Houston Democrats

Al Gore will be in Houston this week promoting his movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth. Predictably, his message is dire. The planet must be saved — and quickly — from manmade carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by coal, petroleum and natural gas usage. Self-interested consumer choices are the culprit, and a government-directed reshaping of energy production and consumption is necessary. The Gore-led campaign is clear: A grass-roots movement must arise to force politicians to give us our bitter medicine — smaller cars, more expensive appliances and higher gasoline prices and electricity rates.

Public policy is the culprit. Several generations of investments in highway infrastructure imply that our patterns of energy consumption are consequences of public policy decisions. If the federal government bought pizza and gave it away, would pizza consumption be consumer choice? We need to change our policy on energy.

Wait! Before we jump to government energy-planning, let's look at the track record of the sky-is-falling crowd. Didn't we hear in the 1960s that the "population bomb" would cause food riots in American cities and mass starvation globally? Didn't the Club of Rome in the 1970s predict the end of mineral resources by now? Wasn't global cooling the scare before global warming? Isn't it suspicious that the problem is always individual behavior, and the solution is always government action?

All of these are red herrings.

There should be great hesitation before swallowing the Chicken Little du jour. The good news is that the bad news about the climate is exaggerated. Leading climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Houston's own Dr. Neil Frank, a hurricane expert, as well as popular writers such as Michael Crichton, John Stossel and George Will are not careless, deceivers or plain bad folks. They are reporting the flaws in the analysis behind climate alarmism.

Bradley never gives us an example of "the bad news about the climate". He leaves it to the reader to conclude that any bad news about the climate must be exaggerated. We don't even know if his experts, Richard Lindzen and Neil Frank, are denying global warming. He only says they are against climate alarmism, whatever that is.

What are some of the inconvenient truths that An Inconvenient Truth fails to consider? First, CO2 is not a pollutant but a building block of life, benefiting plant life and agriculture. The one-third increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, from pre-industrial levels, has produced a "greening" of planet Earth, and this will continue for decades to come. Second, the surface warming that many scientists associate with manmade greenhouse gas emissions shows a relatively benign distribution. Minimum (night, winter) temperatures have been increasing twice as much as maximum (daytime, summer) temperatures. Higher night-time temperatures and longer growing seasons reinforce the carbon-fertilization effect, aiding plant growth and agricultural productivity.

Fats are "building blocks of life". Should I tell my doctor I don't need to be concerned about my cholesterol levels? CO2 is a normal part of the Earth's atmosphere, trapping heat for the climate. Heat is good. Too much heat is bad: it melts the ice caps. Therefore, too much CO2 is bad since global temperatures vary with CO2 levels.

Third, the actual rate of global warming to date is well below the high levels predicted by some climate models. As climate scientists know, it is feedback effects that turn a low level of predicted warming into a potentially problematic one; yet it is the nature and impact of such feedbacks that are most in dispute. Real-world climate is far too complex to be modeled. Local weather predictions several days out are notoriously suspect; models predicting the global climate decades and even a century out are will-o'-the-wisps.

Where has anyone made the claim that all of the global climate models are correct? The theory of global warming say that high levels of CO2 will accelerate the greenhouse effect, which in turn, will lead to increasing global temperatures. He does not mention the climate models that are correct.

At a minimum, Al Gore should add some caveats to his stage show. Citizens and policy-makers should beware those who habitually blame free markets for problems and call on government planning to solve them. Many climate economists argue that global warming — whether man-made or natural — has significant economic benefits, not only costs. The Impact of Climate Change on the United States Economy, an anthology by 26 specialists, pointed out that the United States would be a net beneficiary from most warming scenarios in the 21st century. It concluded: "Agronomic studies suggest that carbon fertilization is likely to offset some if not all of the damages from warming."

One climate model predicts the melting Arctic ice caps will interupt the Gulf Stream, thus changing a major factor in predicting weather for Eastern North America and Western Europe. Under one scenario, New England and Eastern Canada will get warmer, while Western Europe will get colder. That's a good thing for people living in Nova Scotia, but that does not say what's good for the rest of the planet.

Al Gore has been a master of exaggeration ever since then-Sen. Gore blamed the heat and drought of the summer of 1988 on manmade global warming.

Bradley concludes that Gore is a "master of exaggeration" without citing one case of exaggeration.

Be prepared for more of these prevarications in the fall.