WSJ   
REVIEW & OUTLOOK 

Kyoto by Degrees
June 21, 2005; Page A16

      Something strange is happening in the U.S. Senate -- or at least stranger than usual. The world's greatest deliberative body is hurtling toward passage of limits on greenhouse gases, even as the scientific case for such a mini-Kyoto Protocol looks weaker all the time.

      Recall that as recently as 1997 the Senate voted 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution assailing Kyoto's provisions. Bill Clinton never even brought the Protocol up for a vote. But all of a sudden such limits are said to be a political "inevitability" in a Republican Senate. Energy Chairman Pete Domenici says he's open to the John McCain-Joe Lieberman mini-Kyoto, and New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman is proposing an amendment that would impose even stricter limits on fossil fuel use.

      Politics is often illogical, but this momentum seems entirely untethered to real science. Since that Byrd-Hagel vote eight years ago, the case for linking fossil fuels to global warming has, if anything, become even more doubtful. The Earth currently does seem to be in a warming period, though how warm and for how long no one knows. In particular, no one knows whether this is unusual or merely something that happens periodically for natural reasons. Most global warming alarms are based on computer simulations that are largely speculative and depend on a multitude of debatable assumptions.


      Then there's the famous "hockey stick" data from American geoscientist Michael Mann. Prior to publication of Mr. Mann's data in 1998, all climate scientists accepted that the Earth had undergone large temperature variations within recorded human history. This included a Medieval warm period when the Vikings farmed Greenland and a "little ice age" more recently when the Thames River often froze solid. Seen in that perspective, the slight warming believed to have occurred in the past century could well be no more than a natural rebound, especially since most of that warming occurred before 1940.

      Enter Mr. Mann, who suggested that both the history books and other historical temperature data were wrong. His temperature graph for the past millennium was essentially flat until the 20th century, when a sharp upward spike occurs -- i.e., it looks like a hockey stick. The graph was embraced by the global warming lobby as proof that we are in a crisis, and that radical solutions are called for.

      But then, in 2003, Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick published a critique calling Mr. Mann's work riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Correct for those errors, they showed, and the Medieval warm period returns.

      Mr. Mann has never offered a serious rebuttal to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique. He has refused to fully explain his methodology, claiming he's the victim of "intimidation." That's odd when you consider that the sine qua non of real science is independently verifiable and reproducible results.

      Meanwhile, a review of about 200 different temperature studies was published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the journal Climate Research. It likewise reaffirmed the longstanding consensus that there have been large temperature variations over the past millennium.

      So what would be a fair representation of how most scientists view the climate of the past 1,000 years? We'd suggest the graph nearby, which we reprint exactly as it appeared in the first report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hardly a group of oil-funded hacks) in 1990. It shows that our own warming period is neither unique nor all that hot.

      There are other reasons to doubt the global warming alarums. For example, the computer models that predict it suggest the upper atmosphere should have warmed substantially in recent decades. But data from weather balloons and satellites don't match the projections.

      There's also the matter of the alleged melting of the Antarctic ice cover, threatening a catastrophic sea level rise. In fact, recent data suggest the ice is thickening and temperatures are dropping in most of the continent. Finally, an increasing number of scientists are concluding that variations in solar radiation associated with sun spots -- that's right, the heat of the sun -- play a major role in Earth's climate.

      To add it all up, the Earth is slightly warmer than it used to be a century ago, but no one knows why. Even if fossil fuels were the cause, Kyoto would make little difference, especially with China and India understandably bent on oil-fueled growth to lift their citizens out of poverty. And a warmer Earth may not be any worse than a colder one, certainly not for the longer growing seasons it would allow in the world's temperate zones. None of this justifies passing, for the first time, limits on greenhouse gases that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs on American energy production.

      President Bush can in good conscience offer a polite rebuff to his friend Tony Blair when the British Prime Minister presses for American action on climate change at the upcoming G-8 summit in Scotland. Likewise, if Senators are going to insist on passing a pork-laden energy bill, the least they could do is avoid senseless limits on future economic growth such as the Kyoto-lites on offer from Messrs. McCain, Lieberman and Bingaman.