By: James Sherk

1 August 2005 Responsible Creation Care III: Considering the Case for Global Warming

Environmentalists now warn America about a new eco-threat, global warming. Yet despite the hype, the evidence supporting this theory is far weaker than environmentalists suggest. Christians should carefully examine the evidence, and environmentalists past history of ecological false alarms before they embrace extraordinarily expensive legislation to combat global warming that would throw millions into poverty.

The global warming theory states that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause the earth to retain excess solar radiation, gradually overheating the planet. If human CO2 emissions are truly wrecking the earth, Christians have a responsibility to combat global warming and fight for legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Responsible stewardship of God's creation demands no less. Recently Christianity Today has come out in favor of legislation to reduce CO2 emissions, and the National Association of Evangelicals is considering doing likewise.

However, Christians should exercise caution when they listen to environmentalist claims on this issue. Past experience shows that many environmental activists are not primarily motivated by the search for the best scientific evidence, but come to conclusions about the evils of human activity first and seek evidence to justify those conclusions later. Environmentalists have made similar claims before about phenomena that ultimately proved harmless, incurring needless costs in the process. Disturbingly, even some environmentalist leaders have publicly admitted that the science behind global warming does not matter to them because efforts to reduce global warming advance an agenda they already support.

As it is, environmentalists have latched onto this crisis with even greater fervor than they did acid rain or the ozone hole. The World Wildlife Fund warns, "human-caused global warming is among the most pervasive threats to the web of life."1 The Sierra Club proclaims global warming will lead to,

Radical changes in weather patterns, sea levels and serious threats to human health. Increased flooding, storms and agricultural losses could devastate our economy. Plants and animals that cannot adapt to new conditions will become extinct.²

Unlike DDT, acid rain, and the ozone hole, scientific evidence has not refuted the global warming hypothesis. It cannot do so yet, since global warming predicts climate change decades and centuries in the future. Current evidence cannot yet refute predictions about events that have not yet occurred. Nonetheless, much of what has been recently reported as proof of human induced climate change does not actually support the theory. Despite the claims of many activists, science has not come close to irrefutably proving the case for manmade global climate change.

The Media Frequently Overstates the Case for Global Warming
Christians who rely on their local newspapers or evening newscasts for information about global warming could understandably come to the conclusion that scientists had conclusively demonstrated that human activity warms the planet. Almost all news stories on the topic discuss the latest evidence proving the theory. However, the media has an agenda - to make money.

Controversy and disaster sell papers and attract viewers. Consequently the press tends to report dire news, but ignore stories about the world being perfectly fine. This has proven true when it comes to local crime stories, the war in Iraq, or corporate scandals. Good news is boring, while disaster sells. This general trend also holds true about stories on climate change. In many recent news stories the press has highlighted the evidence that the earth is warming while ignoring the details that demonstrated these stories did not really support the theory.

In April of 2005 the Associated Press ran a story headlined "Study Shows Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking."³While the article included some caveats, the reporter focused the story on the reduction in ice on Antarctica Peninsula over the past several decades, and most readers would come away with the conclusion that this presented more evidence of global warming. The AP, however, did not report the fact that the Antarctic Peninsula accounts for only two percent of the landmass of Antarctica, and that while the Peninsula has seen rising temperatures in recent decades, since the 1960s temperatures have been dropping on two thirds of the rest of Antarctica. Moreover sea ice cover around Antarctica has been growing, not shrinking, over the past 25 years.⁴ These facts, which cast doubt on the global warming hypothesis, do not sell papers however, and were not mentioned in the original article.

Similarly, and with much media fanfare, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment recently released the results of a four-year study of arctic temperatures. The press reported that the

Researchers concluded that some areas in the Arctic have warmed 10 times as fast as the world as a whole, which has warmed an average of 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century.⁵

The media focused on the ecological impact of recent arctic temperature changes, and seemed to argue that this report proved the devastating effects of global warming.

Most major media outlets, however, did not report the fact that current arctic temperatures are nothing new. Scientists have measured artic temperatures over the past century, and current temperatures are measurably below arctic temperatures in the 1930s, when the atmosphere contained far less CO2. Arctic temperatures rose substantially in the 1920s and 1930s, fell from the late 1930's to the mid 1960s, gradually rose since then, and have not yet returned to the highs they reached in 1937.⁶

Source: Global Historical Climate Network Database. Image found online at: http://www.techcentralstation.com/112204A.html

So while the temperatures at the North Pole have gone up in recent decades, they do not represent a historically unusual warming trend, nor do they correlate well with human CO2 emissions. While scientists can reconcile this climate record with the global warming hypothesis, arctic temperatures hardly provide positive support for the theory.

However, anyone reading the Washington Post or other major media sources would have come away concluding that this study strongly supported the scientific case for global warming. The press left out important details because headlines screaming "Study Says Polar Bears Could Face Extinction: Warming Shrinks Sea Ice Mammals Depend On," sell papers, while headlines announcing "Current Arctic Temperatures Lower than in 1930s: Show No Historically Unusual Trends," do not. Christians should recognize this media bias towards attention grabbing stories when they consider the evidence on global warming.

Environmentalist Evidence Supporting Global Warming Often Misrepresents the Facts
Further, and more disturbingly, many scientific studies reported in the media as confirming the global warming hypothesis have been subsequently proven baseless. In December 2004 Science published a paper surveying approximately 1,000 peer-reviewed journal articles that dealt with the topic of global climate change. The survey found a virtual unanimous consensus that human CO2 emissions cause global warming. 75 percent of the papers surveyed either explicitly or implicitly endorsed this view, while none disagreed. If true, this study would indeed represent a remarkable scientific consensus on the issue of global warming.

However, other scientists found these results absurd because they knew of papers disputing the global warming hypothesis.⁷ Dr. Benny Peiser at Liverpool John Moores University conducted his own survey of the literature and obtained strikingly different results. He discovered that only one percent of the articles surveyed explicitly endorsed the idea that human activity causes harmful global warming, just a third as many as the three percent that expressed doubt or uncertainty about that view. 29 percent of the papers implicitly endorsed the theory of human induced global warming, while 42 percent dealt with global climate change but "do not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions."⁸

Science, however, refused to publish Dr. Peiser's article on the grounds that his results had appeared elsewhere on the Internet. He protested that they had not, that he had done original research, but Science nonetheless refused to publish his paper or even issue a retraction.⁹ Why would a major journal refuse to retract a discredited paper if the search for the scientific truth, and not arguments for a preconceived position, motivated its actions?

Nor is this an isolated incident. In 2000 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued the U.S. National Assessment of global warming that predicted climate change would lead to widespread and devastating droughts and flooding across the United States by 2100, necessitating immediate action to prevent the threat. However, when the NAS sent the report out for peer review, the reviewers discovered that

The two climate models that are the core of the USNA perform no better than a table of random numbers when it comes to estimating U.S. temperatures during the period of greenhouse effect changes.¹⁰

In other words, the reviewers found the report completely worthless. Nonetheless, the NAS went ahead and published the report, an action that makes no sense if it did not have a preconceived commitment to the global warming hypothesis, independent of whatever the scientific facts demonstrated.

Preconceived Agendas Drive Global Warming Science
It is not only outsiders who claim that unscientific agendas drive global warming science. Recently Dr. Chris Landsea, a climate change scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, resigned his position with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He objected to his superiors making alarmist predictions about future effects of global warming that scientific facts did not support. His supervisor held a press conference stating that global warming would lead to a dramatic increase in hurricane activity, a conclusion which Landsea states, "is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR [third assessment report]." Landsea continued that scientific analysis at the IPCC was "a process that I view as both being motivated by preconceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."¹¹

Christians should listen carefully when scientists point out that environmentalists are misrepresenting their work, and ask themselves why environmentalists would do that if there was other sound evidence available supporting the scientific case for catastrophic global warming.

Disturbingly, even some environmentalist leaders openly admit that they do not care about the science supporting global warming because efforts to reduce human CO2 emissions advance an agenda they still support. Christine Stewart, Canada's former Environment minister, admitted,

No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits.... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.¹²

Former Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) also confessed,

What we've got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.¹³

The Christian Response
Christians, however, do not believe in the innate importance of energy conservation. If necessary to care for God's earth, then Christians should support it, but it is not an end unto itself. Certainly not when the measures necessary to reduce CO2 emissions would throw millions of Americans out of work, increasing poverty in this country. CONSAD Research Corporation found that by 2010, if fully implemented, the Kyoto treaty to mitigate global warming would cause the unemployment of 3.1 million Americans and cost the economy between $170 and $310 billion annually.¹⁴

God has given mankind an important responsibility as stewards of his creation. If global warming were threatening the existence of life on earth Christians would have a duty to take efforts to prevent it. But Christians also have an obligation to help the poor and needy. Needlessly wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and putting millions of Americans on the unemployment rolls to fight a hypothetical threat does not fulfill that responsibility.

Consequently, Christians should view environmentalist claims about global warming with extreme caution. Environmentalists consistently overstate and in some cases misrepresent the scientific evidence for human induced climate change. Environmentalists believe that human CO2 emissions lead to devastating global warming because it fits in perfectly with their preconceptions. Christians do not share these presuppositions and would be well advised to wait for more reliable evidence before they endorse expensive legislation to reduce this "threat."

(1) The World Wildlife Fund website, found online at http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/index.cfm

(2) "A Dangerous Experiment," Sierra Club Global Warming and Energy Program, November 2000. Found online at http://www.sierraclub.org/globalwarming/factsheets/dangerous_experiment.pdf

(3) "Study Shows Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking," by Emma Ross, the Associated Press. April 21, 2005. Available online at: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050421/D89JUVFG0.html

(4) "The Tip of the Iceberg," by Patrick Michaels, Ph.D., Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, former President of the American Association of State Climatologists, and Contributing author and reviewer of the IPCC April 25th, 2005. Tech Central Station. Available online at: http://www.techcentralstation.com/042505C.html

(5) "Study says polar bears could face extinction," Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, Tuesday, November 9, 2004; Page A13. Available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35233-2004Nov8.html

(6) "What's Going on with the Arctic?" by George H. Taylor, a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and State Climatologist, Oregon. Tech Central Station. November 22nd, 2004. http://www.techcentralstation.com/112204A.html

(7) "Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming," By Robert Matthews, The Telegraph. May 1st, 2005. Found online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01

(8) Dr Benny Peiser's Liverpool John Moores University Homepage, "The Letter Science Magazine Refused to Publish," found online at http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm

(9) "Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming," By Robert Matthews, The Telegraph. May 1st, 2005. Found online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/ixworld.html

(10) Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D. "Flips, Flops, and Facts about Global Warming," June 10th, 2002. http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-10-02.html

(11) "Why I must resign," Dr. Chris Landsea, The National Post, Jan 20th, 2005. Available online at http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/landsea.html

(12) Environment Minister Christine Stewart reported in the Calgary Herald, Dec. 14th 1998. Found online at http://www.abd.org.uk/climate_change_truths.htm

(13) Quote found online at http://www.museumofleftwinglunacy.com/envirolunacy.htm

(14) "The Kyoto Protocol: SECTORAL AND REGIONAL ECONOMIC IMPACT ANALYSIS," May 1998. Available online at http://www.consad.com/reports/kyoto.htm