. “The climate cooled from 1940-1975 while CO2 was rising rapidly,” Dr. Singer and company note. “Moreover, there has been no warming trend apparent, especially in global data from satellites, since about 2001, despite a continuous rapid rise in CO2 emissions.”

“The UK Met Office issued a 10-year forecast in August 2007 in which they predict further warming is unlikely before 2009.” The UK Met Office is the British equivalent of our own weather service.

What happens is that the doomsday predictions are based on U.N. calculations of what the temperatures might become. The scientists affiliated with the SEPP compared these projections to actual temperatures.

“While all GH [Greenhouse] models show an increasing warming trend with altitude, peaking at around 10 km [kilometers] at roughly two times the surface value, the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result: no increasing warming but rather a slight cooling with altitude in the tropical zone,” the SEPP reports. The SEPP report, Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate, came out in March.

The balloons that they write of measure temperature change. Speaking of Sea Levels, the SEPP offers a take on them that differs radically from that of Al Gore.

“At one of the allegedly most endangered sites, the Maldives, condemned to disappear soon into the sea, both satellite altimetry and tide-gauge records have not registered any significant SL rise,” the SEPP informs us. “Contrary of IPCC expectations, sea level there fell by 20 to 30 cm [centimeters] in the past 30 years (Mormer 2004).”

The IPCC is the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose modeling most public officials swear by. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the closest thing to a global warming naysayer among the leading presidential candidates this year, wants to aggressively combat the supposed effects of global warming with aggressive government action.

“If we are wrong, we give our children a greener planet,” Sen. McCain has said. “If we are right, we save generations and generations.”

Actually, the only green will be in the hands of government regulators and manufacturers of environmental equipment. Said regulation, the Heritage Foundation estimates, could cost as much as a trillion dollars.

Conversely, being correct about the advent of global warming and doing nothing about it could benefit the country. “Economist Thomas Gale Moore (1998) also found that earlier estimates exaggerated the costs of warming,” the SEPP reports. “Moore used historical data to calculate that if temperatures were 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the U. S., 41,000 fewer people would die each year from respirator and circulation diseases.”

“The annual benefits of global warming to the U. S., he estimates, would exceed costs by $104.8 billion in 1990 dollars.” Moreover, although Moore’s benefits would be universal, McCain’s costs, and he is the most parsimonious of the viable candidates, would primarily be borne by working families, either directly through taxes and regulation or indirectly through the tax and regulatory costs industries pass on to consumers.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.