EDITORIAL

Political support is growing worldwide for costly precautions against global warming. Science, it is increasingly assumed, provides reasonable certainty that a threat looms.

The governing board of the International Energy Agency, for example, seems certain about the threat. Meeting at the ministerial level in Paris last month, the board declared in a communiqu? that "energy policy makers need to play a significant role in meeting the challenge posed by the climate change problem...." A similar view from within the oil and gas industry appears on p. 14.

Along with certainty grows a sense of urgency about acting to avert catastrophic warming. In this view, humankind must do something now, even before science understands the relevant phenomena, because the worst imaginable case is so frightening.

Both motivations-assumptions of certainty about global warming science and urgency to do something now-are misdirected. The best thing people can do for their climate is calm down.

The IPCC report

Much of the alleged certainty about global warming comes from the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an initiative of the United Nations Environmental Program. At the end of 1995, IPCC issued a report that made the warming threat look less menacing than it did in a 1990 IPCC document issued before the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The 1995 report foresees much less warming, 1° C. vs. 3-6° C. in the 1990 forecast, over more time, by 2100 vs. 2050. It nevertheless asserts that climate change attributable to human activity is evident in scientific data, which has proven to be enough to create panic among the certain.

Much is wrong with the 1995 IPCC report, starting with the way it was released over objections of participating scientists who wanted to express more forcefully the uncertainty of their conclusions. The report also sustains a questionable assumption that growing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere relate directly to rising measured temperatures. If the assumption is correct, why did most of this century's observed warming occur in the 1920s and 1930s, while CO2 built up most rapidly after World War II?

The IPCC report takes no account of a University of Oslo study concluding that at least 96% of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from marine and volcanic sources. The findings imply that combustion of fossil fuels influences the climate much less than is usually assumed. And the IPCC report calls "clear" the observation that oceans are warming significantly due to warming of the atmosphere. Yet there are oceanographers who say oceans aren't warming at all.

In fact, while the IPCC report was somehow making people feel certain about global warming, satellite temperature data were indicating negligible warming, if any, in the couple of decades they have been available. Questions also are growing about whether it is reasonable, given the size and complexity of the climate, to think that routine activities of one specie, even one given to burning organic matter, can have catastrophic geophysical effects.

Reason for urgency

So much for certainty. The other motivation to do something now about global warming-fearful urgency-is nonsense. World leaders would be irresponsible to let worst-case fancies dictate economic sacrifice. The most frightening dimension of global warming is not a computer-model temperature zoom not ratified by observation but the precedent of international policy-makers quaking every time Greenpeace and the Sierra Club raise an extremist alarm.

Urgency over a response has little to do with warming prospects anyway. It has much to do with politics and money. Given time, science might add to the list of reasons to doubt warming theories. Loss of such a rich source of popular panic would be terribly inconvenient to crusading politicians needing causes and environmental groups craving funds.