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A Brief History Review of Media Coverage Modern Political Movement Key Research United Nations’ IPCC Criticism of IPCC Conclusions Other Noteworthy Research 19,000 - Scientist Petition

The Kansas Setting

Kansas was thrust into the national spotlight on the topic of global warming in October 2007 when the state’s Department of Health and Environment rejected air permit applications to build new coal-fired electricity plants in Finney County.  The exclusive reason KDHE Secretary Rod Bremby gave for denying the permits was the projected emission of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the new power plants.

CO₂ is one type of “greenhouse gas” that resides in Earth’s atmosphere and contributes to a reflective zone that helps to contain heat in the near-surface air and oceans of the planet.  The gas is generated by the burning of fossil fuels or vegetable matter, but also is produced by all animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms during respiration, and is released by volcanoes and other geothermal processes such as hot springs. 

There are no federal nor Kansas state laws or regulations governing the emission of CO₂.  In a relevant decision published in April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (in Massachusetts v. EPA) may consider CO₂ to be a “pollutant” worthy of regulation.  The authority relied upon by Secretary Bremby in issuing his recent permit denials comes from the following general KDHE powers written in Kansas law:

  "…the secretary may take such actions as may be necessary to protect the health of persons or the environment…upon receipt of information that the emission of air pollution presents a substantial endangerment to the health of persons or to the environment . . .”  [K.S.A. 65-3012]

The legal debate of Bremby’s decision is now in court, but the rest of this discussion will offer context for understanding the CO₂-global warming public policy debate.

A Brief History Review of Media Coverage

The broad contention that fuels public policy on this topic around the world today is a simple one:  Humans must reduce their emissions of greenhouse gasses in order to curb rising average global temperatures and the dire consequences that would come as a result.

Numerous issues relate to this broad premise, but the critical decisions for policy action will depend on the answers to two questions.

(1)     What causes global warming? 

(2)     What can humans do to control global temperature changes?

There is no definitive scientific answer to either of these questions.  Of course, scientific certainty is not required in order to plan a course of public action, but the degree of uncertainty has a powerful influence in deciding which actions, if any, are prudent.

The science of climate change has caused several highly publicized outcries in modern history. 

• Cooling

Shortly after the world began emerging from the 500-year Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s, the New York Times, on Feb. 24, 1895, ran the headline “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.”  Related stories ran for years to come, including the Oct. 7, 1912, Los Angeles Times feature “Fifth ice age is on its way,” and the Aug. 9, 1923, Chicago Tribune story “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada”.

• Warming

With the onset of the Great Depression, scientific opinion began shifting in the opposite direction.  The Los Angeles Times wrote on March 11, 1929, that “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer.”  Then in 1938, British meteorologist G.S. Callendar argued in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society that man is causing global warming through his emissions of carbon dioxide.  This popular theory persisted through the 1950s and on Feb. 15, 1959, the New York Times published “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures.”

• Cooling

The 1970s marked a resurgence of warnings about global cooling.  On June 24, 1974, Time magazine published “A New Ice Age?” and followed it up on Nov. 11, 1974, with “Weather Change:  Poorer Harvests”.  The November Time story wrote claimed that a mean global surface temperature drop of 1-degree Fahrenheit since the 1940s has “trimmed a week to ten days from the growing season” in agricultural regions around the world.  On Apr. 28, 1975, Newsweek magazine’s story, “The Cooling World,” said, “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically” and that food output, according to the “almost unanimous” view of meteorologists, would decline for the rest of the century due to the “central fact” that “the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.”  This conclusion came on the heels of a March 1, 1975, Science News article in which the editor of another science publication declared, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

• Warming

Oceanographer Roger Revelle’s influential article “Carbon Dioxide and World Climate” appeared in the Scientific American in August 1982.  Revelle had chaired the National Academy of Sciences Panel that produced the 1977 study “Energy and Climate” that made a non-alarmist call for additional study on global warming.   Former Senator and Vice-president Al Gore Jr., inspired as a student of Revelle at Harvard, co-sponsored Congressional hearings on global warming and then published his book “Earth in the Balance” in 1992.

A more complete review of these trends in media coverage of climate change is available from the Business & Media Institute.

Modern Political Movement

In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations and its specialized agency, the World Meteorological Organization.  The IPCC began sponsoring a series of working groups to produce assessment reports on a wide array of global warming related research.

At a United Nations conference in 1992, over 150 countries signed a pledge to reduce their CO₂ emissions in the interest of environmental protection and sustainable development.  Two years later, a United Nations panel declared that more drastic measures to counteract global warming were needed.  This led in 1997 to creation of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to fight global warming.  The protocol called for its participating nations to begin reducing their CO₂ emissions by 2005.

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution in 1997 that said it would not ratify any treaty that would impose mandatory greenhouse gas cuts for the U.S. that would cause serious harm to our economy or that are not also binding on developing countries.  In 2001, President Bush announced that the U.S. would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.  In 2003, U.S. Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman co-sponsored a proposal for mandatory caps on "greenhouse gas" emissions from utilities and other industries, but the bill was rejected in the Senate by a margin of 55 to 43.

Today, more than 160 nations have signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the U.S. has not.  Although China and India have signed it, they are exempt from its requirements because they qualify as “developing countries”.

In December 2007, the IPCC and Al Gore Jr. were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

Key Research

Much of the criticism that each side of the global warming debate levels against the other alleges scientific bias. 

Those concluding that humans are causing global warming (known as anthropogenic warming) say that skeptics are influenced by money from fossil fuel corporations; for example, see the Guardian article from February 2007. 

Similarly, skeptics say that political bias and government grants influence scientific findings to support human-caused warming; for example, see the remarks of MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen in April 2006.

United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

The IPCC published Assessment Reports in 1990, 1995, 2001, and the latest, its Fourth Assessment Report (or, AR4) in 2007.   Each is referenced on the IPCC Website and each contains the findings of three Working Groups that contribute to the overall Assessment Report.  Assorted specialists from around the globe participate in the working groups and approve the research findings for publication.

Here is how the IPCC describes those involved in producing just one volume of the AR4 Summary for Policymakers:  “The report was produced by some 600 authors from 40 countries. Over 620 expert reviewers and a large number of government reviewers also participated. Representatives from 113 governments reviewed and revised the Summary line-byline during the course of this week before adopting it and accepting the underlying report.” [IPCC Press Release]

The IPCC’s Working Group I covers the current physical science of climate change, the degree to which it is occurring and the most likely causes.   Working Group II reports on the impacts of global warming and the potential for adaptation.  Working Group III analyzes ways to mitigate climate change.  These parts were published at intervals in 2007 and then were all integrated into the AR4 Synthesis Report that was released on November 17, 2007.

Criticism of IPCC Conclusions

Inspecting each part of the AR4 is very important, as shown in a December 2007 critique published by the American Enterprise Institute.  AEI observes that IPCC research summaries and synthesis reports are political documents that greatly characterize the scientific data on which they’re based.  After noting how the IPCC excluded peer-reviewed, contradictory research, AEI wrote:

These omissions do not necessarily indicate deliberate bias on the part of the IPCC, but they do underscore the importance of greater transparency as well as the admission that our reach may exceed our grasp in terms of what is "settled." These examples, and many more like them, also point out the risks of relying on a single organization--especially one with a self-acknowledged political axe to grind--to provide the single "authoritative" scientific input for world climate policies that would cost trillions of dollars if implemented to the extent called for by the IPCC or environmental groups.

It is possible that we may know less than we did ten years ago precisely because the intense focus on the most scientifically challenging parts of climate behavior is actually revealing more about what we do not know and more evidence that is inconsistent with or directly contradictory to the anthropogenic greenhouse warming paradigm promoted by the IPCC and climate campaigners. Studies over the last few years have demonstrated that the climate models the IPCC relies on for predicting and attributing climate warming do a poor job of matching observations on key climate variables such as clouds.   Indeed, in many key areas, observational evidence suggests the real climate often behaves differently or even opposite to what climate models say we should expect to see under greenhouse warming.   A number of researchers have also fingered other human activities besides greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as major or even the main causes of climate warming, but these non-GHG effects are either omitted from or inadequately accounted for in the IPCC's climate models.  [footnotes omitted] 

Other Noteworthy Research

For an economic analysis of global warming, advocates for CO₂ mitigation have relied greatly on the Stern Review published in October 2006. [ Stern Review executive summary]  Economist Nicholas Stern produced a 700-page analysis for the British government that argues, in a nutshell, that sacrificing one percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year now (in order to reduce CO₂) will preclude up to a 20% cut in the GDP growth rate 100 years later if we take immediate, aggressive action.  Stern concludes that “the benefits of strong, early action considerably outweigh the costs”.

A collection of critiques of Stern’s work is presented at globalwarming.org, sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute with the motto “Reasoned thinking comes from cooler heads”.  Other easily accessible texts of critique are found by Mendelsohn writing for the Cato Institute and by Lomborg at the Wall Street Journal.  Highlighted rebuttals explained by such sources generally include:  Stern’s numerous new assumptions that severely overstate the damages of climate change; Stern’s assumptions that substantially understate mitigation costs; and, Stern’s failure to consider alternative methods of mitigation.

For a peer-reviewed, relatively concise rebuttal to many claims made by the IPCC and other research that supports CO₂ mitigation, see “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Robinson, Robinson, and Soon, appearing in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (2007).

A list of over 19,000 American scientists have now endorsed a statement circulated by the Petition Project, an organization initiated by Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and president emeritus of Rockefeller University.  The petition reads:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

The Petition Project website lists alphabetically, by state, each of the 19,000 + scientists who have signed on to this message.  Qualification to be a signatory requires that the individual have a university degree in physical science, either BS, MS, or PhD, with formal training or specialized experience in the analysis of information.  The Project announces that its costs have been paid entirely by private donations and that no industrial funding or money from sources within the coal, oil, natural gas or related industries has been utilized.

Currently, the list includes 188 scientists from Kansas, of whom 55 are PhDs and 10 are MDs.