D.C. Dispatch April 3, 2007

Scientific evidence does not affirm Al Gore's most alarming hypotheticals about global warming or the costly changes in policy he recommends.

by Clive Crook

Global Warming: Winners and Losers

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The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy recently published a new opinion survey. It found that the number of Americans who say that global warming is a serious problem now stands at 83 percent, up from an already impressive 70 percent in 2004. Nearly two-thirds of those polled said they believe that the threat to the country from environmental hazards such as air pollution and global warming is as grave as the danger posed by terrorists.

In other words, the battle for public opinion is over. The global-warming "skeptics"—for present purposes, let us define the term to mean those who deny that the planet is warming, or that human activities are chiefly to blame—have been routed. Best of all for the victorious global-warming activists, championed by Al Gore, the losers don't seem to know they have lost. As long as these deny-everything skeptics keep talking, Gore and his followers can plausibly position themselves as sensible realists. They can claim, with apparent justification, that the science is entirely on their side, and they can paint their critics as idiots. The result is that no intellectual discipline is brought to bear. There is no real argument, no honing of positions, no gathering of wisdom—and no movement toward good policy.

The triumphant confidence of the Gore tendency is both intellectually false and dangerous. Gore claims that scientists overwhelmingly, if not unanimously, support his position. In one way, this is true. If his position means rejecting the view, still expressed by many of his critics, that the whole global-warming issue is a hoax, or just some fiendish conspiracy to enslave taxpayers and God-fearing gun owners, then yes, scientists overwhelmingly support his position. If the battle of ideas on this question is between Gore and that kind of skeptic, then yes, scientists overwhelmingly back Gore. From that base, Gore can claim—and get away with claiming—that science supports everything else he says or implies on the subject. This is the victory that the deny-everything skeptics have handed him.

In An Inconvenient Truth, and in a reprise of the movie that he gave to lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week, Gore invoked the image of 20-foot rises in sea level. Remember the maps showing an inundated Florida, nothing but water where Holland used to be, and so forth? The newest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose pronouncements Gore regards as holy writ when they suit him—projected a rise in sea level of between 10 and 24 inches, on a business-as-usual basis, by the end of this century. (The new estimate, by the way, is lower than the IPCC's previous figure.) A rise of this magnitude would be a problem but not a catastrophe. So you don't hear much about that. It is not dramatic enough to feature very prominently in the Gore worldview.

Gore says, rightly, that the catastrophic sea-level scenarios he focuses on would require the near-total melting of the West Antarctic ice shelf and/or the ice on Greenland. The most-pessimistic projections that I am aware of expect those changes to take further centuries of elevated temperatures, and the standard models say millenniums. But the point is, on questions like this the science is uncertain: There is no consensus on such risks. Of course, Gore wants people to believe that such catastrophic scenarios are not so remote, and that climate scientists almost unanimously affirm his sense of desperate urgency—his talk of a "planetary emergency." But the fact is, the further you move beyond a) the planet is warming, and b) human influences are important, the weaker the scientific consensus gets. The science, such as it is, does not at present affirm Gore's most alarming hypotheticals, still less the abrupt and enormously costly changes in policy that he recommends.

A few climate scientists, despite their distaste for the deny-everything skeptics, are starting to point this out. But I wouldn't say that their message is coming through loud and clear. And I can understand their hesitation. To raise any sort of objection to the Gore worldview is to invite derision and contempt. The Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg gave testimony alongside Gore last week. Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that provided compelling evidence that environmental activists have tended to exaggerate current and foreseeable hazards. That makes him the contemporary equivalent of a medieval heretic. He is not in fact a global-warming skeptic in the sense I just defined—but he is not much alarmed about the danger and believes that other global development priorities are more pressing. His thinking might be wrong—I believe that it is mostly right—but, in any event, it surely cannot be an illegitimate point of view. Well, Google the name to get a taste of the vituperation and outright character assassination that you draw down upon yourself by adopting such a position.

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Clive Crook is a senior editor of The Atlantic and a columnist for National Journal. This column appears every other week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.