From: Jay_Thomas@putnaminv.com
Date: Tue Oct 31 2000 - 14:05:30 PPET
Next batch of fuel for the fire...
http://www.supplysideinvestor.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=1113
Don't Be Spooked Mr. Sulzberger
Memo To: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., NYT Publisher
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Scary editorial on Global Warming
I bet when you got up Saturday morning and read the lead
editorial in your newspaper, Arthur, you got the willies, and it
wasn't even Halloween. "A Sharper Warning on Warming"
showed up just in time to give a boost to Vice President Gore's
decision to scare little children about getting fried by greenhouse
gases long before Medicare runs out of money. Here is the lead
paragraph, in case you forgot:
The international panel of climate scientists considered the
most authoritative voice on global warming has now
concluded that mankind's contribution to the problem is
greater than originally believed. In addition, the panel warns
that warming over the next 100 years could increase more
than originally estimated. Its worse case scenario calls for
a truly unnerving rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit over 1999
temperature levels.
Don't be scared. It is all a bunch of baloney, cooked up
specifically to help Gore. I'm informed the draft summary, which
the Times reported Friday, was whipped together by a small group
of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who got
together at the headquarters of Environmental Defense Fund in
your town, NYC. They could have waited a few weeks, but Gore
needed it now. If you read the NYPost two weeks ago, Dick
Morris wrote a column about how the only way Gore could win on
November 7 was to scare people about global warming. Gore
loves to do that anyway, so he could use the Morris column to
overrule his campaign team, which does not see this hoax as a
winning issue. (When Gore mentioned it in his acceptance speech,
we could hear the sound of one hand clapping.)
Hoax is not too strong a term, Arthur. Once the greenies
succeeded in getting the Democratic establishment to buy into it,
your newspaper had no choice but to go along with it. I've been
trying to get your editors for years to make a serious effort to
consultphysicists on this issue, as opposed to "climate scientists."
Do you realize how much money is poured down the drain on this
nonsense, how many little children contribute their nickels and
dimes to keep the earth safe from -- boogie, boogie -- CARBON
DIOXIDE!! You may recall that it was James Hansen, director of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who got Gore all
excited about global warming with a study he did about 20 years
ago. It was Hansen who figured that too much carbon dioxide
would cloak Mother Earth with a shield that would trap the heat,
like a greenhouse, and temperatures would rise inexorably until we
were all fried -- or drowned when the icecaps melted.
You may have missed it, because the Times buried the story deep
inside, but Hansen, an honest man, finally threw in the towel when
the predictions he made based on his computer model just did not
come to pass. Carbon dioxide isn't so bad after all, Arthur, so you
don't have to hold your breath. Now if the Times had put the story
on Page One, the Vice President might have seen it and
announced that, based on this new information, he would change
his mind. Or not. Maybe, like the UN's "climate scientists," he
has too much invested in the hoax and has to see it through to the
end. When the IPCC "draft" was leaked last week to your
reporter, Andrew V. Revkin, we learned from the headline: "A
Shift in Stance in Global Warming Theory; Scientists Now
Acknowledge Role of Humans in Climate Change." Nowhere in
the story is Dr. Hansen mentioned, but Revkin did call Richard
Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT,
who had been debunking the Hansen hoax all these years. Alas,
Mr. Revkin quoted Dr. Lindzen as one of the scientists
"acknowledging" mankind's cooking of the climate: "There has to
be a human component to the change that's underway," he said.
Well, now, I've never met or spoken with Lindzen, but I could not
believe what I was seeing in that quote. It had to be taken out of
context in order to justify the headline, which is all Al Gore needs
to proceed. So I contacted Dr. Lindzen, who already was pretty
upset, saying he had complained to Revkin, who apologized, he
said, saying what he had written had been edited. Now I don't
know what happened, Arthur, and I'm NOT saying your editors
are part of a giant left-wing conspiracy. Forget that part and read
what Lindzen actually believes, as he wrote in an e-mail to me:
It was definitely quoted out of context, and Revkin claims
that his article was altered from what he had written. For
starters, I have always said that there had to be a human
component to climate change. I have also said that that is a
trivial statement since the important question is whether the
influence is practically significant or not... The models, in
effect, argue that the earth is very poorly designed. Our
work suggests that the models are missing a very strong
negative feedback which would more than cancel the
models' positive feedbacks -- even if they were correct,
which they almost certainly are not. Our paper will appear
in the February issue of the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society.
Now what Lindzen is saying is that while yes, carbon dioxide
could be a greenhouse gas if it did build up the way Gore thinks it
does, it doesn't (as Hansen found). This is because the "climate
scientists" who build these computer models "are missing a very
strong negative feedback." Maybe Lindzen will leak Revkin the
secret negative feedback, if asked, but the physicists I have been
talking to about this for the last 20 years have made the argument
that if there were not an offsetting negative feedback, we would
have fried millions of years ago. In other words, if there is an
extra carbon dioxide molecule that floats into the atmosphere,
more than Mother Earth is comfortable with, there is a process by
which she breaks up the molecule. Dr. Gordon Prather, a nuclear
physicist I know who writes for WorldNetDaily, tells me there is a
parallel in nuclear fission which helps us understand negative
feedback. He reminds me that before the Manhattan Project
detonated the first atomic bomb in Nevada in 1945, there were
scientists who argued against the project because they said the
chain reaction would not stop, it would continue until the whole
earth blew up. Prather says those in charge understood that the
chain reaction would reach a point where the explosion would
"quench" itself, which is what actually happens. The "climate
scientists" lauded by your editors and Mr. Gore do not see that
whatever teeny bit of carbon dioxide mankind produces relative to
natural carbon dioxide is "quenched" by Mother Nature.
Because so much of what Gore wants to do involves limiting the
use of hydrocarbons, let me add my own little unscientific
illustration: If we took all the petroleum consumed in the last
century and a half and put it into a dry Lake Tahoe, it would only
fill one-fifth of the space. My guess is that you have in your office
a globe. Go to it and see if you can find Lake Tahoe on the globe.
You will not. This should remind you how tiny mankind is
compared to the planet, except when you sit at the top of the
Times and imagine how big you are. Then please read through
these two columns Gordon Prather wrote last summer.
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