A climate change sales job

U.S. President Bill Clinton last month launched a propaganda campaign on behalf of stiff cuts in the use of fossil fuels. Having thus jeopardized future economic growth, he joined bipartisan celebration over an agreement-which wouldn't have come about without expectations of continued economic growth-to balance the federal budget and cut taxes.

In a White House discussion on climate change, the President declared there to be "ample evidence that human activities are already disrupting the global climate and that if we stay on our current course, the average global temperatures may rise 2-6° F. during the next century." Furthermore, he said, "if we fail to act, scientists expect that our seas will rise 1-3 ft and thousands of square miles here in the United States, in Florida, Louisiana, and other coastal areas will be flooded. Infectious diseases will spread to new regions. Severe heat waves will claim lives. Agriculture will suffer. Severe droughts and floods will be more common."

Whose evidence?

By Clinton's own admission, this is a sales job, "a process in which we ask the American people to listen to the evidence, to measure it against their own experience, but not to discount the weight of scientific authority if their own experience does not yet confirm what the overwhelming percentage of scientists believe to be fact today." Why? Because the President is "convinced that when the nations of the world meet in Kyoto, Japan, in December (to discuss an agreement on climate change) the United States has got to be committed to realistic and binding limits on our emissions of greenhouse gases."

Clinton introduced seven scientists who testified to various dimensions of "the climate challenge" and generally ignored evidence that the CO₂ build-up may not be warming the planet at all. Like all sales jobs, this one upholds facts that serve its purposes and suppresses those that don't.

Indeed, the temperature, climate, and health forecasts that Clinton bundled together amount to a worst possible case on the distant margin of probability. In a press briefing before the main event, Katie McGinty, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, implied that global warming is already responsible for the spread of disease, heat-related deaths in Chicago, and what she claimed to be an increase in the severity of storm systems.

The administration is misrepresenting science. Clinton's calamitous worst case presumes maximum warming and includes effects, such as rising sea levels, that many scientists question. There are good reasons to expect natural responses to partly or wholly offset whatever warming might accompany growth in atmospheric concentrations of CO₂. There are also reasons to doubt that warming is under way now. Blaming CO₂ concentrations for specific current phenomena is certainly a stretch.

Many scientists are properly concerned about future climate effects of human activity. Some members of that group think the effects, however uncertain, warrant immediate response; some want to know more before they commit themselves to costly remedies. And some scientists think natural systems can painlessly accommodate human influence.

Selective embrace

The Clinton administration embraces only scientists advocating immediate precautions. At the White House gathering, Vice President Al Gore cited a letter signed by 2,600 scientists supporting early action. By itself, the number sounds impressive. Within the worldwide population of scientists, however, it hardly amounts to the "overwhelming percentage" of Clinton's proclamation.

No one should mistake Clinton's White House gathering for scientific debate or evidence of scientific consensus on the subject of climate change. In accordance with the self-justifying traditions of government activism, Clinton is inventing popular dragons that only heads of state have the power to slay.