Washington, D.C. -- It looked as though another Earth Day might pass quietly last week, but then Sunday’s New York Times delivered a breathless front-page blast at “industry opponents” of the Kyoto global warming treaty,
who are -- can you believe it -- actually organizing to oppose the treaty. What is surprising is not that
industry would organize to oppose the treaty, but that the New York Times would think this front page news. This
is the same newspaper, after all, that told everyone to calm down two months ago when the paper’s brethren in the news media were hyping the remote possibility that a large asteroid might come close to striking Planet Earth 30 years from now. How come, sensible skeptics note, the New York Times doesn’t apply the same “precautionary principle” to the possibility of earth-bound asteroids that it does to global warming?

Deep in the middle of the New York Times story was a paragraph that unwittingly explained what is really going on with the global warming issue: “Whenever the treaty’s advocates, including the Clinton Administration, discuss global warming, they present the science as essentially settled and unchallengeable, and they compare dissenting scientists to discredited apologists for the tobacco companies. That view has become widely accepted among reporters and the public.” (Emphasis Added)

This passage is more revealing than the reporter probably intended. Even before there was a Clinton Administration, Al Gore was playing smash-mouth politics with the issue, publicly attacking any scientist who had the courage to say the global warming emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. This has succeeded in keeping the number of vocal scientific dissenters down to a short list that includes Pat Michaels, Fred Singer, Robert Balling, and Frederick Seitz. The Clinton Administration’s message to would-be scientific skeptics, helpfully conveyed by the New York Times, is simple: dissent from the party line and you will become the scientific equivalent of Paula Jones or Ken Starr. Who wants to do that, when $2 billion of federal research money (more than the Feds spend for the National Cancer Institute) is available for pro-global warming research. And as long as the number of vocal skeptics remains under a dozen, it will be easy to keep them marginalized with ad hominem attacks, rather than meeting their arguments with evidence.

A scientist acquaintance of mine who worked for a spell at the NASA lab in Huntsville, Alabama, where a lot of
climate modeling is going on, tells me confidentially that most of the scientists he knows there are deeply
skeptical of the global warming theory. They don’t speak up not merely because of the political cost but,
moreover, because they want to keep developing their climate models, which they are convinced will someday be
of great utility.

So the Clinton Administration and a compliant media go on perpetrating a fraud on the public, with a vast expansion of government control over energy use in prospect. The good thing about real science, Pat Michaels reminded the Philadelphia Society over the weekend in Chicago, is that the truth eventually comes out. The question before the nation at the moment is: Will it come out in time to prevent a new government power-grab?

-- Steven Hayward