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The debate is over, they tell us. Human-induced catastrophic global warming will bring flood, disease, drought and famine. The seas will rise and cover half of Florida, swamp Manhattan and vanquish Pacific islands to the deep. We’ll be hit with more and stronger hurricanes that will make Katrina look like a summer shower. Major cities will be wiped out along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Goodbye Washington, Miami and Houston. New Yorkers, you’ll be next.
It may already be too late, they say, for us to stop the consequences of what we have done by driving SUVs and leaving too many lights on.
But we’ve got to try; in fact, we’ve got to go all-out. And don’t even consider the cost. We’re saving our children and our children’s children. The scientists of the world are in consensus. We must act now with sweeping restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. And if we do everything in our power, if every nation on the earth—but particularly the United States—unites in this fight, maybe, just maybe, we can stop the deadly warming of the globe’s atmosphere.
Or maybe not.
You can read something close to the previous paragraphs in just about any newsmagazine in America these days. Or hear such predictions on any national network newscast or morning radio show. But there’s something you’re not hearing.
Prior to coming to work at Focus on the Family, I was the chief meteorologist for a TV station in Lexington, Ky. I’m by no means a “top scientist,” but, nonetheless, I’ve been skeptical of catastrophic global-warming claims for more than a decade. Here’s what I know:
There are important voices you are not hearing, and there are reasons you are not hearing them. There are thoughtful arguments from top scientists who counter the alarmism, but you won’t find them in your newspaper. There are reasons for that, too. And there are reasons evangelical Christians are being called to enter the fight—but they’re likely not what you’ve been told they are.
Crises and McCarthyism
In June, Robert Bazell, NBC’s chief science correspondent, reported on a National Academy of Sciences study that declared the Earth warmer than at any time in the last 400 years. Notably, the story quoted no one who disagreed with global-warming alarmism. When asked about that by anchor Brian Williams, Bazell likened skeptics to people who believe the Earth is flat.
Colorado State University’s Atmospheric Science building sits on a hilltop on the western edge of Fort Collins. Professor William Gray sits across from me in the pleasantly cluttered corner office that has been his haven for nearly 40 years. On one wall is a large white board filled with scribbled notes that ultimately get reported worldwide. Since 1984, he and his colleagues have produced hurricane forecasts—how many named storms, how many hurricanes and how many major hurricanes to expect in an upcoming season.
Gray is not only a top hurricane researcher, he’s also a flat-Earther.
“I also believe the sun goes around the Earth,” the 76-year-old joked with a chuckle.
He said he’s been appalled by news coverage of global temperatures for decades.
Digging through a stack of papers, he pulled out a graph of 20th century temperatures. In the decades leading up to the 1940s, the global average was rising.
Gray remembers writing a book report in seventh grade “about how the great global warming from 1910 to 1940 had taken place. And although the war was on, and we were going to win, how were we going to grow up after the war? We’ll have a dust bowl. We’ll have all kinds of problems. What were people doing?”
He pointed to the graph again and showed how temperatures fell from the mid 1940s to the mid 1970s. An April 28, 1975, a Newsweek article warned that falling temperatures could cut food production, and “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” One scientist said the drop had “taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.” An extreme idea was to cover the polar ice cap with soot to melt it.
“The longer the planners delay,” the report concluded, “the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
“Everyone looks out the rearview mirror,” Gray said. They think “if it’s changing, it’s going to keep on changing.”
The temperature then began to climb from the 1970s to now. No worldwide famine. No Ice Age.
Instead, the April 3 Time magazine cover showed a sad-looking polar bear on a melting hunk of ice. The headline: “BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. Climate change isn’t some vague future problem—it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here’s how it affects you, your kids and their kids as well.”
“This was unbelievable,” Gray said with exasperation. “The most slanted thing I have ever read.”
He said the underlying attitude is that it’s OK to scare people, to lie or twist science if it’s for a “good cause.”
“What paper could write up and say, ‘110 million Americans went to work today and came home without incident’?” Gray asked. “Would that make any news? No.”
To the news media, it’s not about whether the science shows it’s the warmest it has been in 400 years. They’ll take any available crisis, because it attracts viewers, listeners and readers. Then they can charge more for advertising. Higher ad revenue means bigger profits. Crisis = success. So we get lots of crises.
Gray said researchers, particularly those specializing in computer models that predict climate, have a vested interest in keeping government grants flowing. So even if they’re skeptical, they won’t speak up, for fear of becoming an unemployed climate modeler.
“Once you get people in these jobs, they want to keep their jobs,” Gray said. “So, they’ll naturally err on the side of this being an ‘important topic.’ ”
He said anyone who expresses skepticism is cut off by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—and that includes him.
“The Clinton administration came in January ’93,” he recalled. “I had NOAA grants for 30 years before that. I never saw another NOAA grant. I was turned down 13 straight times.”
He called it “a mild form of McCarthyism” against those who will not go along.
The Science
Global warming is the theory that increasing levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average global temperature.
How does that work? Well, the Earth is kept warm primarily by energy coming in from the sun. The atmosphere lets some of that energy escape out to space, but also holds some back to keep the planet warm. The “greenhouse effect” theory holds that certain gases in the atmosphere—we often hear about carbon dioxide, but the most prevalent one is water vapor—trap some extra heat that would otherwise escape.
Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke with Citizen by telephone from Paris, where he often spends his summers
“The hardest thing to communicate to the public, I think, is that the climate system can wobble without any external reason,” he said. “It’s always warming and cooling.”
Most scientists now agree it’s warmer than it was in 1900, although precisely how much is still up for debate.
“It is on the order of about a degree Fahrenheit,” Lindzen said. “That’s pretty small. And, in point of fact, it is much smaller than (computer climate) models predict we should have seen for the amount of CO 2 that has been added.”
What he’s saying is when the models used to predict the temperature 100 years from now are applied to today, they say it should be warmer than it is. If they can’t predict 2006, what are the odds they’ll be right about 2106?
Still, the hundreds-of-billions-of-tax-dollars-at-stake question is: What part of that roughly 1 degree did humans cause?
If you increase any greenhouse gas, Lindzen explained, then, in principle, “you should contribute to warming. On the other hand, detecting it in the data, given that the temperature fluctuates a half degree [to] a degree by itself, is very hard if not impossible.”
Imagine a concert hall with a full orchestra playing. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes not. Seated next to you, a couple of little boys are playing plastic flutes. Are they adding to the overall sound in the room? Surely they are. They might also be an annoying distraction. But even if they stopped playing, the sound of the orchestra would continue filling the hall.
So, in a concert hall the size of planet Earth, we’re trying to decide how much extra noise those pesky boys are adding. But in the real world, we don’t have any method to separate their decibels from the rest of the show.
Beyond that, before predictions of global-warming catastrophe are amplified in the media, Lindzen said they are first amplified by the computer models.
“The only reason why the models predict so much is they have a feature which is not [seen in the real world],” he said, “namely that the main greenhouse substance—water vapor and clouds—is acting to take whatever man does and make it worse. And that normally in engineering would be considered horrifically bad design. It’s saying that nature has been poorly designed and can only survive with man’s intervention.
“That seems to me a most peculiar metaphysical position.”
Alarmists also tell us that increasing levels of CO 2 will bring a steady temperature climb, but Lindzen explained that’s not how it works.
“You’re not so much interested in the amount of CO 2, but what it does to the greenhouse effect,” he explained. “And that is such that you’ve already done most of what you’re going to do, because each ton of CO 2 you add does less than the previous one. It’s kind of like painting a window with black paint. The first coat blocks out most of the light; adding three times as many coats doesn’t do a heck of a lot.”
So, even if the world entirely shut down all fossil fuels—cars, planes and power plants—it likely wouldn’t have any significant impact on global warming.
But there would be a huge upsurge in the horse-and-buggy business.
Hurricanes and Icebergs
Hurricane Katrina has become a poster child of sorts for global-warming alarmism, but the facts tell a different story. A Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico—the highest rating—it made landfall as a Category 3, still a major hurricane, but not out of the ordinary. In fact, the storm developed in an ordinary way, traveled along an ordinary path and came onshore in an ordinary place.
And while Katrina ranks as the costliest storm ever, that has far more to do with the failure of New Orleans levees and an explosion of coastal development than the storm itself.
Part of the reason for that development is a multi-decade lull in hurricane activity. With fewer hurricanes, beachfront property looked more enticing. But the National Hurricane Center has been warning that those years have come to an end. We are entering a period that promises to be as active as the 1930s to 1950s.
More to the point, NOAA released a study in November 2005 that concluded the increase in hurricanes “is not related to greenhouse warming.”
Gray, the hurricane expert, said those who claim warmer sea-surface temperatures brought by global warming will lead to stronger storms are simply mistaken. They’re fooled when they see hurricanes strengthen as they cross the warm waters of the Gulf Stream along the East Coast.
“So people say, ‘Gee, it’s a direct thing. Storms go over warmer water; they get more intense,’ ” he said. “But that doesn’t follow in a greenhouse-gas world, because the surface warms, the upper air warms and the lapse rates don’t change.”
“Lapse rate” is a term meteorologists use to describe how air cools as it increases in altitude. It’s what weather balloons measure on the way up. What Gray is saying is that if the water got warmer, but the air temperature did not, the storms would indeed intensify, because surface air warmed by the water would rise faster in the cooler air higher up. Rising moist air is what builds the thunderstorms that make a hurricane.
But if global-warming models are correct, the air temperature will warm up right along with the water. Since the temperature difference remains roughly the same, Gray says the storms would not be made stronger.
OK, so what about all those icebergs breaking off? Doesn’t that indicate global warming?
Dr. Lindzen said simply, “Remember the Titanic.”
There have always been icebergs, in warm years, cold years, even during ice ages. In fact, rather than a sign of melting, he said icebergs falling off Greenland may be a sign of ice building up in the center of the country pushing excess ice off the edges.
It’s great video to watch, but don’t be fooled.
Co-Opting Consensus
You’ve heard there’s a consensus among scientists concerning catastrophic human-induced global warming.
Let’s knock that down in three steps.
One, while there is a consensus that the average global temperature has increased, there is not a consensus on:
• How much it has gone up.
• Whether it will continue to go up.
• How much humans are responsible.
• Whether warmer temperatures present a crisis or a benefit.
• Whether increased CO 2 levels cause the warming or follow the warming.
• What public-policy action we should take, if any.
• Whether anything we do would have a significant impact.
• Whether anything we do might have the opposite of the desired effect.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Two, when someone trumpets a consensus, they’re taking the general agreement concerning warmer average temperatures and stretching it to fit everything they are about to tell us we should do—which is deceitful at best, sinister at worst.
Three, as Lindzen expressed it, “Science, first of all, is not conducted by consensus and science is not a matter of authority; it’s a process. And so whenever [people] hear politicians declare ‘the science is settled, the debate is over’ and so on, they should be aware, they’re not hearing about science.”
He said “the debate is over” line may be a good political technique, but it’s dishonest.
“People don’t want to deal with science,” he said, “and as a result, it appeals to their laziness when someone says ‘the debate is over,’ because at that point they don’t have to learn anything. They don’t have to study anything. They can just say, ‘Well, if all scientists agree, who am I to even bother?’ ”
Gray put it succinctly: “In science, it only takes one person to be right. And of course, in science, the majority is often wrong.”
As he sat back in his chair, he remarked how his father loved political satirist H.L. Mencken. Gray recited a favorite quote:
“The whole aim of popular politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” Gray said with a wry smile. “Politicians go to the press, the press makes money, the politicians make money, and the public suffers.”
An Evangelical Response
There are continuing efforts to get evangelicals to join the fight against global warming. The Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) released a statement in January called “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.” It said humans are the main cause. It claimed global warming would most hurt the poor. And it said there’s a moral imperative for evangelicals to act.
E. Calvin Beisner, associate professor of social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary, coauthored a response by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) released in July. He made clear he does not question the sincerity or motivation of those who support ECI’s call to action, but he does have questions whether this should be an issue that defines evangelicals.
“Although I can find passages in the Bible that have very clear implications regarding things like abortion and homosexuality and capital punishment,” he said, “I haven’t found a passage anywhere in the Bible that teaches anything explicitly as to answering the very complex scientific questions about whether the globe happens to be warming right now or not, how rapidly it’s doing whatever it’s doing and what is the human contribution to that, and what we could or should do about it, if there is anything that we could or should do.”
Beisner said evangelicals should base their decisions on the authority of Scripture.
“Where Scripture is not decisive, we should not make it an issue defining whether one is evangelical,” he said. “We should certainly not make it an issue dividing evangelicals.”
Rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year in a futile attempt to regulate the atmosphere, he suggested that much less money could be better spent on actions such as protecting people in the few areas that may (or may not) gradually flood over the course of decades and assisting people in finding relief from an occasional heat wave.
Moreover, draconian limits on fossil fuels would effectively keep the poorest nations stuck in poverty. Beisner said helping such nations prosper would have a far more positive impact on their future. Who’s more likely to suffer in a heat wave, someone with air conditioning or someone without electricity?
In the end, Beisner suspects the effort to woo evangelicals is simply about politics.
“This is, in large part, an intentional effort,” he said, “on the part of some left-wing Democratic-party-leaning people—some not evangelicals, others who are—to split the evangelical vote that has tended to be fairly strongly pro-Republican, in order to return control of the Congress to the Democratic Party.”
Stuart Shepard is managing editor of CitizenLink, Focus on the Family’s weekday e-mail newsletter.
This article appeared in the November 2006 issue of Citizen magazine. Copyright © 2006 Focus on the Family. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
