ANOTHER FACTOR THE GREENIE CLIMATE "MODELS" LEFT OUT:

No day goes by without another story regarding global warming, and the latest news has scientists throughout the world scratching their heads about climate change. A team of scientists reports in the prestigious journal Science that dandruff levels in the atmosphere are surprisingly high, and the load of biological aerosols from flaking skin, fur, and pollen can make up between 25% and 80% of the aerosols in the atmosphere. These aerosols are important building blocks for clouds, and clouds remain the greatest mystery in the global warming debate. If our future has more high clouds, any greenhouse warming will be amplified, but if our future has more low clouds, their ability to reflect away solar radiation will dampen any warming caused by elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases. Clouds are widely recognized to be the wild cards in the greenhouse debate, and at present, clouds are notoriously poorly represented in numerical models of climate. The latest news about dandruff has implications for future clouds, and the results from the German team mean more uncertainty in predicting the future climate.

In 1990, concern over global warming prompted the United Nations to publish its first major scientific assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Almost all of that assessment dealt with the climate impact of elevated atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Only two years later, the IPCC released an amended report that included the effects of sulfate aerosols, which come from fossil fuel burning, and once in the atmosphere, reflect sunlight, brighten clouds, and make clouds last longer. Sulfates have a cooling effect that must be considered in predicting future temperatures of the Earth. By 1995, the IPCC scientific assessment was expanded to include the global and regional climatic effects of various greenhouse gases, stratospheric ozone, tropospheric ozone, sulfate aerosols, fossil fuel soot, biomass burning, mineral aerosols, and variations in solar output. The IPCC scientists added black carbon, organic carbon, jet contrails, and land-use changes to the list in 2000. This all lead Dr. James Hansen, a prominent greenhouse scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences "The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate changes."

The global warming scientific debate at times seems to be a squabble regarding how quickly the Earth is warming (or if it is warming at all), where the warming is occurring, the time of year of any warming, whether the warming is good or bad, or most importantly, whether policy actions would have any impact on the warming. The latest report from the German scientists about dandruff, fur, and pollen is a reminder that our knowledge of controls on the climate system is far from complete, and as we see in the IPCC reports, new "forcings" of climate are added in each major assessment. Even if we had perfect temperature records of the Earth and numerical models that accurately simulated the climate system, we do not know enough about how the various "forcings" will impact the climate system over the next 50 to 100 years.

We are all itching to know what will happen to the climate system over the next century, and year after year, scientists make discoveries that further complicate predicting climate into the future.

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Can We Afford to Squander Our Resources Through Our Reliance on Junk Science?

Asbestos and Alar are only two of many instances where vast sums were spent on hypothetical risk while science was ignored.

In the past we used our natural resources freely. We took great pride in our ability to convert resources into products with a direct benefit to the public. We turned trees into houses, coal and iron into automobiles. Today we hear that we must stop using our economic resources. Scale back! Harvest fewer trees. Drill fewer oil wells. Use less fertilizer. Build no new power plants.

Encourage the government to buy back land it once offered to its people, even though the government already owns one third of our land base.

Clearly the future of this nation depends on the proper and wise use of all our resources. How do we distinguish between the proper use, the misuse or the failure to use our resources.

A few years back EPA caused a national panic by saying that exposure to a single fiber of asbestos would cause children to have lung cancer. Congress appropriated money to test schools, and school districts spent 200 billion dollars to rid their buildings of asbestos.

Tests before the removal showed about .0001 fibers per cubic centimeter in the air. After the removal, tests showed several hundred fibers per cubic centimeter. Now that the money is spent, the EPA tacitly admits what science panels in both England and Canada had already concluded; asbestos in buildings was not a health hazard. However the asbestos left loose after the removal may well be dangerous. Why did we spend this money in this way? One answer is that we practice bad science when it comes to risk assessment, and too much public policy is made by headlines.

We may well squander ten times that amount on technically unsupportable global warming assumptions being pressed upon us by a scientific community receiving $4 billion a year to prove the unprovable, the United Nations wishing to expand its power, big business desiring to drive small business out of business, foreign nations desiring to shackle our economy, environmental zealots wishing to undermine our capitalistic economy and a co-conspiring news media which thrives on all manufactured crisis.

The management of all our resources-- natural, financial, human -- must be undertaken with an understanding that they are limited, and our decision to spend them must be better researched and better understood. Money already spent on asbestos removal can not be spent on new classrooms.

The dilemma we face does not arise from any lack of understanding of industry. The nation's attention is being diverted from concerns of research, management and production. When we do discuss expanded production of any kind, we hear immediately from a vocal minority who oppose any economic growth, especially if it is anywhere near their backyard.

Obviously some things should not be built, but in our personal experience we can think of few cases when a proposed factory, generating plant, waste facility, commercial complex, housing development, road or recreational facility has not produced a visible, sophisticated, and often effective opposition.

We also see farmers and farming coming under attack from some of these same elements -- whether it is a demand for the unlimited preservation or wetlands, the banning of pesticides and fertilizers, creeping residential development bringing regulations against dust and noise, or the animal rights movement. Any farmer who is paying attention has a right to be concerned; but his concern had better lead to some action.

We are not against wetlands or in favor of dust and noise. We believe in the regulation or our natural resources. We don't think anyone has the right to spray poison anywhere he likes, and we acknowledge the need for community involvement. What we are concerned about, however, is how in this climate of the politicization of trivia, we make decisions about our resources. How do we conduct the debate that leads to public policy and law? The answer we fear is "not very well."

We talked about asbestos and the EPA. Let us use an older example, one we all know: the controversy over Alar which led to its removal from the market. Alar was not initially banned by the government. It was not found by any scientific body conclusively to be harmful. And yet it was forced off the market by a well organized well financed scare campaign which cost apple growers and others millions of dollars. This happened at the sad beginning of our now flawed political process which says "the focused concerns of a minority will always prevail over the unfocused concerns of the majority." Well organized, well financed groups with a focused agenda are able to use the media to scare the wits out of an uninformed public, most of whom learn their science from television's talking heads.

Asbestos and Alar are only two of many instances where vast sums were spent on hypothetical risk while science was ignored. More and more public policy is decided this way. The scare and reaction method has become a staple of fund raising and a primary element of decision making in this country.

This is how the public learns of hazards of pesticides. Where does it learn about insect-borne diseases which are prevented or the food that is saved from pests to feed millions of people? Any cause that involves moral righteousness and impending disaster can be used to raise large sums of money. Saving almost anything -- rain forests, seals or an endangered species -- is very effective in raising money.

Many advocacy groups now have multi-million dollar annual budgets and beautiful new headquarters in New York, Washington and San Francisco. Last year the top 12 environmental groups alone took in $2 Billion in revenue.......

The politics of trivia are not cheap; morally righteous disputes sap our energy. Washing oil-soaked birds, scrubbing rocks and curb side recycling may make us feel better, but is it worthwhile? Saving the world from Radon, Asbestos, arsenic, ozone and CO2 is great for raising funds, but what is the real cost to the nation's industry? Wetlands, wilderness and unobstructed views are vital to us all, but where, how much and at what cost?

If we are to solve our dilemma, we must address each of its dimensions: misinformation, government by unelected special interests. a willingness to ignore science, and the myth that the imagined needs of raw nature stand as equals to the needs of mankind. Only then will we assure that the dilemma, the loss of economic strength, will not prevent us from using our resources to insure survival of our democratic society, and America's leadership in the world.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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