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Contributors
Steven Hayward- Contributor
[Courtesty of Pacific Research
Institute]
Dr. Steven
Hayward is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies for the Pacific
Research Institute. He
is also nationally recognized for his recently released book, The
Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 (Prima
Publishing, 2001), and Churchill on Leadership: Executive
Success in the Face of Adversity (Prima Publishing, 1997).
[go to Hayward index]
 Climate
Panic
More from an activist media..
[Steven Hayward] 8/24/04
, Around
the Pacific Research Institute hallways and water cooler, we
like to say that the environment
is much
too important to be left to the environmentalists—they’ll
only screw it up. Fresh evidence of this problem is found in
Tuesday’s New York Times, which carried a story headlined, “New
Study Finds Climate Shift Threatens California.”
Now, climate
change is a serious issue, but it is hard to take seriously
people who say repeatedly and
in increasingly frantic
tones that it is the greatest threat to mankind since the Y2K
computer bug. The new study, sponsored by the Union of “Concerned” Scientists
but somehow paid for with our tax dollars, concludes that average
temperatures in California could increase by as much as 16 degrees
over the next several decades. This would make much of the state
as hot or hotter than Death Valley, and wipe out most of California’s
agriculture. We're toast, in other words.
As we have mentioned in the last few edition of our annual
Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, the environmental
reporting of the New York Times has been generally superior to
the most of the media pack. But the Times dropped the ball on
this one, starting with a failure to provide any background on
the extreme ideological bias of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Imagine what the Times would say about an industry-funded study
on any controversial subject.
Keep in
mind that we are constantly hectored to beware of scientists
on the fringes of the climate debate,
and to pay more attention
to the “mainstream” or “consensus” of
current science. Fair enough. What does the “mainstream” say
about local climate predictions?
The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official UN effort to evaluate
global warming,
issued several disclaimers
against estimating regional or local climate futures in its most
recent assessment, including this one: “Despite recent
improvements and developments, regionalisation research is still
a maturing process and the related uncertainties are still rather
poorly known . . . Therefore a coherent picture of regional climate
change via available regionalisation techniques cannot yet be
drawn.”
Back in
April, Nature magazine took note of this issue, with an article
headlined “Modellers Deplore ‘Short-Termism’ on
Climate.” Reporting on a climate modeling conference in
Switzerland, Nature said: “Participants admitted privately
that the immediate benefits of regional climate modelling have
been oversold in exercises such as the Clinton administration’s
U.S. regional climate assessment, which sought to evaluate the
impact of climate change on each part of the country. . . many
researchers would like to avoid the word ‘prediction’ altogether.”
But as usual,
the most sensational claims make the headlines, while the sober
realists get reported only in
the pages of specialty
journals such as Nature. It is precisely the apocalyptic alarmism
of the noisiest environmentalists, starting with the “population
bomb” crowd and the Club of Rome, that make it so hard
to take seriously the current predictions of extreme climate
doom. CRO
copyright
2004 Pacific Research Institute
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