Point/Counterpoint

Global Gasses

by Fred Kilbourne

Don Bashline's entertaining "Take Note of Global Warming" pits the 1998 Fred Kilbourne against my own 1983 forerunner in ostensible support of Bashline's conclusion that conventional wisdom about global warming is wise. He also refers to my reference to Fred Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, who said about a global warming report, "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process." Understandably, Bashline did not refer to my unnoted reliance on Fred Singer, first Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and former Director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Maryland, who said of the greenhouse theory of global warming that "the evidence is neither settled (as Tim Wirth said), nor compelling (as Bill Clinton said) nor even convincing." But Don missed the obvious conclusion forced on the observer by the foregoing: people named Fred are vision-impaired! We just can't see the regal raiments of the emperor. In our allegiance to the scientific method, we blindly persist in our skepticism, in our compulsion to substitute facts for appearances and demonstrations for impressions.

Some years ago (even earlier than 1983), I delivered an actuarial report to a client, confident that I had not only done the actuarial work properly but that I had also expressed the results suitably for a lay audience. I was chagrined when I was thanked, paid, and told that my actuarial prose was to be rewritten by a professional writer who would make it "suitable for a lay audience." My chagrin turned to a darker emotion when I read the professionally written report, which told a very difference story from the one I had unearthed.

That darker emotion is familiar to members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who have been told over and over, as you, Don, and I have, that their 1995 report concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." The fact is that the quote is not from their 1995 report, but rather from a 1996 supposed-rewrite delivered to the media as a "Summary for Policymakers." The quote itself is neither to be found in nor supported by the 1995 report, which did include a number of pertinent and contrary conclusions that didn't make it into the Summary for Policymakers.

Even as freedom must be defended or it will be lost, so must those who call ourselves scientists resist attacks on the scientific method, or resign ourselves and humanity to the Dark Ages. Trofim Lysenko may be dead, but Timothy Wirth lives on. You may recall, it was Wirth who said "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy," and "Let me make clear the U.S. view: The science calls upon us to take urgent action." That siren call you hear, Tim and Don, may be supremely melodic (though it grates for those of us who prefer freedom). It conceivably may even be the right thing (though I'd welcome a debate on that subject). But it isn't science.

Editor's note: Fred Kilbourne recommends Hot Talk, Cold Science by Fred Singer, and "Hot Air," National Review, August 17, 1998, by Jonathan H. Adler, for those interested in learning more about global warming.

Global Warming: Just a Lot of Hot Air?