WEATHER AND CLIMATE VARY NATURALLY AND CANNOT BE PREDICTED

In ancient times, priestesses at the Oracle at Delphi often answered important political questions with enigmatic predictions derived from dreams, signs, casting lots or reading animal entrails. Today, in the realm of climate change, that function is served by scientific priests and priestesses who offer forecasts of dubious value, derived from computer models.

Investing in the stock market, like planning next summer's vacation, is a dicey proposition. But if someone offered to eliminate the uncertainty - by using computer models to pick surefire investments and perfect weather windows at idyllic resorts - few would jump at the chance.

Most people know complex markets and weather defy such predictions. Computers certainly help understand and analyze these systems; they can even forecast trends, if they've been tested against actual data. However, even predicting tomorrow's IBM closing price or hurricane path is iffy, and attempts to do so months or years in advance are meaningless. Thus the rapt attention that certain academics, journalists and policymakers give to climate models is truly astounding.

The latest example comes from Columbia University, where the Earth Institute asserts that its new "Climate Change Information Portal" will enable people to assess, avoid and adapt to "the problems that climate change and variability can cause" - and can even do so years into the future for regions as small as the tri-state New York metropolitan area. The Institute begins by assuming that human-induced global warming of alarming proportions is a fact. It then offers computer-driven guidance as to how we should respond.

Several computer models have presented "scenarios" of what might happen if temperatures really do increase 5 or 10 degrees in 100 years. These dire projections garner extensive coverage. However, the models fail miserably when tested against actual data, and there is simply no evidence to support theories of catastrophic climate change. Indeed, satellite and weather balloon measurements have found little or no warming over the past 25 years, and other climate models project only modest warming - a degree or two over the next century. Such warming would be mostly beneficial, by bringing us longer growing seasons and lower heating bills. This kind of change people and planet can readily adapt to.

World-class geologists and climatologists emphasize that Planet Earth has been buffeted by numerous natural climate shifts for millions of years. The shifts often come in 50, 500 and 1,500-year cycles, they say. For instance, our Earth went through a 500-year Little Ice Age - then warmed about a degree since that era ended around 1850. Nearly half of this warming occurred before 1940 - long before carbon dioxide began building up in the atmosphere. Other past climate swings also show there is little cause for alarm.

Wild weather whipsawed Detroit awhile back, according to news accounts. Six snowstorms hit during April of '68, frosts in mid-August of '69, ice in mid-May and a 98-degree heat wave in June of '74, and ice-free lakes in January of '77 and '79. But that was 1868 to 1879! New England saw average annual temperatures increase by about 2.5 degrees F over a half century. But that was 1904-1954.

Arctic temperature increases between 1971 and 2003 might spell trouble if they continued, even though the rise was below what computer models had predicted: 1.4 degrees F per half century. However, between 1938 and 1966 average annual arctic temperatures fell 6 degrees F. Had that trend continued, temperatures would have plummeted 10.7 degrees F in 50 years!

Moreover, the CO2 that is supposedly causing "catastrophic" warming represents only 0.00035 of all the gases in the atmosphere (1.25 inches out of a 100-yard football field), and proposals to control this vital plant nutrient ignore a far more critical greenhouse gas: water vapor.

There are at least three reasons the debate has nonetheless focused on carbon dioxide - though some are now talking about dandruff as a possible source of global warming! CO2 is easy to measure, villainize and regulate. It would be extremely difficult to sequester water vapor, without draining the Great Lakes and turning the planet into a vast Sahara Desert. And water vapor doesn't come out of tailpipes, smokestacks and chimneys. It isn't an unwanted bastard child of the hated fossil fuel industries that radical greens want to relegate to the ash heap of history.

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GREENIES FEAR REAL SCIENCE


Prior to becoming the acting EPA administrator in January of this year, Mr. Johnson was directly in charge of implementing the nation's pesticide, toxic substances, and pollution prevention laws in the Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances (OPPTS). He knew, as a scientist, that it would be useful to try to gather toxicity data from human exposures, rather than from the animal experiments upon which the EPA has always relied. The animal data has been found wanting as a basis for assigning human risk. The tricky part: how to gather human data ethically: i.e., without knowingly exposing humans to toxic substances. The answer: just by observing kids in their "natural habitats," since it is known that the large majority of families in the proposed study area use household chemicals and pesticides routinely. Why not just observe them and gather data?

Indeed, just to be completely secure, Johnson requested an opinion from the National Academy of Sciences on the ethics of collecting human data in such circumstances. Their committee's conclusion was that it was acceptable to gather and utilize such information if appropriate safeguards and standards were adhered to. That seemed to be a go-ahead for the CHEERS study. Johnson made two serious blunders, however: he offered to compensate the study families, and he arranged to get funding support from the American Chemistry Council.

Environmental activists went ballistic -- even more so than usual. The EWG asserted that a study done on humans in which people could not derive any health benefits was ipso facto taboo. And worse: partnering with a chemical group? In a study on children? Are you kidding -- not on my watch! (Even though the EPA routinely works with regulated industries to assess environmental risks, often with funding from those same industries.)

The environmentalists' real gripe is somewhat less likely to be articulated in the media: these groups have fought tooth and nail against using human toxicity data because they know quite well that such data will show no evidence of harm to humans from the so-called "toxins" in our environment. Their dependence on the "Precautionary Principle," wherein a lack of data mandates restrictions out of "safety" concerns, would finally be shown for what it is: an excuse for agenda-driven regulation.

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INTRODUCED SPECIES NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL

Driving around in the Patagonian Andes in December, my wife and I were enchanted by the masses of luminous blue lupines and brilliant yellow scotch broom lining many of the roads. We stopped frequently to take photos of the floral abundance. How insensitive of us! Both, it turns out, are evil foreigners. Lupine is from North America and scotch broom hails from Europe.

Since 1992, the nations of the world have been waging a war against such foreign invaders under the Convention on Biological Diversity. In the United States the public regularly reads anguished stories about the "damage" being caused by alien invaders such as zebra mussels and purple loosestrife. Environmentalist groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the National Wildlife Federation fiercely denounce these foreign intruders, urging Americans to band together to force these invaders from our shores.

In response, Congress passed the National Invasive Species Act and the executive branch has adopted a National Invasive Species Management Plan aimed at closing our borders to alien species. NASA warned recently, "Non-indigenous invasive species may pose the single most formidable threat of natural disaster of the 21st century." But is all this jingoistic furor justified? Some biologists and other analysts are beginning to doubt it.

For example, University of California-Santa Barbara biologist, Daniel Botkin, points out in his article "The Naturalness of Biological Invasions," that "[b]iological invasion is a natural process everywhere, requisite for the persistence of essentially all species on Earth over the long term. Being able to seek new habitats and survive in them is essential in an environment that changes at all scales of space and time."

In the May 2005 cover article for Discover, senior editor Alan Burdick asks the startling question, "Are Invasive Species Really So Bad?" (not yet available online). The article concludes, "Fifty years of invasion biology has failed to identify a clear ecological difference between an ecosystem rich in native species and one chock-full of aliens. Invasions don't weaken ecosystems-they simply transform them into different ecosystems, filled with different organisms of greater and lesser value to us." (To be immodest, this is exactly the point I made in my "Bioinvaders" article nearly 5 years ago.) Introducing new species generally boosts the total number of species dwelling in any given ecosystem.

What about the claim that invasive species pose "the single most formidable threat of natural disaster"? It is certainly the case that some introduced species have detrimental effects. Think West Nile virus and Norway rats. We should take steps to prevent the introduction of disease organisms and parasites that show a high likelihood of harming species that we value.

But even the NRDC admits that over the past two centuries, only one in seven of the thousands of introduced species have caused environmental, health, or economic harm. In fact, most, such as wheat and cows, have provided people with far more benefits than harms. And while some species are threatened with extinction by the introduction of outside species-most infamously the case of the brown tree snakes that killed off several bird species on the isolated island of Guam -in fact, fewer than 6 percent of species considered endangered are menaced by non-native species, according to Burdick.

Ecologists had assumed that introducing alien species would be detrimental because these species would disrupt ecosystems in which species had co-evolved for millions of years. Species from different ecosystems would harm tightly functioning "natural" plant and animal communities. This assumption has recently been called into question by the creation of an "accidental rainforest" on Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As New Scientist (subscription required) points out, Ascension's bare central peak once called White Mountain is now covered with an extensive cloud forest consisting in guava, banana and wild ginger, bamboo, the white-flowered Clerodendrum and Madagascan periwinkle, Norfolk Island pine and, eucalyptus from Australia and is renamed Green Mountain. This new rainforest, less than 150 years old, is an affront to conventional ecological wisdom that species must co-evolve in order to function together. Instead the Ascension rainforest supports the dissident notion that species engage in "ecological fitting." That is, species make the best of what they have.

Ascension's rainforest is evidence that nature is super resilient and that moving species around the globe is unlikely to cause wide-scale ecosystem collapses. Ecological puritans loathe the new Ascension Island rainforest as a pastiche and lupine and scotch broom in Patagonia as sinful aberrations. However, less conservative temperaments welcome foreign species as fascinating scientific and aesthetic experiments that can enrich landscapes such as Patagonian roadsides. Ultimately, the battle against exotic species is a cultural and aesthetic war, not one compelled by scientific evidence.

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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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