Public disservice: Melting myths

The last two weeks of July are normally the hottest of the year, so it's no surprise that we're being deluged with public-service announcements about the horrors of global warming. Radio and television stations are compelled to transmit these announcements at no charge because of a long-standing policy that they must provide "public good." "Don't Litter" and "Fasten Seat Belts" come to mind. Now the notion has been expanded to "Fight Global Warming." By defining it as something we all should fight, these announcements tell us warming must be bad — something no comprehensive treatise on the science and economics of climate change has ever demonstrated.

Ogilvy and Mather, a prestigious public-relations firm whose for-profit clients include IBM and Motorola, produced the global-warming ads for free on behalf of Environmental Defense, a major environmental nonprofit that clearly advocates certain types of global-warming legislation. Like their ads for Motorola, Ogilvy and Mather's global-warming announcements are clearly targeted towards sullen youth — a brilliant idea, considering the appallingly low level of scientific knowledge our children have in comparison to their counterparts around the world. But scientific exploration requires critical skepticism, and these ads are full of unquestioned certainties.

Perhaps the most egregious is a radio ad, called "The Gift." It mentions dying coral reefs, rising sea levels, melting ice caps, devastating floods, and hurricanes, and accuses us of leaving them all to our children. The ads ignore facts that are widely accepted in the scientific community. Take hurricanes. The frequency of category 4 and 5 storms — the really destructive ones — has increased as the planet warmed. Good sound bite, with only one problem: It's back to where it was in the 1940s and 1950s, long before human beings started warming things up.

In fact, as late as the 1970s, scientists were more concerned with planetary cooling, as revealed in the 1974 CIA report, "Potential implications of trends in world population, food production, and climate," that presented cooling-related food shortages as a major strategic threat. The report first appeared in public in the New York Times on May Day, 1976. Soon, global cooling abruptly reversed into global warming. Crop yields rose.

The public-service announcements are all similarly big on melting polar ice caps and consequent rises in sea level. The Arctic cap loses ice in the summer, but no one bothers to mention that we only began collecting data on it in 1979, at the end of the second-coldest period in the Arctic in a century. The ice had to be abnormally expanded then. It's also floating ice, and melting it and doesn't change sea level at all. And, for all the headlines about loss of ice in Greenland, which does contribute to rising sea levels, the mean temperature there was much higher from 1910 through 1940. Between then and the late 1990s, temperatures in southern Greenland — the region where ice is melting — declined sharply. One has to presume that Environmental Defense knows this.

Around the world, in Antarctica, for the last few decades, average temperatures across the continent have been going down. Snowfall has increased, resulting in more continental ice. In fact, every modern computer simulation of 21st century climate has Antarctica continuing to accrete ice.

Ogilvy and Mather marketed their public-service announcements through the Ad Council, whose website says that "reversing the global warming trend is possible." This suggests that humans have the power to turn planetary warming into cooling — a scientific absurdity. We have neither the technology, the means, the money, nor the political will to do this. Consider the Kyoto Protocol, a "baby step" in the fight against global warming. It "requires" the U.S. to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Requirements vary by a percent or so for most other signatories such as Canada and the EU nations. Yet if every nation of the world met its Kyoto targets, the amount of warming that would be prevented is .07 degrees Celsius per half-century — an amount too small to even measure, as average surface temperatures fluctuate by about twice that much from year to year.

Neither the U.S. nor the EU nor virtually anyone else will be able to fulfill the Kyoto targets. EU emissions rose last year, while U.S. emissions remained unchanged. "Reversing" warming would require reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by 60-80 percent, which is simply impossible. The world economy would implode. Ogilvy and Mather's corporate website feature a quote from founder David Ogilvy: "We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles." But what about knowledge on hurricanes, ice caps, and the real possibilities with respect to global warming? The best course is one in which we continue to use our economic wherewithal to invest in successful companies, which are generally those that produce things efficiently or produce efficient things. Stating that would be a public service. The ads you're seeing and hearing are not.

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It's time to drill for natural gas

Gas prices are too high. We can all agree on that. We hear a lot of complaints about how much we are paying to keep our cars moving. But what we don't hear much about is the astronomical increase in the price of natural gas. Since 2000, natural gas prices have more than tripled. That is a hefty hike. Why would we want to remain dependent on anyone else for that which we can provide for ourselves? It's time for us all to ask that question. It is a simple matter of Economics 101, Supply and Demand. Domestic gas production is in decline while demand has increased by 31%. More than 95% of new power plants are gas fired. Where is the gas going to come from if this decline continues?

It doesn't have to be this way, but because of governmental red tape we have a gas crisis. America has great energy potential and specifically North Carolina has the potential to end the crisis here. The Department of the Interior estimates that there is enough natural gas to sustain current production for 75 more years, resting off of our shoreline. It is estimated that North Carolina alone has 36 trillion feet of natural gas off of our coast.

We hear many elected officials lamenting over the loss of jobs in our country. Now there is an opportunity to do something about it. Since the natural gas crisis began in 2000, the US has lost more than 2.8 million manufacturing jobs. North Carolina has suffered many of those losses. Some industries have suffered more than others and many of those industries are right here in North Carolina. Let's take a look at some of the industries that have been especially hard hit.

* Agriculture - Since 2000, 36% of the nitrogen fertilizer plants dependent on natural gas have been shut down or mothballed. The agriculture industry spent $6.2 billion on energy in 2003-2004-16% of production costs.

* Plastics - The plastics sector has lost more than 150,000 jobs and $14.6 billion in business to other countries from 2000 to 2002.

* Chemical - Since 2000, America's chemical sector has lost nearly 90,000 jobs and $50 billion in business to overseas operations.

* Forest/Paper - The forest and paper industry has closed 200 mills and lost 146,000 jobs since the run-up in natural gas prices began.

Congress has an opportunity to remedy this situation. The Senate will be voting within the next few days on legislation that can allow us to become energy independent. Passage of such legislation would bring energy costs down, reduce reliance on foreign energy and bring jobs to North Carolina. I think it's time to do the responsible thing and help our state with a recovery plan to produce natural gas.

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NO ESCAPE FROM GREENIE DOOM

By ex-Marxist Mick Hume -- writing from Britain

RIGHT, get your sun-addled brain around this vicious circle. Environmentalists and the authorities argue that the recent heat waves demonstrate the extent of man-made global warming. If that's true, then we must need more air-conditioning to cope. But oh no, they tell us, that will cause - you've guessed it - man-made global warming. Verily, they want us to suffer for our sins. The old puritans cautioned only that we would burn in Hell in the next life. The neo-puritans tell us we must burn on Earth in this one.

Air-conditioning and refrigeration do indeed account for a lot of energy. But then, they are technological cornerstones of modern civilisation. Much of the world as we know it would be uninhabitable without air-con. The booming growth of the American South in the past half-century, from the metropolis of Los Angeles to the space centre of Houston, has been possible only because air-con is ubiquitous there. The UK is hardly California. But we need air-conditioning now almost regardless of the weather, as the success of domestic insulation schemes (ironically, to save energy) means that the problem is less heating up our homes than cooling them down.

Yet the belated spread of air-con over here is greeted with a hum of warnings about global warming. This heated debate typifies the doom-clouded climate. Even if we were to accept the eco-arguments, surely they highlight the need for humanity to adapt so it can thrive in a hotter world. We need to produce more and better air-con and refrigeration technologies, and more energy to power them. Instead, we get sermonising from those who seem less interested in the complex science of climate change than the simple moral parable of man-made global warming.

As far back as the world fairs of the 1930s - Chicago's "A Century of Progress" and New York's "Building the World of Tomorrow" - home air-con was lauded as a product of the future available today. I have just returned from a Turkish village where every apartment seems to have it. Yet in London, Olympic city of the 21st century, we are expected to swelter in our Victorian sweatboxes, and an electricity company has the cheek to claim too much air-con helped to cause yesterday's power cut in Soho. Meanwhile, in California, the world's air-con capital, rackety energy supplies threaten blackouts every time people turn up the dial. These shortcomings really are man-made disasters, and action to change things is needed now.

Let the neo-puritans stick their heads in a bucket of cold water. Some of us would rather put our faith in the miracle of man-made indoor climate change that is air-conditioning.

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CALIFORNIAN METEOROLOGISTS NOT GETTING HYSTERICAL ABOUT HOT WEATHER

For California, sporadic blasts of withering heat are as typical as earthquakes. Not new. Not unexpected. But able to dominate our days, our nights and our conversations with an oppressive drumbeat of discomfort. So those who study weather and climate weren't surprised to be asked repeatedly if the recent stretch of killing heat was yet another effect of global warming.

Their short answer is, if so, global climate change would be just one factor stirred into a confounding brew of other effects, including the routine variability of weather. "There certainly is global warming, but . it's not like every summer is going to be like this one," said Jan Null, a Bay Area meteorologist. The changes are likelier to come in fractions of a degree each decade. "Back in '97 and '98, everything was El Ni¤o," said Null, who teaches meteorology at San Francisco State University and runs his own consulting firm. "The media likes easy labels to put on events. They don't like to hear, 'Well, this is just a normal cycle.' " Null leans toward blaming the normal cycle for Sacramento's record-breaking string of 100-degrees-or more days, noting that as recently as spring, the capital region was much cooler than usual instead of warmer.

Sacramento suffered through 11 days of 100 degrees or higher, easily surpassing the previous nine-day record, before the latest heat wave broke on Thursday. While records show the capital's longest hot spells have clustered largely in the past two decades, that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about global climate, said Jim Ashby, a climatologist with the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno.

A different man-made weather change could be warming Sacramento, Ashby suggested. Concrete and asphalt trap heat during the day and retain it overnight much longer than dirt and trees, creating the well-known "urban heat island" effect. Some rapidly growing cities, including Reno, are seeing much warmer nights than they used to and fewer overnight freezes, both clearly caused by urban development, he said. Like the vast majority of climate experts, Ashby believes there is overwhelming evidence that Earth's atmosphere is getting hotter. He stresses, though, that looking for global warming's effects in any fast-growing city is particularly tough because of urban heat islands.

There are other complications, too. Equipment changes over the decades. Mercury and alcohol thermometers have been replaced with twitchier digital ones. Measuring sites move, and Sacramento's has been especially active. The city's temperatures were taken from five different downtown sites before being monitored for decades from a post office's tarred roof, a spot ultimately abandoned for giving unusually warm readings, said Weather Service forecaster George Cline. Since 1999, Sacramento's weather has been recorded by equipment tucked away at a water treatment plant near California State University, Sacramento.

Different surroundings -- how much grass, how many trees, how much asphalt -- can easily alter temperature readings by a couple of degrees, potentially changing a 99-degree day to a 100-plus scorcher. Even irrigation can affect the weather, said Bryan Weare, a professor of atmospheric science at UC Davis. Just as paving drives up temperatures, water in the soil sends them down, and irrigation appears to have reduced summer highs for much of the Central Valley over the past 100 years, Weare said. That's just a reminder, he and others said, that no one year, no one hot spell, is evidence of much of anything.

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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