Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Steve Hayward, the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. He is the author of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, released each year on Earth Day. He is the producer of the new film An Inconvenient Truth or Convenient Fiction?, a rebuttal to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. To see the film, visit aconvenientfiction.com.

FP: Steve Hayward, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Hayward: Always great to be on Frontpage.

FP: So Gore and the U.N.'s climate change panel has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Tell us what this prize is for exactly. Then tell us your thoughts on it.

Hayward: People may well wonder what the connection is between prospective global warming and peace. The Nobel committee has bought into the hype that global warming will lead to war down the road. In other words, they have used a marginal alarmist scenario as a shoehorn to give their award to Gore. This is tenuous at best, even if the catastrophic warming scenario were to come about, which I and many others seriously doubt. But it is a good example of how climate change has become what philosophers call a "non-falsifiable hypothesis," i.e., it is implicated in everything except perhaps teenage acne, and no event or trend can be considered a counter-indicator. When the weather is hot, we are told it is proof of global warming; then the weather is cold, we are told it is proof of climate change. And don't forget the new UN Secretary General, Banki-Moon [SP?], blamed the Darfur conflict on global warming. So Gore's prize is another phase of the climate silly season that we've been in for several years now.

FP: It is obvious there is a political agenda here. What is it? To crystallize the issue, for instance: how come taking a contrarian position on climate change wouldn’t lead one to getting a peace prize?

Hayward: Gore exemplifies the urge most environmentalists have to exert ever greater political control over resources. Some environmentalists want to do this because they believe we use "too many" natural resources and want to be in charge of rationing them; others believe the rationalist fallacy that government can direct better use of resources than private individuals and the marketplace. To be sure, resource scarcity can be a source of conflict and war, but democracies and nations with market economies seldom have to go to war to resolve such conflicts. The prize ought to go to the multinational forces in Iraq trying to help forge a stable, decent, post-totalitarian nation there.

FP: Why do you think the Nobel Committee is so politicized? Wangari Maathai, Shirin Ebadi, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev etc. I mean come on. How come George W. Bush didn’t get one for liberating 50 million Muslims from two fascist dictatorships?

Hayward: All you need to do to answer this is remember John O'Sullivan's First Law (O'Sullivan was the editor of National Review for several years in the 1990s), which goes as follows: Any organization or institution that is not explicitly conservative shall become left-wing over time. The Nobel Committee has followed the same line of conventional consensus that has undone the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Professors, the Ford Foundation, etc.

FP: Why does the Left lust for catastrophe and disaster predictions?

Hayward: Because it makes them happy. Seriously. A certain cast of leftist mind just loves end of the world threats because it gives their lives meaning and fuels their anger at middle class democracy.

FP: Yep, if everything is going to crumble then even more the urgency for us to change who we really are – the Left’s greatest yearning.

The dissenting voices against catastrophe predictors are threatened and silenced in our culture. Why?

Hayward: Just another variant of McCarthyism of the Left.

FP: There is something I don’t get. If glaciers are disappearing in certain parts of the world, why is only one interpretation allowed of why this is happening?

Hayward: It is true that it has warmed significantly in the arctic (but not Antarctic) region, and that many glaciers have shrunk substantially because of this. It is not yet certain that greenhouse gases are responsible for this arctic temperature rise; some studies suggest it is shifting ocean currents, perhaps related to greenhouse gases, but perhaps not. Other recent studies point the finger at something called "black carbon." And don't forget we're coming out of the "little ice age" of roughly 1500 - 1850. And some glaciers in other areas are growing.

The green fixation on glacier and polar bears and other totems is that climate change has become what philosophers call a "non-falsifiable hypothesis," that is, every event if adduced as "proof" of climate change, and no contrary evidence or fact pattern counts.

FP: What kind of a scientist is Gore?

Hayward: Not much of one, if you go by the recent British court decision that identified nine errors in his movie.

FP: What were some of the errors in Gore’s movies? And “errors” is a nice word. There is also the possibility that they were just flat-out lies and that Gore knew he was misleading the public. Surely Gore knows this whole issue isn’t as clear-cut as he tries to make it to be?

Hayward: The most glaring is sea-level rise. The worst-case scenario of the IPCC's latest report is 23 inches. Gore's movie depicts sea level rise of 20 feet. So who is outside the scientific "consensus" now? A more troublesome and interesting problem is his use of the 600,000 years of data from ice core samples, which he depicts in his movie, through a feat of visual misdirection, to suggest that rises in greenhouse gases cause temperature increases. In fact, what those data show is the opposite; that is, in each case when temperatures and greenhouse gases increased over the last 600,000 years, the temperature went up BEFORE greenhouse gas levels went up, by as much as 800 to 2000 years. This suggests the possibility that our current rise in greenhouse gas levels may be partly or wholly the result of natural factors, and that the modest temperature increase we have seen over the last 100 years isn't wholly caused by human activity.

FP: What are your own personal thoughts on global warming? And what do you think of Al Gore in general and what his main motives are when it comes to this issue?

Hayward: The world is warming, and human civilization probably plays a role in this (though that role may have more to do with land use changes than greenhouse gas emissions, which would mean the warming is about over), but it is a much more modest and manageable problem than Gore and his fellow alarmists argue. I think Gore is a deeply problematic person and thinker. I wrote a long paper last fall (which you can find here) in which I make out Gore as an epigone of Heidegger. Gore believes man is separated from nature by technology, and his calls for "changing human consciousness" are really quite amazing, and potentially totalitarian in its implications, though I do not think he has any understanding of the implications of his own attempt at "deep" thinking on these matters.

FP: If Gore doesn’t deserve a Peace Prize, what does he deserve?

Hayward: Monty Python's Upper Class Twit of the Year Award.

FP: Steve Hayward, thank you for joining us.

Hayward: Thanks.