CAMBRIA, CA - Around the PRI hallways and water cooler, we like to say that the environment is much too important to be left to the environmentalists - they'll only screw it up. Fresh evidence of this problem is found in Tuesday's New York Times, which carried a story headlined, "New Study Finds Climate Shift Threatens California."

Now, climate change is a serious issue, but it is hard to take seriously people who say repeatedly and in
increasingly frantic tones that it is the greatest threat to mankind since the Y2K computer bug. The new study,
sponsored by the Union of "Concerned" Scientists but somehow paid for with our tax dollars, concludes that
average temperatures in California could increase by as much as 16 degrees over the next several decades. This would make much of the state as hot or hotter than Death Valley, and wipe out most of California's agriculture. We're toast, in other words.

As we have mentioned in the last few edition of our annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, the
environmental reporting of the New York Times has been generally superior to the most of the media pack. But the Times dropped the ball on this one, starting with a failure to provide any background on the extreme
ideological bias of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Imagine what the Times would say about an
industry-funded study on any controversial subject.

Keep in mind that we are constantly hectored to beware of scientists on the fringes of the climate debate, and to
pay more attention to the "mainstream" or "consensus" of current science. Fair enough. What does the "mainstream" say about local climate predictions?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official UN effort to evaluate global warming, issued several disclaimers against estimating regional or local climate futures in its most recent assessment, including this one: "Despite recent improvements and developments, regionalisation research is still a maturing process and the related uncertainties are still rather poorly known... Therefore a coherent picture of regional climate change via available regionalisation techniques cannot yet be drawn."

Back in April, Nature magazine took note of this issue, with an article headlined "Modellers Deplore
'Short-Termism' on Climate." Reporting on a climate modeling conference in Switzerland, Nature said:
"Participants admitted privately that the immediate benefits of regional climate modelling have been oversold
in exercises such as the Clinton administration's U.S. regional climate assessment, which sought to evaluate the
impact of climate change on each part of the country. . . many researchers would like to avoid the word ëpredictioní altogether."

But as usual, the most sensational claims make the headlines, while the sober realists get reported only in
the pages of specialty journals such as Nature. It is precisely the apocalyptic alarmism of the noisiest
environmentalists, starting with the "population bomb" crowd and the Club of Rome, that make it so hard to take seriously the current predictions of extreme climate doom.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Steven F. Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of The
Age of Reagan--The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. He can be reached via email at
shayward@pacificresearch.org.