September 23, 1998

The "Threat" of Global Warming
By E. Ralph Hostetter

(The following article is the second of two by Hostetter which were prepared for use in the American Farm Publications: Delmarva Farmer and New Jersey Farmer, which . Hostetter publishes. Permission to reprint or otherwise make use of this, was granted to the Alliance for America by Hostetter. The material included may be used, with suitable credit or attribution, by Alliance members and their publications. JFL)

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Historical perspectives are always informative when advanced to the present. Of particular interest are the climatic issue advanced some 30 years ago.

The founding of Earth Day in April 1970 heralded the beginning of a new Ice Age! Average annual temperatures in the United States had dropped from a high of 54.67 degrees F. in 1934 to slightly less than 52 degrees F. in 1970.

By 1974, the average temperature dropped to 51.6 degrees F., a loss of a full three degrees F. in just 40 years. This was startling, indeed, in as much as the global temperature had struggled over the past 115 years to add a mere nine-tenths of one degree F. to the warm side.

In its 1975 Earth Day issue, Newsweek magazine weighed in heavily on the side of the Ice Age activists. Newsweek reported: "There are ominous signs that the earth weather patterns have begun to change dramatically." Scientists were reporting cooling trends with another Ice Age in the making. The magazine found "climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change."

Newsweek conceded, however, that such solutions as "melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot to retain the Earth's heat" might create other problems. Newsweek concluded by writing, the longer planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become "grim reality."

Smithsonian magazine published a article entitled "Climate Outlook: Variable and Possibly Cooler" by Henry Lansford of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"Most climatologists (the italics are mine) agree on one documented fact," Lansford wrote: "The Northern Hemisphere has been cooling off for the last quarter century or so, especially in the higher latitudes.

Next at bat was Stephen Schnieder from the same national research center who asked "if we can afford to gamble that we will not have a series of years like 1972 and 1974 when droughts, floods and early frosts will drastically reduce crop yields." (Sound familiar?)

Schnieder went so far as to suggest implementation of what he called the "Genesis Strategy" of biblical times when Joseph advised the Pharoah to store grain for the seven years of plenty to feed the people during the seven years of famine.

As late as 1976, Lowell Ponte wrote a book entitled "Cooling." Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island wrote in the forword: "This book is as disquieting as Silent Spring in its analysis of environmental hazards that can affect our future."

Ponte claims in his book that the "cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations because of the floods, violent storms and other destructive phenomena."

A 1975 National Academy of Sciences study suggested the possibility of huge, year-round snowfields in the United States and Europe.

About this time, global warmers, having discarded their overcoats, were just beginning to warm up to a program to melt down the Ice Age crowd. Not to be defrosted so easily, NASA's Goddard Institute scientist Dr. S. I. Rasool and our previously referenced Stephen H. Schnieder, in 1975, stepped out of the cooler long enough to fire a broadside at the crowd in Bermuda shorts and bikinis. The NASA scientists struck below the belt by suggesting the "greenhouse" threat from carbon dioxide is overrated and even an eight-fold increase over then present levels (an increase from 352 parts per million to over 2,800 ppm) might warm the globe by a mere two degrees.

It is worth noting at this point, that carbon dioxide levels have risen only 92 ppm from 1850 to the present while, at the same time, global temperature has increased only 0.9 of one degree F. and most of this increase was prior to 1940 when the full impact of automotive and aircraft traffic was just beginning.

It should be obvious at this time, 1998, that coolers are out and politically powerful warmers are in. It took some 30 years to make the transition from the Ice Age mentality to the global warming mentality. That switch from cold to hot should come as no surprise to any observer of the people who blow hot and cold so often.

The global warmers now appear to be a more determined lot, especially since one of their own is vice president of the United States with practically unlimited power and money to force issues regardless of science.

Little notice was taken of a drop in average temperatures from 54 degrees F.+ in 1981 to 51.7 degrees F. in 1993, nearly the same differential in temperature that brought about the Ice Age scare in 1970, and, we might add, in a span of 12 years, not 40. Power and politics keep the fires of global warming burning.

James D. Johnston, in his well-researched book Driving America, published by the American Enterprise Institute of Washington, D.C., details many of the facts used as a basis for this article. In Driving America, Johnston lists ad infinitum examples of regulatory actions taken which he calls "classic examples of the unintended consequences of well-intended policies."

As time goes on, more and more serious scientists are studying the bible of global warming, the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These scientists, far outnumbering the 2,000 who were credited with writing the I:PCC report, are publishing on the Internet, testifying before Congress and producing papers for policy institutes around the world.

Thousands of pages are now available on the Internet and from testimony at Congressional hearings attacking the conclusions, weak though they are, of the 1995 IPCC final report. Typical is New Zealander, Vincent Gray, M.A., PhD., currently a peer reviewer of IPCC '95 and a physical chemistry scientist with vast scientific experience on three continents, who concluded: "There is nothing in the latest IPCC report to support the introduction of drastic or economically damaging measures to control greenhouse gas emissions."

He further noted: "The 'final' draft of Climate Change '95 had the following passage (Page 8.17)-"'When will an anthropogenic (human influence on nature) effect on the climate be identified?' The best answer is 'We do not know.' Inexplicably, this passage was deleted from the published report."

Honesty among the global warmers? We rest our case.