Hidden Agendas (Part II)
By Candace Othout
I can't help but wonder how these consequences demonstrate good stewardship of our planet. I cannot understand why eliminating managed care of our forests, putting thousands of people who were employed by the timber industry out of work, destroying small towns in rural areas and causing increased costs for importing the wood we need for building, etc. - while allowing a natural renewable homegrown resource to be wasted makes any sense.
The environmental community argues that we are not living our lives sustainably because we use more natural capital than is renewable. This is an extremely interesting argument in relation to the timber industry. Again, using the Northern spotted owl as the example, Ann and Paul Erlich, in their book, Betrayal of Science and Reason state that the unanimous opinion of more than fifty attendees at a December 1993 workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado is sufficient proof that the species was in danger of extinction, to completely justify their listing.
Fourteen years later, however, after much more monitoring and study, the owl is still declining, not because of habitat destruction by logging interests, but because of the natural expansion of the barred owl into their habitat, defoliation of forests due to insect infestation, and loss of habitat to catastrophic wildland fires.
In fact, 80% of the habitat loss has been to wildfire. The listing of the Northern spotted owl as endangered and the setting aside of "critical habitat" for it placed 24 million acres of federal land, mostly National Forests, off limits to even minimal forest management practices that could sustain the owl while providing a renewable supply of the wood needed by our society for building and other purposes. This has helped to reduce U.S. timber harvest by 80-90%, and forced the importation of wood resources from other countries that lack similar environmental regulations and are much less likely to employ strategic logging and forest management principles.
The 2005 U.S. Forest Service Report on the status and trends of Northern spotted owl population trends indicates that this species is less dependent on specifically "old growth" habitat than was stated to force their listing. In fact, some in the environmental movement have stated that they were willing to lie, or at least overstate the threat to this species to advance their hidden agenda to dismantle the timber industry in the United States, and "protect" old growth forest from logging, but presumably not from wasteful destruction by fire and pest infestation.
We are currently being bombarded with demands to drastically change and reduce our lifestyles based on climate science that has actually only begun to be organized, from roughly 60 years ago. Before 1947, there were no common quantifiable methods of measurement, no multi-disciplinary standards, or even a common language among scientists. Weather related sciences were focused on interpreting history and statistics in order to predict future weather events. The main lesson learned turned out to be that there is no "normal" weather, when it is viewed over multi-decadal and millennial timescales. Mostly-reliable temperature records have actually only been available for about 150 years.
Climate research remained quite a small field of science into the 1980s. Although any substantial sub-field of physics or chemistry counted its professionals in the thousands, the number of scientists dedicated full-time to research on the geophysics of climate change was probably only a few hundred worldwide. (If you included every scientist competent to at least comment on some aspect, including such fields as biological responses to climate change, it would still be not much above a thousand.) Since these climate scientists were divided among a great variety of fields, any given subject could muster only a handful of true experts.
However, as climate research science began to coalesce into a scientific discipline, funding in the form of grants from the federal government and environmental non-governmental organizations became more and more available. In the late 1970s, government funding for climate research expanded exponentially. In the 1980s, universities and other institutions jumped on the bandwagon, increasingly funding research groups in a variety of fields. The number of conferences and papers published proliferated from only a few conferences each year in the early 1980s, to about 40 in 1990, and more than 100 in 1997.
As one scientist aptly put it, the "traveling circus" of the greenhouse effect had begun. While no one actually knew for certain, it is estimated that three to four billion dollars a year was being spent on climate research by the end of the 1990s. The number of full-time climate researchers increased as more funding opportunities became available, reaching about a thousand by the beginning of the 21st Century. Obviously, climate alarmism pays well.
Early climatologists, such as Stephen Schneider were desperately trying to explain the complexities of climate to the general population. At the time, Schneider was intent on making the case for a rapid global cooling and he was probably as right as it was possible to be - given all the unknowns in the 1970s. Thirty-seven years later, while we have more information about climate, there are still too many unknowns, to state as strongly as Al Gore does, that we are doomed unless we drastically change life as we know it in our society. One point that the Erlichs make in their book, that I can completely agree with is that "science never proves anything."
We know, based on observed data, that many of the claims regarding Global Warming are overstated, sometimes radically overstated. We know that many in the Global Warming debate have chosen to deliberately overstate their version of the science, in order to send a moral message about mankind's destructiveness. There was indeed an ethical dilemma here, as Schneider pointed out, when other scientists criticized his approaches to the public.
It was not easy "to find the balance between being effective and being honest," It is hard to accept the truthfulness of scientists who have said that they have chosen to overstate the rate of potential warming and the consequences of it, in order to foment exactly the kind of fear that we see Al Gore spreading.
I have wondered for quite a while now, how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came into being, and how it became the arbitrator of all things climate related. Stephen Schneider has continued to be a climate alarmist, whether it be global cooling or warming. He is now considered a key IPCC author.
James Hansen who was working at the NASA Institute in New York City in the early 1980s, has also chosen to take his opinions regarding climate change to the public, often even before giving the scientific community an opportunity to react or respond to his claims. In 1981, he sent a copy of a report that he had submitted to the journal Science to the New York Times before it was reviewed and published, with the result that the greenhouse gas effect made the front page of a major U.S. newspaper for the first time. Mr. Hansen continued to be very outspoken on the subject of Global Warming. He and his group staunchly proclaimed that they could, "confidently state that major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty". A number of respected scientists publicly objected to Mr. Hansen's tactics - saying that he had gone far beyond what the data indicated in his claims. They also objected to his insistence on going to the general public, who had little understanding of the complexities of climate.
Unfortunately, the weather in the 1980s seemed to support Mr. Hansen's claims. The summer of 1988 raised concerns about Global Warming with widespread drought in the American Midwest, the so-called super-hurricane Gilbert, and record low water levels in the Mississippi River. However, journalists writing about these weather events were confusing weather and climate - a situation that continues today.
News reports often failed to explain that scientists never claimed that a given spell of weather was an infallible reflection of global warming. Schneider, who also testified in Congressional hearings and was often quoted, suggested that "the association of local extreme heat and drought with global warming took on a growing credibility simply from its repeated assertion." He worried that the media exaggerations would bring the public to dismiss climate science as unreliable, when the next cold, wet season arrived. But Schneider, Hansen, and their fellows could only be pleased that the issue had at last gotten into the spotlight. "I've never seen an environmental issue mature so quickly," an environmental advocate remarked, "shifting from science to the policy realm, almost overnight."
According to a paper published in 1997 by Wendy Franz, then an academic at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, the first World Climate Conference was organized by the World Meteorological Organisation in 1979 to bring national representatives together to attempt to understand climate change and prepare for it. Unfortunately, this and following similar conferences became opportunities for climate scientists to discuss all their personal theories, without regard for the policies of the countries they worked for.
The Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases (AGGG) was set up in 1986. The AGGG's model was to rely on a few private foundations; and its connections with outspoken environmentalists raised suspicions that the group's recommendations were partisan. An even more fundamental drawback was the group's structure, in the traditional model of a tight, elite committee.
It was, however, instrumental in coordinating the "World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security," nicknamed the Toronto Conference in 1988. Toronto was a meeting by invitation of scientist experts - not official government representatives, The Toronto Conference's report concluded that the changes in the atmosphere due to human pollution "represent a major threat to international security, and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe."
Meanwhile, the media increasingly hinted that any catastrophe in the news, from droughts to floods to polluted seas, might be due to human interference with climate.
What had begun as a research puzzle had become a serious international public concern and a diplomatic issue.
Also, in 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) worked together to establish an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC was composed mainly of people who participated not only as science experts, but as official representatives of their governments - people who had strong links to national laboratories, meteorological offices, and science agencies like NASA.
The IPCC was neither a strictly scientific nor a strictly political body, but a unique hybrid.
Another consequence was a 1989 meeting in Hanover, Germany where twenty environmentalists from Europe and the United States discussed ways to work together. The result was the Climate Action Network, a loose coalition of non-governmental organizations. (Within two decades, the network was exchanging information and coordinating strategy among more than 360 NGOs around the world.) This resulted in panels of scientists becoming a voice in world affairs, in ways that had not even been imagined previously. They functioned independently of nationalities and sought to shape perceptions of the actual state of the world itself.
Groups that had other reasons for preserving tropical forests, promoting energy conservation, slowing population growth, or reducing air pollution could make common cause, as they offered their various ways to reduce emissions of CO2.
Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and many other organizations made CO2 reduction one of their top priorities.
The first IPCC report was issued in 1990. It concluded that the world was, in fact, warming - although it allowed that much of the warming could be caused by natural processes. Additionally, the report specifically rejected an objection raised by a group of skeptical scientists that the main cause of any observed changes was solar variations.
There were a number of polls of the scientific community taken in the early 1990s which suggested that most scientists felt their understanding of climate change was incomplete, and that predictions of future climate was, therefore, extremely uncertain.
Many climate experts believed that significant Global Warming could occur, however nearly all of them agreed that the future would hold "surprises," deviations from climate as it was currently understood.
The IPCC had written its report in preparation for a Second World Climate Conference, held in November 1990. Strongly influenced by the IPCC's conclusions, the conference wound up with a strong call for policy action. This induced the United Nations General Assembly to call for negotiations towards an international agreement that might restrain global warming.
The IPCC established a cyclical international process whereby it would review and issue a consensus report on the most recent research on the prospects for climate change in order to establish a foundation for international negotiations to develop guidelines for individual nations to use for policy-setting processes.
In 1995, the IPCC issued its second report, which found that "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." Unfortunately, the IPCC process deliberately mingled science and politics, until they could scarcely be disentangled.
The IPCC's conclusions had a huge impact on the 1997 U.N. Conference on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan. This was a policy and media extravaganza attended by nearly 6,000 official delegates, and thousands more representatives of environmental groups and industry, plus a swarm of reporters. The greenhouse debate had now become tangled up with intractable problems involving fairness and the power relations between industrialized and developing countries, with Western European countries demanding mandatory carbon emissions restrictions and developing countries rightly refusing to be denied their abilities to develop, using inexpensive and readily-available fuel and Western technology.
The IPCC has now become, in the minds of many, the final arbiter of the consensus of all the world's governments, with regard to the policy of climate change, when in fact, it should be serving as a clearinghouse for scientific debate. It has taken up a moral agenda, and has framed the climate change debate primarily as one of science decoding nature's message about humanity's destructiveness. It has become a political tool to further the attitudes of scientists like Paul Erlich who said, "Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... is the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
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