[Vision2020] WSJ -- Climate of Opinion (editorial)

[Dan Carscallen]

I think the key phrase is thus: 
 
"In any case, the evidence of warming is not evidence of man-made
warming."
 
enjoy,
 
DC
 
Climate of Opinion 
Why we believe in global warming. 

BY HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR. 
Sunday, April 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT 

Al Gore will have no trouble finding in Monday's Supreme Court ruling
more evidence that global warming is a reality, indeed a dire threat. 


He will soon say--you can take this to the bank--words like: "Now, even
a majority of the Supreme Court has recognized the danger of global
warming." And he'll be right in the sense that the Court invokes the
magic word "consensus" for a physical fact that itself is unproven,
unprovable and exists purely in the realm of speculation. 


Al Gore has made himself, in his curious way, the personification of a
society's impulse to manufacture political certainty out of irresolvable
scientific uncertainty, of which the Supreme Court is the latest
culprit/victim. You can see this by arranging the questions related to
global warming in descending order of urgency. 


The most urgent, by definition, is Mr. Gore's claim that the atmosphere
is in such a calamitous state that we have "no more than 10 years before
we cross a point of no return." How does he know, asked interviewer
Charlie Rose last year? 


Mr. Gore's answer: "I accept the fact that the most respected scientists
whose judgment I think is the best are now concerned that we may be in
that territory." 


The second question is whether human-produced carbon dioxide is driving
this dangerous warming. Invariably, Mr. Gore cites a single observation:
that such a belief is the "consensus" of scientists. 


Only at the third question--is there evidence that global warming is
actually occurring?--do we enter the realm of the observable. Air and
sea temperature can be measured. The standard observation is that the
planet has fitfully warmed by one degree Celsius over the past century,
but this figure is produced by massaging inconsistent readings from many
times and places. Different assumptions would produce different trends,
or none at all. And that's without considering whether a planetary
"average" temperature is even a meaningful data point (some have likened
it to averaging all the phone numbers in the phone book). 



  <http://www.opinionjournal.com/images/storyend_dingbat.gif> 


In any case, evidence of warming is not evidence of manmade warming. 

It would surprise the public, and even the Supreme Court, to know how
utterly the science of global warming offers no evidence whatsoever on
the central proposition. What fills Mr. Gore's film, books, speeches and
congressional testimony are scientific observations and quasi-scientific
observations, all right. They concern polar bears, mosquitoes,
hurricanes, ice packs and everything but whether humans cause global
warming. 


Some of this evidence may suggest, weakly or strongly, the existence of
warming trends in particular parts of the world (such local trends, both
cooling and warming, have been observed in many places and many times).
More dubiously, some may indicate a generalized warming. But none offers
any evidence that carbon dioxide is causing warming. Mr. Gore's method
is the equivalent of trying to prove that Jack killed Jane by going on
and on about how awful it was that Jane was killed. 


Polemicists in favor of human-caused global warming liken skeptics to
tobacco lobbyists who denied the link between smoking and lung cancer.
In fact, it makes a useful analogy. 


Suppose the world consisted of exactly one smoker who could be observed
only from a distance to test the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.
If he died of cancer, it wouldn't prove smoking causes cancer. If he
failed to die of cancer, it wouldn't prove smoking doesn't cause cancer.



The link between smoking and cancer is made by observing millions of
smokers and nonsmokers. Indeed, what led scientists to seek systematic
evidence of a link in the first place was anecdotal evidence that
smokers, of whom there have been millions, appeared to die in unusual
numbers from lung cancer. 


Nothing remotely similar has been involved in developing the hypothesis
that carbon dioxide creates warming. The relevant observations are a
mess: Measured global temperature has both risen and fallen for
considerable periods during the past century, even as CO2 has risen
steadily. The geologic record suggests the world was much cooler in the
past despite CO2 concentrations higher than today's. Unlike smoking and
cancer, there's no anecdotal observation for the hypothesis that CO2
causes planetary warming. It may or may not be true, but to believe it
is a "scientific truth" is to make a leap of faith, not science. 


The consensus that human activities are causing global warming is purely
a social invention--there's no way of showing it to be so, and no
self-evident reason for preferring to believe it's so. The "consensus"
is, in truth, a product of itself. 



  <http://www.opinionjournal.com/images/storyend_dingbat.gif> 


Now we are prepared to get the joke. It came during last fall's Supreme
Court oral argument about global warming, when the learned Justices,
allowing the word "consensus" to serve as evidence of manmade warming,
devoted themselves instead to a solemn discussion of how many inches of
sea-level rise, and thus how many square miles of coastal inundation,
the EPA is guilty of failing to prevent by refusing to regulate U.S.
tailpipe emissions (which account for just 8% of human CO2 output). 

Sen. James Inhofe is notorious for saying the theory of manmade global
warming is a "hoax." Obviously we need a better theory than Mr. Inhofe's
of when head-counting is a useful way of estimating the validity of a
factual proposition and when it isn't. Until then, it's perhaps
sufficient to say that many people believe in manmade global warming
because many people believe in manmade global warming; Al Gore believes
in it because many people believe in it; many people believe in it
because Al Gore believes in it; and so on, right up to the highest court
in the land. 


Mr. Jenkins is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
His column appears in the Journal on Wednesdays. 

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