The real news about Mann-made global warming



Last week's release of a National Academies of Science (NAS) report entitled "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years" was the result of a congressional request to look into the controversy surrounding the now-famous "hockey stick" temperature curve. The media portrayed the findings of the NAS review panel as some sort of new statement about how warm the Earth is at present, and totally missed the real news: that the original claim of Mann et al. of unprecedented warmth in the last 1,000 years -- based mostly upon tree ring data, especially from the southwest U.S. -- was dubious at best.

For the last several years, the hockey stick has been a poster prop for manmade global warming. For instance, it figures prominently in Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." But the statistical and data analysis methods that Mann et al. used to arrive at their 1,000 year temperature reconstruction were strongly criticized by some. The hockey stick played down the warmth of the "Medieval Warm Period" of 1,000 years ago, as well as the later coolness of the "Little Ice Age."

Also, the uncritical acceptance of the hockey stick for inclusion in the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report on global climate in 2001 gave many scientists the impression that the editors of that report wanted to believe the hockey stick more than they were convinced of its validity.

In their attempt to not publicly scold Mann and his coauthors for questionable data analysis methods, the authors of the new report instead chose to restate the evidence for how warm the Earth has gotten recently. What the media didn't notice, however, is that the 1,000 year figure that was central to the whole hockey stick debate had now been replaced in the report by a figure of 400 years. Since most of the last 400 years was dominated by the "Little Ice Age," the warming during the 20th century should be welcomed by humanity.

The report says that surface temperature reconstructions before this period (about 1600) have "less confidence" and that "uncertainties...increase substantially backward in time..." for any of these proxy estimates of ancient temperatures. One review panel member told me that the statisticians on the panel were amazed when it was revealed that the method underlying the hockey stick had essentially no statistical skill when validated.

This is pretty harsh language for an NAS report written by review panel members, several of whom are equivalent to foxes guarding the hen house. Researchers who have bought into the validity of using proxy measures for ancient climate reconstructions aren't about to throw away the "best" method the paleoclimate research community has, even if it can not be validated with real temperature measurements (the thermometer was not even invented until the 1600's).

One rather amazing characteristic of the hockey stick is the so-called "divergence problem": the strong warming in the late 20th century is not even indicated in the tree ring data that were used to reconstruct the last 1,000 years of supposed temperature variations. Much of the 20th century warming (the blade of the hockey stick) represents real temperature measurements, not tree ring reconstructions, since they don't show the warming. This raises a natural question, which the panel shrugged off: If tree rings do not show the strong warming of the late 20th century, how do we know there wasn't a similar temperature spike 1,000 years ago?

Keeping the door open to the possibility that Mann might be right anyway, the new report says that it is at least "plausible" that we are warmer now than anytime in the last 1,000 years. But this is a much lower level of certainty than has been associated with the hockey stick by the media, bureaucrats, and movie stars (like Al Gore).

But what was the biggest news in the media coverage of the NAS report last week? The biased nature of the media coverage. It almost seems like the media covering the report looked for familiar phrases that fit their global warming paradigm (e.g., "...warmer than the previous 400 years..."), without noting the important conclusions that addressed why the report was written in the first place.

Indeed, much of the press coverage managed to connect the words "warmer than" with a report reference to "2,000 years" to come up with widespread statements (not supported by the report) that the Earth is warmer now than when Jesus Christ walked the Earth. Apparently, sound bites are still preferred over truth.

The NAS review panel report admits that it is difficult to conclude that we are warmer now than 1,000 years ago, but that we are very likely warmer than anytime in the last 400 years. Since what this really means is that we are warmer now than any time during the "Little Ice Age" (and thank goodness for that), one wonders whether we really know anything about past climate reconstructions from tree ring data.

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The holy grail in a grain of rice

Who among us hasn't experienced a touch of the trots from stomach flu or food poisoning? For those of us fortunate enough to live in an industrialized country with ready access to health care, diarrhea is little more than a nuisance, most often involving some discomfort and bloating, and a day or two off from school or work; but in the developing world it can be deadly. In sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America and Asia with poor access to health care, clean water, and other resources, diarrhea is the number-two infectious killer of children under the age of five (surpassed only by respiratory diseases), accounting for two million deaths a year.

However, thanks to a simple but ingenious innovation by a California company, those numbers may soon be a relic of the past, like the mortality from smallpox and bubonic plague-if we don't let naysayers and special interests get in the way.

Since the 1960's the standard of care for childhood diarrhea in the developing world has been the World Health Organization's formulation of rehydration solution, a glucose-based, high-sodium liquid that is administered orally. This low-tech product was revolutionary. It saved countless lives and reduced the need for costly (and often unavailable) hospital stays and intravenous rehydration. However, this product did nothing to lessen the severity or duration of the condition, which over time leads to malnutrition, anemia and other chronic health risks. Other approaches to treatments and preventive measures-including changes in public policy, improvement of water treatment and the development of vaccines-have not yielded significant, cost-effective results.

The solution (literally and figuratively) may be an ingenious, affordable innovation from Ventria Bioscience that combines high- and low-tech. It is an improvement on current oral rehydration that could be a veritable Holy Grail: two human proteins produced inexpensively in rice that radically improve the effectiveness of rehydration solutions.

It has been known for decades that breastfed children get sick with diarrhea and other infections less often than those fed with formula. Recent research done in Peru has shown that fortifying oral rehydration solution with two of the primary protective proteins in breast milk, lactoferrin and lysozyme, lessens the duration of diarrhea and reduces the rate of recurrence. Although the availability of an oral rehydration solution that lowers the severity, duration and recurrence of diarrhea would be of modest benefit to those of us in the developed world, it could be a near-miraculous advance in the developing world.

Ventria partnered with researchers at the University of California, Davis, and at a leading children's hospital and a nutrition institute in Lima, Peru, to test the effects of adding human lactoferrin and lysozyme to a rice-based oral rehydration solution (which provides more nutrition and tastes better to kids than glucose-based oral rehydration solution, so they're more likely to drink it).

The researchers found that when lactoferrin and lysozyme are added to rice-based oral rehydration solution, the duration of children's illness is cut from more than five days to three and two-thirds. This improvement is thought to be caused by the antimicrobial effect of lysozyme, which has long been known to be one of the primary protective proteins in breast milk. Moreover, over the twelve-month follow-up period, the children who had received the lactoferrin and lysozyme had less than half the recurrence rate of diarrhea (eight percent versus eighteen percent in the controls). This effect is probably caused by lactoferrin, which promotes repair of the cells of the intestinal mucosa damaged by diarrhea.

These developments represent significant progress in managing diarrhea and keeping it from becoming a chronic, recurring health risk.

What makes this approach feasible is Ventria's invention of a method to produce human lactoferrin and lysozyme in genetically modified rice, a process dubbed "biopharming." This is an inexpensive and ingenious way to synthesize the huge quantities of the proteins that will be necessary. (In effect, the rice plants' inputs are carbon dioxide, water and the sun's energy.)

Sounds like a great success for Ventria and end of story, right? Not by a long shot. Virtually every biotech breakthrough brings the creeps out of the woodwork, and this one is no exception. One radical biotech opponent remonstrated, "The chance this will contaminate traditionally grown crops is great. This is a very risky business."

Rubbish. Rice is self-pollinating, so outcrossing-interbreeding with other rice varieties-is virtually impossible. But even in a worst case, "contaminate traditionally grown crops" with what? With two human proteins normally present in tears, breast milk and saliva? Contamination, indeed!

Equally shameful was the comment of Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association: "We just want [Ventria] to go away," he said. "This little company could cause major problems." The truth is that it is the Luddite rice producers themselves who are causing major problems by their willingness to let the antagonism toward biotechnology by foreign importers of American rice interfere with the development of life-saving new products.

Biopharming has brought us to the verge of a safe, affordable solution to one of the developing world's most pressing health problems. It will be the first of many to come-if only we can keep the troglodytes at bay.

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Al Gore and The Da Vinci Code

Al Gore's messianic certainty that our planet will perish without his guidance is a modern example of gnosticism. The Da Vinci Code movie is a purely fictional attack on Christianity employing, as part of the background material, one of the gnostic gospels to provide a patina of ancient, secret wisdom powerful enough to unravel existing civilization. Mr. Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, goes further, making the gnosticism of his book Earth in the Balance the whole content.

Mr. Gore is the loudest spokesman for an elitist group who are dead certain that only they know the truth, a group prepared to impose their doctrine upon mankind regardless of the costs in human life and well-being. In that respect, the Gospel of Al follows the pattern of gnostic eruptions from the earliest days of Christianity, through the 18th century advent of socialism. Mr. Gore unites in a single personality the messianic pretensions of the gnostic mystic and the scientistic (pseudo-scientific) materialism of today's liberal-socialist theoreticians.

Karl Marx's gnostic vision inaccurately predicted the inevitable, revolutionary triumph of socialism. In the Marxian manner, Mr. Gore, a liberal-socialist, preaches a sweeping, gnostic revelation of earth's End Times, a catastrophic destruction of life that will befall civilization, if we don't repent and follow the Gospel of Al. Mark your calendars. The Gospel of Al predicts that the End Times of atheistic materialism will commence in about ten years.

In his book, Mr. Gore writes, "But [writing this book] has also led me to undertake a deeper kind of inquiry, one that is ultimately an investigation of the very nature of our civilization and its relationship to the global environment." He fears that, ".we will not be able to see how dangerously we are threatening to push the earth out of balance." This is the gnostic core: the deep knowledge revealed to Mr. Gore, without which we are doomed. He stands ready to save civilization, if we will only heed his gospel and accept him as our savior (i.e., elect him President).

This is remarkably similar to Auguste Comte's founding The Religion of Humanity in the 1830s. Comte was confident that he uniquely had fathomed the Immutable Law of History that was propelling civilization into the age of scientific socialism. He predicted that all of humanity would abandon ancient traditions and forms of government to follow his positivistic philosophy.

To construct his Immutable Law, which has proved somewhat more flexible than he imagined, Comte took fragments of history and reworked them to fit his hypothesis. Mr. Gore and his greenhouse-gas gang have used the same approach. Evidence that contradicts the greenhouse-gas hypothesis is removed from consideration. For example, Mr. Gore's charts and graphs ignore the Medieval Warm Period, from approximately 1000 AD into the 1300s, and the Little Ice Age, from the late 1300s into the 1800s, both worldwide phenomena. During the Warm Period, today's uninhabitable, ice-covered areas of Greenland were cozy enough for Vikings to establish farming colonies. In the Little Ice Age, glaciers advanced all over the world, in the Swiss Alps crushing whole villages. Yet Mr. Gore belittles these massive phenomena with jokes. His followers dismiss them as fiction.

Mr. Gore is, of course, free to speak his mind. The mischief arises from his call for us to repent our sins by abandoning use of fossil fuels and subscribing to the Kyoto Protocol.

When assessing the reliability of Mr. Gore's all-or-nothing gospel, let's not forget that the same crowd who now champion Mr. Gore's word as revelation of gnostic truth were, thirty years ago, equally firmly convinced that the earth faced an imminent disaster from a new ice age. In its April 28, 1975, edition, Newsweek featured an article titled "The Cooling World." Let's also not forget that these same liberal-socialists in the 1980s were firmly convinced that President Reagan was about to provoke the Soviet Union into World War III by re-arming the United States and branding the USSR an evil empire.

Becoming followers of the Gospel of Al will entail more than just piously mouthed sentiments. There will be a real price to pay. Many studies have documented the enormous economic costs from compliance with the Kyoto standards of CO2 emissions control. All have demonstrated that the actual costs in lost jobs and reduced standards of living will far outweigh any theoretical benefits. In an article posted on the Slate website, New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook wrote:

This raises the troubling fault of An Inconvenient Truth: its carelessness about moral argument. Gore says accumulation of greenhouse gases "is a moral issue, it is deeply unethical." Wouldn't deprivation also be unethical? Some fossil fuel use is maddening waste; most has raised living standards. The era of fossil energy must now give way to an era of clean energy. But the last century's headlong consumption of oil, coal, and gas has raised living standards throughout the world; driven malnourishment to an all-time low, according to the latest U.N. estimates; doubled global life expectancy; pushed most rates of disease into decline; and made possible Gore's airline seat and MacBook, which he doesn't seem to find unethical.

A less respectful review of the movie can be found in Wesley Pruden's column in the Washington Times.

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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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