Global warming push begins

U.S. President Bill Clinton made at least partial sense on two of the four points he made to weather forecasters about global warming this month. Vice-President Al Gore, as usual, made little sense at all.

In a White House meeting launching an effort to, in Clinton's words, "build the awareness of the American people," the government's two top executives exaggerated scientific consensus about climate change, mischaracterized the phenomenon, and continued their tawdry campaign to foreclose dissent.

Concern for growth

Clinton sounded reasonable when he said that remedies should be consistent with economic growth and that developing countries should take part in any effort to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But the principles are easier to proclaim than apply.

Limiting the use of fossil energy, the only way to cut emissions of carbon dioxide to anywhere near target levels, will hurt economies. No one should pretend otherwise. And necessary as it is that developing countries cut CO2 emissions if all others must, getting them to do so won't be easy. Their priorities are economic.

Clinton pointed to a "vast majority opinion" among scientists on the subject of climate change, citing 2,000 signatures on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That report actually moderated earlier alarms about planetary warming. Its most important finding was that human influence is becoming evident in climate data. Some scientists who signed the document later complained that the published report omitted wording about uncertainty of the conclusion.

It should be a source of comfort, not alarm, that scientists are concerned about a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere and about other changes of possibly human origin. And it should come as no shock that heightened study has identified, to the satisfaction of many if not most scientists, the renowned "human signal" in climate data.

Few scientists, however, will either aver that detectable human influence leads inevitably to catastrophic warming or attribute current effects to planetary warming already under way. The logical leap is too great, the variables too numerous, the mechanisms too complex.

Paying these distinctions no heed, Clinton and Gore prattle away about floods, glacier melt, and weather volatility. It serves their political purposes if people conclude that a scientific majority actually considers catastrophic warming to be not only certainly threatening but also immediately manifest. On either score, however, the conclusion is no less wrong.

Clinton's other point, therefore-that the U.S. should commit to "realistic and binding limits" on emissions of greenhouse gases-asserts a faulty conclusion for a debate that should only be starting. Before committing Americans to the costs of such limits, he might consider testing the "vast majority opinion" among scientists by proposing an end to federal funding of climate research. If the country is to accept costs of precautionary remedies regardless of all it doesn't yet know about the climate, why keep paying to learn more?

The tobacco analogy

With the weather forecasters, Gore picked up where Clinton left off, making selective use of data ranges, ignoring trends within trends, and discounting the possibility of natural compensations. Then he compared arguments based on the uncertainty of climate science with lingering claims that tobacco hasn't been proven to cause cancer. Interior Sec. Bruce Babbitt, who earlier called global warming doubters un-American, repeated the tobacco metaphor before the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The message is clear: Whoever questions this administration's inclinations on global warming, whoever indeed might dare suggest that Clinton and Gore can't separate science from salesmanship, grovels in ethical muck with the tobacco demons. So, anybody got a light?