Research Group Issues Report
Debunking Claims Of "Warming"

WASHINGTON — As politicians gather this week in Buenos Aires for global warming talks, a research group is releasing a report claiming there is no warming trend.

John Carlisle of the National Center for Public Policy Research says each major climatic index cited by global warming proponents has either failed to substantiate dire predictions or has been proven to be the result of natural forces.

In short, he says, there is no corroborating evidence for a global warming theory.

"Even by their own barometers of global warming — melting glaciers, higher Arctic temperatures and rising sea levels — global warming simply is not occurring," Carlisle says.

The author of a paper on the subject, Carlisle is the director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Environmental Policy Task Force.

Taking the claims of "warming" promoters one by one, he says glaciers are not receding as predicted by global warming proponents, but advancing.

According to the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, for example, 55 percent of the 625 glaciers in the United States, Russia, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy have advanced since 1980.

He also notes that between 1955 and 1990, a period in which global warming proponents warned Arctic regions would warm by three degrees, they cooled by one degree.

Carlisle also says there is no appreciable difference in the rate of sea level change over the past several centuries. Sea levels have risen at a steady rate of seven inches per century despite significant temperature variations during the period. Carlisle says the sea level changes are more likely to be linked to tectonic movements in the ocean basin than to climate change.

He further points out that satellite data shows the overall temperature of the planet has not warmed as predicted, but rather cooled by about two-hundredths of degree since 1979.

Carlisle's conclusions and the supporting data can be found on the Internet at www.nationalcenter.org.

That website also includes a revealing look at the makeup of the Buenos Aires conference, their degree of participation in the "Kyoto Protocol" agreement, and a hint of what effect the conference itself might have on global warming if proponents' criticism of man-made emissions has any validity.

The website notes, for instance, that 160 nations are expected to be represented, more than 75 percent of which would not incur any burdens under the Kyoto agreement. Individual participants in the conference are estimated to total 9000, it adds, and it will require more than 1.7 million gallons of smoky jet fuel to fly them there.

In addition, the website includes independent calculations of the cost to the United States of complying with the Kyoto agreement.

The Clinton administration, it notes, has projected those costs to total $7-12 billion per year. By contrast, three respected research firms — with no vested policy interests to promote — peg the cost at anywhere from $100 billion to $300 billion per year and up to 2.4 million lost jobs.

A "myths and facts" section debunks a variety of common "warming" claims, beginning with the pretense that "2500 of the world's leading scientists" agree with global warming predictions. The number of actual "scientists" signing off on the report used to promote that claim, the research group points out, totaled no more than 100, and the report they signed off on did not make the claims that global warming promoters insist on citing; those claims were added afterward.

Warming promoters claim that last summer's heat wave supports their theory, but the research group points out that fully half of the states in the nation did not experience temperatures high enough to break records set more than 60 years ago.

As for claims that tropical storms are increasing because of global warming, the website points to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data showing that tropical storms have actually decreased in frequency during the last two decades.

Efforts to tie "warming" — which the evidence shows isn't actually happening — to increases in emissions of carbon dioxide and the burning of fossil fuels are similarly futile. The report notes that global temperatures have risen by approximately 1.5 degrees since the mid-1800s, but that two-thirds of that increase came before 1940, when fossil fuel use was significantly less than it is today. Since 1979, the report adds, during the period of most intense fuel use so far, temperatures have actually declined one one-hundredth of a degree.

Finally, the report concludes with revealing quotes by promoters and detractors of the "warming" hypothesis.

Notable is an admission by Stanford University professor Dr. Stephen Schneider, the "Godfather" of global warming. Speaking in 1996 to what he must have assumed would be a friendly forum of co-conspirators, Schneider said the way to promote global warming is to get "loads of media coverage."

To do that, he continued, "we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have." That remains the classic recipe for deceit.

In opposition, legitimate atmospheric scientist Dr. S. Fred Singer pointed out that "warming" promoters "insist on using everything to measure the temperature of the planet except a thermometer."