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smith, fred CEI

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promoted primary 2 22 on claim he raised alarm to RWI to kill Kyoto

some interlocks between cato, atlas, aei and cei

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exxon promise dumps CEI but:

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acsholes: 

https://www.climatedocket.com**/2019**/06/26/exxon-climate-denial-american-council-science-health/

exxonMobil is funding a little-known nonprofit that calls itself a “pro-science advocacy organization,” but whose scientific advisory board includes several renowned climate deniers and has worked for decades to sow doubt about the health impacts of climate change.

Records show the ExxonMobil Foundation provided grants of at least $60,000 in both 2017 and 2018 to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH),a group that says its mission is to “publicly support evidence-based science and medicine.”

Members of the ACSH scientific advisory board, however, include a who’s who of climate deniers, including Patrick J. Michaels, who has worked for more than 30 years on behalf of the fossil fuel industry;S. FredSinger, who last year wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal falsely claiming that sea level rise is not caused by climate change; andWilliam Happer, a current member of President Trump’s National Security Council who as recently as 2016 argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Documents recently revealed in an investigation by The Guardian guk show ExxonMobil’s current funding of the ACSH began prior to 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged to become Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the largest oil companies in the world.

“ACSH is a front group for libertarian billionaires, fossil fuel companies, and basically every other industry selling dangerous products,” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University researcher who in 2017 published a study that showed how Exxon’s internal memos take the climate issue seriously while its public communications emphasize doubt about the science.

ACSH has also defended fracking as safe for the environment, denied the dangers of bisphenol-A (BPA) and opposed efforts to limit sugar in sodas, among other pro-industry stances.

Corporations fund nonprofits, think tanks and trade groups, many of which are “dark money” organizations that do not disclose their donors to the public, to further their interests without directly being tied to the groups’ work.

“This is just one more example of how these large corporations use third-party organizations to convey their message without being directly connected to them,” said Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, who is now a visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University.

“It fits exactly with the kind of stuff ExxonMobil has done for years and years—this is exactly their strategy,” said Brulle, who has studied the funding patterns of organizations connected to climate denial. “The question is what is still going on and why does Exxon still have its connection to this group after all these years?”

:{:{In addition to its questionable science advisory board, the ACSH board of trustees include}::{sFred L. Smith, founder of the conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and current director of CEI’s Center for Advancing Capitalism. }:

}:

In a bit of irony, Exxon said in 2006 it would stop funding CEI (which it had given nearly $2 million between 1998-2005) because of its work denying climate change, but it continued to fund ACSH at least through 2018, the last year for which data is available.

ExxonMobil’s current funding of ACSH is a continuation of a relationship that goes back decades.

Prior to merging in 1999, Exxon and Mobilboth funded the ACSH, according to internal Mobil Foundation documents, which include a list of potential grant recipients as well as Mobil’s justification for the funding decision. They reveal that the Mobil Foundation provided at least $125,000 in grants to the ACSH between 1981-93 and funding was expected to continue into 1994.

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Tomorrow, the ultra conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will launch a new round of television ads attacking former Vice President Al Gore for his leadership on climate change.The right-wing Washington Times gleefully reported on CEI’s ad buyon Saturday:

Al Gore’s opulent lifestyle and his virtuous plea to save the planet from global warming don’t mesh, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which announced plans yesterday for a new national advertising campaign to showcase the contrast before the American public.

In fact, Al Gore has worked diligently to reduce his own carbon impact. After a thorough renovation of his house —complete with a fight to obtain zoning permission for solar panels — Gore has one of the first 14 homes in the United States to receive the LEED gold certification for efficiency and green practices. The renovations “cut the home’s summer electrical consumption by 11 percent compared with a year ago.”

CEI’s campaign simply recycles old partisan smears. According to the Times, CEI is relying on “research released last year by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research,” a conservative group founded by Drew Johnson, who previously worked for the right-wing National Taxpayers Foundation and interned for the Exxon-funded American Enterprise Institute.

CEI is hardly a neutral player either:

– The Washington Monthly reported, “The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been a particularly aggressive advocate of the notion that global warming is a ‘theory not a fact.’” [LINK]

– CEI “adjunct analyst” Donald Boudreaux said in 2006: “the best policy regarding global warming is to neglect it– and let capitalism continue to make us healthier and wealthier.” [LINK]

– CEI has received more than $2 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. [LINK]

– CEI’s global-warming denying position is so radical that last year, ExxonMobil announced it had ceased funding CEI, in an effort to improve its corporate image. [LINK]

– CEI belongs to the State Policy Network, a “voluntary and by invitation-only” coalition of free-market think tanks that includes both the Tennessee Center for Policy Research and the Heartland Institute, which ran last week’s global warming denial conference. [LINK, LINK]

This is not the first time CEI has tried to distract attention from global warming science in order to attack Gore. Last year, it produced two ads asserting thevirtues ofcarbon dioxide. The ad campaign had the Orwellian title, “They call it pollution. We call it life.”

UPDATE: Desmog blog notes that CEI is trying to fundraise off its Gore campaign.

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https://www.desmog.com/2008/03/04/cei-letter-outlines-tv-ad-attack-campaign/

ref mar 2008

Below is a fundraising letter one of our loyal readers sent along, penned by Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

It’s quite the vitriolic and desperate pitch for money – something the CEI is no doubt in need of after their fall from grace with oil giant ExxonMobil. This vast government, media, science conspiracy theory stuck in Smith’s head isn’t going to save any shred of credibility he and his organization might have left.

And it won’t endear him with media, who he describes in the letter as being “remarkably gullible.”

The letter also outlines the CEI‘s plans to run a national TV campaign to expose the “… hypocrisy and distortions of global warming mania.”

Wow, a national TV campaign by CEI!? Hopefully it goes as well as their last one.

Here’s the intro:

… about Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”?

… about how we’re supposedly killing the planet?

… about how we Americans must drastically cut back our standard of living to avert an alleged catastrophe?

Here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, we’re the leading group in the country telling the “real” truth about global warming.

And the hard-left environmentalists don’t like it one bit. That’s because their agenda is not based on science but on ideology – an ideology that opposes human technology and progress.

An ideology that is anti-growth, anti-capitalist, and anti-American.

Unfortunately, the global warming movement has become incredibly powerful. It has convinced many Americans that global warming is a catastrophe in the making.

More dangerously, they have recruited powerful allies in a remarkably gullible news media, which have dropped all pretense of balance and instead are committed advocates for the global warming agenda.

Have you noticed, for example, how every heat wave results in more media hysteria, while record cold waves are brushed aside as irrelevant?

And remember the dire predictions that the record 2005 hurricane season was a trend that would continue because it was fueled by global warming?  Remember how it was followed by an embarrassed media in 2006, when not a single hurricane hit the U.S.?

But theradicalenvironmentalists won’t be deterred.

On the contrary, aided by Hollywood elites, pop culture icons and political opportunists like Al Gore, the global warming movement is on the brink of turning its agenda of fear into actual public policy that will do enormous harm to our prosperity and to our freedom.

That’s why I need your help today.

As President and Founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market public policy group established in 1984. Mr. Smith is also a frequent guest on national television including such shows as CNN‘s “Crossfire,” PBS‘s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” and “Now with Bill Moyers,” ABC‘s “20/20” and “This Week,” NPR‘s “Talk of the Nation” and “The Diane Rehm Show,” and “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” among many others.

A prolific writer, Mr. Smith’s works have been published in leading newspapers and magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Economic Affairs, and the Washington Times.

Letter from Smith:

My name is Fred Smith. I am founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

My colleagues and I are doing everything we can to fight the reckless politics of the global warming movement. And to speak out about the dangers that their radical agenda poses to you, to me and to every single American.

For years now, pro-free market, pro-limited government individuals and organizations have warned of the growing threat posed by unfounded global warming hysteria.

But, as I’m sure you agree, they’ve been unable to actually stop the radical green political juggernaut we see today. That juggernaut that is now a dominant force in American politics thanks to the results of last year’s elections.

That is, until now.

At the Competitive Enterprise Institute we’re ready to do more than just TALK about the hypocrisy and distortions of global warming mania; we’re ready to DO SOMETHING about it.

That’s why we are launching a national TV ad campaign to expose Al Gore and the global warming alarmists. We have produced two hard-hitting 60-second television ads that we have already aired on a limited basis.

TV ads can be expensive, but it’s the best way to reach millions of Americans.

And remember, these ads are only the first step in a massive new public education campaign to stand up to the wild hysteria of the global warming fanatics

These ads are important because they represent a truly new strategy in combating the junk science, scare tactics and blatant propaganda of today’s radical green movement.

That strategy is to take our case directly to the people. These first two ads remind people of how biased the media are in presenting the alleged science behind global warming alarmism, and of how reducing CO2 emissions can’t be achieved without a massive loss of individual freedom and drastic reductions in the living standards of ordinary Americans;

These ads – and the new ones we hope to produce and air soon with your help –are not aimed at scholars and “policy wonks,” but at ordinary Americans.

You Can Help Us Show These Ads by Going Here Now

Let me tell you a bit about CEI.  We are not a traditional “think tank.” Our work does not stop with groundbreaking research. We realize it is not enough to simply identify the flaws in the arguments of those who think massive government is the solution to every problem.  Instead, we have to actively reach out – not just to other scholars and to policy makers – but to the public and the media to ensure that our ideas are heard.

This approach has made us one of the nation’s most effective and powerful forces for economic freedom, and against global warming alarmism.

We’ve been called “the best environmental think tank in the country” by The Wall Street Journal.

The Weather Channel named CEI as one of the ten most influential participants in the global warming debate in 2006. No other non-profit group made the list. Not one of the big environmental groups, with annual budgets twenty or fifty times CEI’s, was named to the list. Not the Sierra Club. Not Greenpeace. Not the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Only CEI.

Two liberal U.S. Senators were so upset with our efforts that they wrote a letter which threatened one of our corporate supporters unless they cut off our funding. These two senators even mentioned CEI by name in this outrageous attempt to stifle free speech.

That just tells me we are effective.

CEI has done a tremendous amount of research on global warming alarmism. I invite you to explore our website (www.cei.org) and review the many papers we have published that challenge the so-called “proven” science behind global warming.

But research alone isn’t enough to win this fight.

That’s why we need your help today – Go Here Now

The truth is most of the papers we publish – while enormously influential in policy circles – will never be seen by the general public. And thanks to a biased news media, they will go largely unreported.

This means that we have to go beyond the usual arenas of academic debates, and reach out directly to the public.

The messages contained in our hard-hitting TV ads are the first step in our plan to do this.

IF we can raise the funds we need from concerned Americans like you, we can take those messages to a far wider audience.

I admit that this will be one tough fight.  Our adversaries have been masterful at manipulating public opinion.

Because of films like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Hollywood thriller, “The Day After Tomorrow,” and countless unquestioning TV news reports and newspaper articles, more than 8 out of 10 Americans now believe that human-induced global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions threatens our planet.

Thanks especially to Al Gore and his movie, which has been called one of the “slickest science propaganda films of all time,” ordinary people are now haunted by visions of droughts, floods, disease, famine, mass extinctions, ferocious storms and catastrophic rises in sea level.

But in reality Gore’s movie is more science fiction than science.  Most of his claims are not even backed by the scientists that he claims support him.  (I urge you to read our point-by-point rebuttal of Al Gore; just look for Al Gore’s Science Fiction at www.cei.org.)

In fact, a growing body of evidence demonstrates how little basis there is for claims that we face a global warming catastrophe:

Yes, there has been a slight warming trend (about 1 degree Fahrenheit) in the 20th century.  This was to be expected, since the Earth was still recovering, after all, from a multi-century cold spell known as the Little Ice Age.

But it’s highly uncertain that CO2 had much to do with that slight warming.  From 1940 to 1975, the global temperature fell even as CO2 emissions rose. Since 2001, global temperatures have only gone up a statistically insignificant .03 degrees Celsius.

And as for whether mankind played a role in that slight warming, two new scholarly books have just been published throwing new doubt on this claim.

[]

In “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years,” scientists Fred Singer and Dennis Averypresent evidence of 600 global warming and cooling periods in the last million years.

In “The Chilling Stars,” Professor Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder discuss how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s brightness, creating 1- to 2-degree increases in temperatures on earth.

Global warming alarmists would have you believe that, until now, the Earth has always had a stable climate.  But in fact, over the millennia, the earth has warmed and cooled repeatedly.  The reasons for this are unclear, but they were certainly unrelated to human activity.  Yet Al Gore and the other alarmists want us to ignore this.

We won’t. Help us expose Al Gore – Go Here Now

In fact, the green lobby pretends that there is an absolute “scientific consensus” on a coming climate disaster, and they want to shut down the debate altogether.  In Mr. Gore’s words, “the debate in the scientific community is over.”

Those scientists and analysts who disagree are under increasing professional and personal attack.

For example, Heidi Cullen, an “expert” for the Weather Channel, declared that meteorologists who disagree with her about global warming should not be certified to report the weather on television.

More outrageously, liberal newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, “We’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

But if global warming alarmists are so certain of their position, then why do they react so harshly when anyone challenges their views?

I believe the answer is that they’re not all that certain at all.  They know full well that many of their claims can’t withstand critical review.

And they know that once their pretense of a consensus starts falling apart, their radical political agenda will collapse as well!

In short, we can win this debate.

And, in fact, we must win it.

Too much is at stake for our children’s future, our nation’s prosperity, our way of life, our freedom, to do anything less than our utmost on this issue.

We need to take the battle of global warming hysteriato the next level.

And I must ask for your most generous financial support to make this happen.

We need to run our new series of hard hitting ads, not in just a few cities, but in every media market in the United States. And we need to air them often enough and continuously enough to change public opinion.

Our initial budget for this massive undertaking is $6.5 million dollars. This budget allows us to create and air a series of ads challenging the false claims of the global warming crowd with indisputable scientific evidence.

I am convinced these ads will get results.

Our goals with this campaign are clearly ambitious. Nothing on this scale has ever been tried before. $6.5 million is a lot of money.

But it is really a very small amount when you consider the potential danger our economy faces from ill-advised, politically-motivated global warming legislation. Some have estimated that the cost to enact panic legislation to curb carbon emissions will be in the TRILLIONS of dollars.

If the alarmists get their way you could end up paying twice as much as you do now for gasoline or electricity.  Great Britain is considering limiting the number of personal plane trips that a “regular” person can take to one a year.

I believe we can succeed in turning this debate around. But we are absolutely dependant on the generous financial support of Americans like you.

You can make a difference today – Go Here Now

Will you become a Friend of the Competitive Enterprise Institute by sending a tax-deductible donation of $1,000 or more today?

Your $1,000 donation can pay to run as many as 20 – or perhaps more – of our ads on television stations and cable channels around the country.

While I hope you will consider a gift at that level, please know your donation today of $100, $250 or $500 is also most welcome and urgently needed.

Rest assured, at whatever donation level you feel comfortable, your tax-deductible contribution will be much appreciated and put to immediate good use in our campaign against global warming alarmism … and for affordable energy and economic freedom around the world.

I have enclosed a donor information page detailing the benefits of giving to CEI at a number of levels.

Remember, no one does what we do. No other public policy group is duplicating the work we are doing to counter the global warming fanatics. And if we don’t succeed now in changing public opinion, we will lose this debate and America will be changed forever.

For 20 years CEI has been at the forefront of the struggle for liberty. And despite modest resources, we’ve succeeded time and time again! But we cannot succeed alone.

Time is short. Ill advised, global warming legislation is being introduced and debated right now. We have very little time to get the truth out about global warming.

Please make your most generous possible contribution

to CEI without delay – Go Here Now.

Sincerely,

Fred L. Smith, Jr.

President and Founder

P.S. Please, do not put this letter aside thinking one person can’t make a difference. Your $100, $250, $500 or hopefully $1,000 or more, tax-deductible contribution to CEI today can truly have an impact on public opinion. As a thoughtful and concerned American, your personal commitment to our crusade to tell the truth about global warming is important to our success.

Take a minute to help us fight back – Go Here

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https://theecologist.org/**2018/oct/**08/why-did-george-w-bush-pull-out-kyoto-protocol

Despite the huge amount of fossil fuel funding upon which George W. Bush was elected president in 2001, insiders in the monopoly-dominated oil industry remained unsure that he would fight for them - and against climate scientists.

Bush had suggested during his candidacy that CO2 should be treated as a pollutant and, therefore, subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act - even if the international Kyoto Agreement was not economically favourable for America.

Bush’s fence-sitting was strategic: swing states such as Florida were environmentally conscious and speaking out would likely give Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore the advantage.

But, optimistic environmentalists remained hopeful while wary oil-men were worried that it demonstrated a willingness to agree to the broad principles of the treaty.

A Rumoured Speech

Shortly after his inauguration, a rumour circulated that Bush planned to include a line reinforcing his earlier pledge in a forthcoming speech.

Word of the speech reached the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Koch- and Exxon-funded think tank that helped donate to Bush’s presidential campaign. CEI set to work. As their founder and president, Fred Smith latertold Newsweek: “We alerted anyone we thought could have influence and get the line, if it was in the speech, out.”

Despite the think tank’s best efforts, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman testified, on 27 February 2001 at a Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works subcommittee, that she was in favour of regulating CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act.

A week later, she signed a joint statement at the G8 Environment Ministers Meeting [ITALY?] which said: “We commit ourselves to strive to reach agreement on outstanding political issues and to ensure in a cost-effective manner the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol.”

The President’s Position

At this, the denial machine set in motion.Haley Barbour, a lobbyist for a utility firm that stood to lose if greenhouse gases were regulated, urged Vice President Dick Cheneyin a March 1 memo to persuade Bush not to align with the “eco-extremism” of those who saw carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

A group of far-right Republican senators wrote an open letter to their new president. In light of Whitman’s testimony, they asked that Bush clarify his position on climate change, “in particular the Kyoto Protocol, and the regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.”

Aware of the rising tide against her, Whitman went to the Oval Office to fight her case on the morning of March 13. But, Bush had already composed his response, shortly to be [ACUTALLY WRITTEN BY DC?] sent via Cheney to the senators, which he read to her.

“I do not believe,” read the letter, “that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act.”

Information from the Department of Energy had shown that consumers’ energy bills might be affected, and that this warranted a re-evaluation of his earlier pledge, “especially… given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of and solution to global climate change.”

Polluter Pull-Out

Whitman left defeated, just as the puppeteer Cheney arrived to hand-deliver the President’s response to the senators.

By the end of the month, the world’s biggest polluter had pulled out of Kyoto.

Whitman, who later said the decision was “the equivalent to ‘flipping the bird’ frankly to the rest of the world,” was the one to deliver the news. “We have no interest in implementing that treaty,” the former New Jersey Governor told assembled journalists.

Though the terms of the treaty would be finalised in Bonn that July, they would be made all but useless, with the world’s largest polluter out of the game.

Years later, freedom of information disclosures revealed the industry’s input to this decision.

A briefing note prepared for Paula Dobrianksy, Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, ahead of her meeting with Glenn Kelly of the Exxon-bankrolled Global Climate Coalition, states: “POTUS [President of the United States] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you… Interested in hearing from you, what type of international alternatives to Kyoto would you support?”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press).He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fred_Smith

Fred L. Smith, Jr (Fred Smith) is President and Founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market public policy group established in 1984.

According to his biographical note, prior to forming CEI Smith served "as Director of Government Relations for the Council for a Competitive Economy, as a senior economist for the Association of American Railroads, and for five years as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency."

"Currently, he sits on the Institute Turgot in Belgium. Mr. Smith holds a B.S. degree in Theoretical Mathematics and Political Science from Tulane University where he earned the Arts and Sciences Medal (Tulane's highest academic award) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa," his biographical note states.

Smith is a frequent commentator in the media including appearances on CNN's "Crossfire," PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and "Now with Bill Moyers," ABC's "20/20" and "This Week," NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and "The Diane Rehm Show," and "The G. Gordon Liddy Show".

Smith's works have been published in leading newspapers and magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Economic Affairs, and the Washington Times. His academic articles have appeared in journals such as Harvard Journal of Law and Economics, CATO Journal, and Economic Affairs, and he is a contributing editor to Liberty magazine.

Books

External links

Category: 

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Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Fred L. Smith, Jr.** is founder and former president of theCompetitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit libertarian think tank.[1] He has written on topics as antitrust law, environmental regulation, and the economic impacts of global warming.

Contents

  [hide] 

Biography[edit]

Before founding CEI, Smith served as Director of Government Relations for the Council for a Competitive Economy, as a senior economist for the Association of American Railroads, and for five years as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency. Currently,[when?] he sits on the Institute Turgot in Belgium. Smith holds a B.S. degree in Theoretical Mathematics and Political Science from Tulane University where he earned the Arts and Sciences Medal (Tulane’s highest academic award) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.[2] Smith has served as an NGO delegate to international environmental conferences such as the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the UNFCCC third Conference of the Parties in Kyoto, Japan.

Smith appeared on Crossfire in 2006 and stated: "We know that there are these elaborate computer models that have never been right before, may be right this time, that suggest climate changes, possibly good, possibly bad. Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we’re moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture.".[3][4] Smith defended contributions of companies such as ExxonMobil to groups skeptical of climate change, explaining that support for such organizations can be expected to rise as public interest in global warming issues increases, saying, "Firefighters' budgets go up when fires go up."[5]

In 2003, Smith lobbied the Secretary of the Treasury against a proposal that would require banks to report interest earned by non-resident aliens.[6] Smith argued that foreign investors' willingness to invest in the United States depends on how they are treated by financial regulators.

Smith is married to Frances B. Smith, an adjunct scholar at CEI who also serves on its board of directors.[7]

Bibliography[edit]

Volume contributor[edit]

References[edit]

  1. Jump up Competitive Enterprise Institute, Advancing liberty – from the economy to ecology
  2. Jump up http://cei.org/people/fred-l-smith-jr
  3. Jump up The CEI ads
  4. Jump up CEI Founder on Global Warming: ‘It Looks Pretty Good…We’re Moving To A More Benign Planet.’
  5. Jump up Context of 'Between 1998 and 2005: ExxonMobil Grants $16 Million to Global Warming Skeptic Organizations'
  6. Jump up CEI's Fred L. Smith's letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow, September 26, 2003
  7. Jump up http://politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=4114&name=Fred-Smith-Jr Fred Smith Jr.

External links[edit]

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http://www.amazon.com/Global-Warming-Other-Myths-Environmental/dp/0761536604

Includes essays by Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman E. Borlaug and other noted scientists and scholars

The modern environmental movement began with the publication of three seminal works, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth. These books' dismal visions of a poisoned, over-populated, resource-depleted world spiraling down toward environmental collapse are today's conventional wisdom. And every year we hear about new "conclusive" reports from special interest groups claiming that our atmosphere's temperatures are soaring, our air and water are more polluted, our cities are more crowded, and our global food supply is more precarious than ever before. However, according to a number of leading scientists from around the world, members of the environmental movement are guilty of twisting—sometimes manufacturing—the facts in an effort to frighten people into joining their cause.

In this eye-opening book, some of the most respected researchers in the country explode the myths behind much of the doom and gloom of today's environmental movement. You will discover how the hysteria about global warming, overpopulation, mass extinctions, imminent famines, biotechnology, energy shortages, and more are grounded not in reason but in false science and a fear of progress. When placed beside the overwhelming facts, some of the most pervasive eco-myths crumble, including:

Myth: 

Antarctica is melting due to global warming—threatening to raise ocean levels 

Fact: 

Antarctica has been cooling—and its glaciers thickening—for the past 30 years 

Myth: 

The global population is growing faster than our ability to produce food 

Fact: 

Global fertility rates are falling dramatically, and with advanced technology, farmers are producing more food using fewer resources than ever before 

Myth: 

Solar- and wind-powered generators are a renewable, efficient, and less intrusive alternative to gas-, oil-, and coal-burning generators 

Fact: 

Global fossil fuel supplies are in no near-term danger of being depleted, and a single 555-megawatt natural gas power plant produces more electricity than 13,000 windmills 

Myth: 

Modern pesticides and fertilizers are increasing the rates of cancer in humans 

Fact: 

No study has ever shown that anyone has developed cancer from the legal application of pesticides, and environmental pollution accounts for at most 2 percent of all cancer cases versus 30 percent caused by tobacco use 

And many more 

Ultimately, this book shows that uniting much of the environmental movement is an agenda that is not so much anti-pollution as it is anti-human. Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths lays out the true state of the planet, which, as you'll discover, is more healthy, vibrant, and clean than ideologically motivated environmentalists want you to believe.

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Bailey (a writer and "adjunct scholar" at CEI, the Competitive Enterprise Institute) gathers these dozen articles to discredit what he calls "false science" and an "ideological environmentalism" that "wants to claim the mantle of objective science...." Bailey's contributor assertions include: global warming is not disastrous; CO2 is the lifeblood of the planet, not a pollutant; and organic agriculture is incapable of feeding the world's current population. Of 14 contributors, three are science PhDs (Borlaug is a Nobel Laureate and founder of the "green revolution"; Prakash, a food biotechnician who helped invent the transgenic sweet potato; Christy, a climatologist). The other 11 contributors are non- scientists, most with undergraduate degrees or no degree mentioned. Four contributors are, like Bailey, part of CEI, described in the contributor notes as an organization "dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government activity in a wide range of economic and environmental public policy issues." Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

==

Free Market Fire

The two met whenOkonski was working as a research assistant for climate denier Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) – funded by Philip Morris, Dow Chemicals and ExxonMobil – after graduating from a free market college.

Okonski had gained a reputation, even among the free market zealots, as being “fiery” and determined.

Morrishad been speaking at a conference called the Precautionary Principle held by American non-profit organisation Consumer Alert three years earlier, when Okonski was swept off her feet by his chiselled good looks and devotion to the free markets.

Smith recalls: “He was delivering a speech; he looked down at Kendra, with her big eyes, and thought: ‘scary’. It was a public policy marriage.”

Morris said: “Kendra is a beautiful, engaged and inspiring woman; she is the love of my life. We share a deep desire to improve the lot of humanity through the empowering institutions of a free society: property rights, markets and the rule of law. So far as I am aware, we came to those ideas independently, but I cannot speak for Kendra.”

==

===

tempest:

...

The Free Market Solution: Zoos

AL GORE IS ABOUT TO COME ON THE BIG SCREEN. Fred Smith is eagerly awaiting the moment. We're at a media

preview of "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on Gore and global warming (it debuts this week in Washington). Smith is not exactly a Gore groupie. He is the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a factory for global warming skepticism.

CEI has 28 people on staff, "half a platoon," Smith likes to say. They're in the persuasion business, fighting for the free market. They lobby against government regulations of all kinds. Smith writes articles with titles such as "Eco-Socialism: Threat to Liberty Around the World." These promoters of capitalism don't really operate a commercial enterprise; like any think tank, CEI relies on donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. The most generous sponsors of last year's annual dinner at the Capital Hilton were the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and Pfizer. Other contributors included General Motors, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Plastics Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and Arch Coal.

Smith is short, stocky, bearded. He talks extremely fast and sprinkles his remarks with free market jargon, climate change lingo, historical references and various mysterious words that seem to come from a secret conservatives-only code book.

As we wait for the movie to start, I ask him how he would define his political beliefs. "Classical liberal," he says. He explains that civilization is a means for allowing individuals to liberate their energies and their genius -- an emergence from primitive, tribal, collectivist social arrangements. When humans switch from collectivism to private property, he says, "you have greater freedom of ideas." This prompts the thought that the federal government owns way too much land in the West. Much of it should be privatized, he says.

Including national parks? I ask.

"Probably wouldn't touch it for political reasons," he says.

The movie begins: Images of a river. Lush foliage. Gore's voice, almost sultry, rhapsodizes about nature. Then we see him take a stage in an auditorium. He is in a suit and tie and looks very much like a candidate for political office.

"Maybe he is running," Smith says.

When Gore shows a big graph of rising CO2, Smith says, "That's a phony scale."

The film shows footage from Hurricane Katrina.

"It was a Category 3 hurricane," Smith says. Not the Cat 5, at landfall, you keep hearing about.

Gore reveals that insurance losses because of hurricanes have steadily climbed.

"That's just dishonest," Smith says. There are more beach houses and so on -- it's just an infrastructure issue.

Subsequent visits to the Competitive Enterprise Institute show Smith in his element. The think tank is a warren of offices lined with framed magazine advertisements from the 1950s and earlier. These are images of the Golden Age of American Commerce, when cars were like luxury liners and chemical companies bragged about their mosquito-annihilating concoctions.

"New Guinea is an island gripped in the vise of high, jagged mountain ranges . . . Choking entangling jungle is everywhere . . . In this appalling setting, aviation made an epic conquest." That's ad copy for the Socony-Vacuum oil company, later known as Mobil.

Smith loves this stuff. Those were the days! The message: Free enterprise brings people together and improves their lives. It was the Better Living Through Chemistry era. Smith points out an ad for Weyerhaeuser Timber showing clear-cut forests on a mountainside and two raccoons tussling with one another on the stump of a Douglas fir. Another photo, lower, shows a frame house. You can clearly see that cutting forests benefits people. Nowadays, environmentalists want the benefits without any of the pain. "It's all gain, no pain," Smith says.

We pass an asbestos ad.

"When I was a kid, this was called the miracle mineral," he says.

Although Smith can be rambling and digressive, he has a team of analysts who know the global warming topic inside and out and can quickly produce the latest nugget of potentially contradictory evidence (Greenland melted faster in the 1920s!). What rankles them most of all is the suggestion that global warming is a problem that must be fixed by the government, top down, through regulations. Let the free market work its genius, they say. Countries with thriving economies will, in the long run, be more adaptive to climate change and will find more technological solutions than countries that hamstring themselves by clamping down on greenhouse emissions.

Smith's office has a grand view of Farragut Square and the Washington Monument in the distance. A man named Chris Horner, general counsel of the Cooler Heads Coalition, joins us, as does, popping in and out, Marlo Lewis, a CEI policy analyst who works on climate change. They lapse several times into the Secret Code.

"Terrible toos," Horner says. I'm confused. He explains that it's shorthand for environmental doom and gloom.

"Terrible toos. Too many people, using too many resources."

Smith has a different equation: "Less people, less affluence, less technology: We call that death, poverty and ignorance."

They believe the rise of carbon dioxide may be a symptom of global warming, not the cause. Look at the chart Gore used:

Didn't it look like the warming comes before the CO2 increase?

Lewis says the snows of Kilimanjaro have been in retreat since the 1880s. The climate there is not getting warmer, it's getting drier. Just won't snow.

They see economic growth as an all-purpose cure for environmental problems. Rich societies are environmentally resilient; poor societies have dirty power plants and sooty huts. Government regulations aren't necessary. I ask Lewis if he thinks the Clean Air Act is a good idea. "It depends," he

answers. There follows a complicated riff from Smith about common law property rights and English fishermen suing upstream polluters in the 19th century.

Smith takes an abrupt detour into the issue of endangered species. The solution is to let the private sector handle it. They should be privatized, like pets or livestock. Dogs, cats, chickens, pigs: These creatures won't ever go extinct.

I want to make sure I understand what he is saying, so I begin to ask a question: "For endangered species, people should --"

"-- own them," Smith says.

But isn't there a difference between animals that live in zoos and animals that live in the wild?

"Yes and no," Smith says. " 'Zoo' is a pejorative term that PETA has turned into an animal slavery community. A zoo is nothing more than an elaborate ark."

What's unnatural, Smith says, is wilderness. The so-called wilderness of early America used to be inhabited by Indians, and they changed their environment. "They burned down trees, they burned forests, they ran buffaloes over cliffs. They were not dancing with wolves," he says. "Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet."

Human beings, in his view, are not apart from nature but very much of it, and thus whatever human beings do is natural. Environmentalists view human activity as a blemish, and animal activity as noble and good. If Manhattan had been built by termites, environmentalists would make it a World Heritage Site, Smith says. If the Grand Canyon had been the result of coal mining, he says, "Al Gore would say, 'This is horrible.'"

Horner talks about baselines used in climate trends. Why start in 1860? That was the end of the Little Ice Age. Of course the world has warmed since then. That's cheating with the baseline. At one point Horner refers to the "cooling" since 1998 -- a record-breaking year with a major El Niño event in the Pacific. He admits he is being disingenuous.

"We're playing the baseline game," Horner says.

And then -- I'm not even sure how it comes up -- Smith says we can solve the problem of gorillas being killed in Africa. They're caught in the middle of a civil war among African tribes. The solution: Evacuate them. Airlift them out, like soldiers caught behind enemy lines.

"We've got lots of land."

For the gorillas, he means.

"Build a Jurassic Park in Central

America."

Horner says that perhaps we are getting off track.

And Then There's Hitler

LET US BE HONEST about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything.

Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of environmentalism and free market capitalism. It's bound to be not only politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. The divisive nature of global warming isn't helped by the fact that the most powerful global-warming skeptic (at least by reputation) is President Bush, and the loudest warnings come from Al Gore.

Human beings may be large of brain, but they are social animals, too, like wolves, and are prone to behave in packs. So when something like climate change comes up, the first thing people want to know is, whose side are you on? All those climatic variables and uncertainties and probabilities and "forcings" and "feedback loops," those cans of worms that Bill Gray talks about, get boiled down to their essence. Are you with us or against us?

Somehow Hitler keeps popping into the discussion. Gore draws a parallel between fighting global warming and fighting the Nazis. Novelist Michael Crichton, in State of Fear , ends with an appendix comparing the theory of global warming to the theory of eugenics -- the belief, prominently promoted by Nazis, that the gene pool of the human species was degenerating due to higher reproductive rates of "inferior" people. Both, he contends, are examples of junk science, supported by intellectual elites who will later conveniently forget they signed on to such craziness.

And Gray has no governor on his rhetoric. At one point during our meeting in Colorado he blurts out, "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."

When I opine that he is incendiary, he answers: "Yes, I am incendiary. But the other side is just as incendiary. The etiquette of science has long ago been thrown out the window."

In a media-saturated world, it's hard to get anyone's attention without cranking the volume. Time magazine recently declared that Earth looks like a planet that is sick (cover headline: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried"). Vanity Fair published a "worst-case scenario" photo illustration of Manhattan drowned by an 80-foot sea-level rise, the skyscrapers poking up from what has become part of the Atlantic Ocean. That's not inconceivable over the course of many centuries, but the scientific consensus (IPCC, 2001) is that by 2100 sea level will have risen somewhere between three and 34 inches from its 1990 level.

The news media -- always infatuated with doom (were it not for the obvious ramifications for ratings and circulation, the media would love to cover the End of the World) -- struggle to resist the most calamitous-sounding climate scenarios. Consider the January 2005 survey of thousands of climate change models that showed a very wide range of possibilities. One model at the very extreme had a worst-case-scenario warming of 11 degrees Celsius -- which is nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The world is likely to heat up by an average of 11ºC by the end of the century, the biggest-ever study of global warming showed yesterday," the London Evening Standard reported online. This would cause "a surge in sea levels threatening the lives of billions of people."

Wrong, but whatever.

The skeptics feed on alarmism. They love any sign that global warming is a case of mass hysteria. Someone likeMyron Ebell, an analyst at CEI, freely admits that, as an advocate in a politicized battle, he tries to make "the best case against alarmism." Everyone, on both sides, is arguing like a lawyer these days, he says. "What is going on right now is a desperate last-ditch Battle of the Bulge type effort by the forces of darkness, which is relying heavily on the lockstep/groupthink scientific community."

The president's science adviser, John Marburger, thinks the politicized debate has made it almost impossible to talk sensibly about the issue. "There seems to be the general feeling that somehow the administration doesn't feel that climate change is happening," he says. "That's completely wrong." The administration just doesn't think the problem can be solved with the "magic wand" of regulation.

Marburger recently declined to go on "60 Minutes" to address allegations that

federal scientists were being muzzled and government reports rewritten by the White House to minimize concerns about global warming. "In general the public discourse on this has gotten completely off the track, and we're never going to straighten it out on '60 Minutes,'" Marburger says.

This issue forces Americans to sort through a great deal of science, technology and economics, all of it saturated in divisive politics. Many Americans haven't really tuned in. A Gallup poll in March showed that global warming is far down the list of concerns among Americans -- even when asked to rank their environmental worries. More Americans were worried about damage to the ozone layer. No doubt some people have the two issues confused. Both involve air, and emissions of some kind, and some worrisome global effect. But the ozone issue, while hardly solved, has at least been seriously addressed with a global ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Climate change takes place on time scales of decades and centuries. In a 24-hour information society, it is hard to keep the year 2100 in mind. But these changes are happening at a geologically rapid pace. For roughly the past 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, human beings have enjoyed a relatively stable, comfortable "interglacial" period, during which they've invented everything from agriculture to moon rockets. Nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers have given way to more than 6 billion people, largely urbanized and energy-hungry. Pressure on ecosystems is immense. Biologists warn of a "sixth extinction"-- the sixth mass extinction of species since the rise of multicellular organisms about 600 million years ago. The most recent mass extinction, 65 million years ago, was apparently caused by a mountain-size object striking Earth. Human civilization, in this view, is like an asteroid hitting the planet.

The expansion of human civilization is an experiment on a global scale: What happens when a species obtains not only intelligence but technology? Do intelligent, technological species tend to survive for a long time -- or bring their environment crashing down around them?

The Hurricane Conference

BILL GRAY HAS THE HONOR of delivering the closing remarks at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. It's mid-April, and we're at a fancy hotel on International Drive, a main street for the tourist industry that has sprouted from the orange groves and cow pastures of central Florida. Gray seems to be everywhere, constantly talking, popping out to the terrace by the pool to give TV interviews, holding forth without any hint of fatigue. He has three media assistants following him around. They are working under contract for TCSDaily, a Web site that is a nexus of anti-global-warming arguments.

They set up two news conferences. At both events, Gray gives his standard arguments about global warming, bracketing a dispassionate discussion of the upcoming tropical storm season by his young protege, Phil Klotzbach. The two are a sight to behold: Gray, the white-haired titan, thunderous, outraged, and Klotzbach, red-haired, freckled, very calm, very mild, looking so much younger than his 25 years.

"I think there's a lot of foolishness going on," Gray says as he stands before a bank of 10 TV cameras and a couple of dozen journalists.

Hurricanes aren't getting worse -- we're just in an uptick of a regular cycle. But the alarmists won't let anyone believe that.

"The world is boiling! It's getting worse and worse!" Gray shouts. "Hell is approaching."

He was a paperboy in Washington in the 1940s, he says. There were stories back then about global warming. But then it got cooler, for decades, and by the mid-1970s the story had changed, and scientists were warning of -- yes -- an Ice Age! Gray shows a slide of magazine covers in the mid-1970s (Science Digest, 1973; Newsweek, 1975) fretting about the Cooling World.

The core of Gray's argument is that the warming of the past decades is a natural cycle, driven by a global ocean circulation that manifests itself in the North Atlantic as the Gulf Stream. Warm water and cool water essentially rise and fall in a rhythm lasting decades. "I don't think this warming period of the last 30 years can keep on going," he says. "It may warm another three, five, eight years, and then it will start to cool."

Gray's crusade against global warming "hysteria" began in the early 1990s, when he saw enormous sums of federal research money going toward computer modeling rather than his kind of science, the old-fashioned stuff based on direct observation. Gray often cites the ascendancy of Gore to the vice presidency as the start of his own problems with federal funding. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stopped giving him research grants. So did NASA. All the money was going to computer models. The field was going off on this wild tangent.

Numerical models can't predict the future, he says. They don't even pretend to predict the weather in the coming season -- "but they make predictions of 50 or 100 years from now and ask you to believe the Earth will get warmer."

The modelers are equation pushers.

"They haven't been down in the trenches, making forecasts and understanding stuff!"

The news media are self-interested.

"Media people are all out for Pulitzer Prizes!"

The IPCC is elitist.

"They don't talk to us! I've never been approached by the IPCC."

He spots a famous meteorologist in the back of the room. It's Neil Frank, former

director of the National Hurricane Center.

"Neil, have they ever approached you?"

"No," Frank answers.

A TV reporter asks Gray a key question: "What if you're wrong?"

"We can't do anything about it if I'm wrong. China and India are going to burn fossil fuels."

After Gray finishes, he gives more interviews. Frank, waiting in the wings, tells me he agrees with Gray.

"It's a hoax," he says. He says cutting carbon emissions would wind up hurting poor people. I ask if he thinks more CO2 in the air would be a good thing.

"Exactly! Maybe we're living in a carbon dioxide-starved world. We don't know."

Skeptics and Conspiracies

THE SKEPTICS DON'T AGREE with one another. They will privately distance themselves from other skeptics ("I think he's full of beans") while maintaining a certain public solidarity against the Forces of Fear. Pat Michaels, the U-Va. climatologist, doesn't even want to be called a skeptic.

"I believe in climate change caused by human beings," Michaels says. "What I'm skeptical about is the glib notion that it means the end of the world as we know it."

John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says: "We're skeptical that the observations we see now are indicating catastrophic change. And we're skeptical of our capability to truly understand the climate system, how it works, and so on, and therefore predict its evolution."

Of all the skeptics,MIT's Richard Lindzenprobably has the most credibility among mainstream scientists, who acknowledge that he's doing serious research on the subject. Lindzen contends that water vapor and clouds, which will increase in a warmer world because of higher rates of evaporation, create "negative feedbacks" that counter the warming trend. "The only reason the models get such a big response is that, in models, the most important greenhouse substances, which are water vapor and clouds, act to take anything man does and make it worse," he says. Observations show otherwise, he says.

Lindzen argues that the climate models can't be right, because we've already raised CO2 and methane dramatically, and the planet simply hasn't warmed that much. But Isaac Held, a NOAA modeler, says Lindzen is jumping the gun, because the greenhouse gases take time -- decades, centuries -- to have their full impact. Indeed, we've already made a "commitment" to warming. We couldn't stop global warming at this point if we closed every factory and curbed every car. The mainstream argument is that we could minimize the increase, and reduce the risk of a dangerous, unstable, white-knuckle climate change.

Held studied under Lindzen years ago and considers him a friend and a smart scientist -- but highly contrarian.

"There're people like [Lindzen] in every field of science. There are always people in the fringes. They're attracted to the fringe . . . It may be as simple as, how do you prove you're smarter than everyone else? You don't do that by being part of the consensus," Held says.

The most vocal partisans in the climate change debate often describe their opponents as part of a conspiracy, of sorts. Both sides think the other side has a monetary or political incentive to skew the data. But there are people in this battle who fervently believe in what they say. Bill Gray says he takes no fossil-fuel money. He's simply sick and tired of squishy-minded hand-wringing equation-pushing computer jocks who've never flown into a hurricane!

Gray has his own conspiracy theory. He has made a list of 15 reasons for the global warming hysteria. The list includes the need to come up with an enemy after the end of the Cold War, and the desire among scientists, government leaders and environmentalists to find a political cause that would enable them to "organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!"

Gray admits that he has a dark take on human nature: "I have a demonic view on this."

The most notorious example of climate change conspiracy-mongering is in Crichton's State of Fear . The villain is the director of an environmental organization. He's in league with radical environmentalists who kill people at the drop of a hat as part of a plot to trigger natural disasters that will somehow advance the theory of global warming. The novel's fans include the president of the United States, who met with Crichton in the White House.

There's a certain kind of skeptic who has no patience for the official consensus, especially if it has the imprimatur of a government, or worse, the United Nations. They focus on ambiguities and mysteries and things that just don't add up. They say the Official Story can't possibly be true, because it doesn't explain the [insert inexplicable data point here]. They set a high standard for reality -- it must never be fuzzy around the edges.

"They argue not as scientists but as lawyers," says Pieter Tans, who runs a lab at NOAA in Boulder, Colo., where he examines bottles of air taken from monitoring stations all over the planet. "When they argue, they pick one piece of the fabric of evidence and blow it up all out of proportion . . . Their purpose is to confuse, so that the public gets the idea that there is a raging scientific debate. There is no raging scientific debate."

Some of the anomalies cited by the skeptics go away over time. Remember that graph showing the world's temperature leveling off and actually cooling from 1940 to 1975, even as the industrial economies of the planet were going full blast? The mainstream climate scientists think one factor may have been air pollution -- aerosols pumped out by smokestacks, dimming sunlight before it reached the surface. In the early 1970s, governments passed air pollution controls, such as the Clean Air Act, that required scrubbers on smokestacks. The skies cleared. And the temperature has been racing upward ever since.

What about the Medieval Warm Period? If human industry causes warming, why were the Vikings sailing around the North Atlantic to godforsaken places like Greenland and setting up farming communities 1,000 years ago? Many scientists answer that the Medieval Warm Period wasn't a global phenomenon. You can't draw global conclusions from the experience of the North Atlantic.

"There is this misperception that global change is a spatially uniform and smooth in time process," says Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT. "In fact that's not true. There's all kind of variability. You can find places in the world where the temperature has gone down for the past 50 years. When you're looking for a signal in a very noisy record you do as much averaging as possible."

So what about all those fears, back in the 1970s, of a coming Ice Age? It was a minor issue among serious climate scientists. One paper commonly cited by skeptics as an example of Ice Age doomsaying merely stated that, absent any human-driven global warming, an Ice Age might return in 20,000 years.

The most famous anomaly, long cited by skeptics, was the satellite data. It didn't show the warming of the lower atmosphere.

It flatly contradicted the surface measurements. Earlier this month, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program announced that a re-analysis of the data resolved most of the discrepancy. Anomaly gone. Arch-skeptic Fred Singer says there's still some inconsistency, but the advocates of the consensus view of global warming feel vindicated. ("Game over," one environmentalist told The Washington Post.)

Scientists are argumentative by nature. They're supposed to be. They're supposed to attempt to disprove the hypotheses and claims of their fellow scientists. Theories are hazed unmercifully. And when they emerge from that trial-by-skepticism, they are all the more respected.

Certain skeptics -- really, they're optimists -- have scored debate points by noting that prophesies of doom have often slammed into a wall of human resourcefulness. But you can't solve a problem if you spend decades failing to perceive it. Humans adapt best when worried.

Or at least not in denial.

Back in Orlando

Climate change is generating headlines almost daily -- (e.g., "Peril to Walrus Young Seen As Result of Melting Ice Shelf") -- but it is also abstruse in its specifics, so journalists rely on "experts" to tell them where the truth lies. Someone like Bill Gray seems to be a fully credentialed authority figure. But when you press him on his theory of how thermohaline circulation has caused recent warming of the planet and will soon cause cooling, he concedes that he hasn't published the idea in any peer-reviewed journal. He's working on it, he says.

The Web site Real Climate, run by a loose group of climate scientists, recently published a detailed refutation of Gray's theory, saying his claims about the ocean circulation lack evidence. The Web site criticized Gray for not adapting to the modern era of meteorology, "which demands hypotheses soundly grounded in quantitative and consistent physical formulations, not seat-of-the-pants flying."

The field has fully embraced numerical modeling, and Gray is increasingly on the fringe. His cranky skepticism has become a tired act among younger scientists. "It's sad," says Emanuel, who has vowed never again to debate Gray in public.

When I ask Gray who his intellectual soul mates are regarding global warming, he responds, "I have nobody really to talk to about this stuff."

That's not entirely true. He has many friends and colleagues, and the meteorologists tend to share his skeptical streak.

I ask if he has ever collaborated on a paper with Richard Lindzen. Gray says he hasn't. He looks a little pained.

"Lindzen, he's a hard guy to deal with," Gray says. "He doesn't think he can learn anything from me."

Which is correct. Lindzen says of Gray: "His knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor, but he knows more about hurricanes than anyone in the world. I regard him in his own peculiar way as a national resource."

In Orlando, the national resource has the honor of closing the hurricane conference with a speech. He and Klotzbach go through their usual routine. Gray talks of global warming foolishness, untrusty numerical models, underappreciated ocean circulation, overly dramatized CO2 increases, the crazy complexity of the weather.

"It becomes an absolute can of worms!"

He seems to be running out of steam just a little bit. He's given so many interviews, he might have lost a little velocity on his fastball. But everyone claps at the end. He throws in a final few words:

"Don't believe everything you read in the paper! This whole business about global warming --"

But he steps from the mike, and his final words are inaudible.

In 20 years, he likes to say, the world will have cooled, and everyone will know he was right all along. When that happens, he says, he hopes someone will put flowers on his grave.

Adapting to Uncertainty

Let us say a word in praise of uncertainty. It is a concession to an interesting and complicated planet that is full of surprises. The fog of uncertainty surrounding climate change is routinely cited as a reason to wait before making cuts in greenhouse emissions. But if we wait for that fog to break, we'll wait forever.

Isaac Held, the NOAA climate modeler, is the first to admit that the models aren't perfect. "Clouds are hard," he says. The models on his computer screen are incomprehensible to the untrained eye. But Held argues that the models are conservative. For global warming to be less of a problem than is currently anticipated, all the uncertainties would have to break, preferentially, toward the benign side of things.

Moreover, we don't even know all the things that we don't know. James Hansen, the prominent NASA scientist, points out that the models don't realistically include ice sheets and the biosphere -- all the plants and animals on Earth. The global climate surely has more surprises for us.

"Our models were not predicting the ozone hole in 1980 when it was discovered," Held says. Scientists are haunted by the realization that if CFCs had been made with a slightly different type of chemistry, they'd have destroyed much of the ozone layer over the entire planet.

Hansen thinks we have less than 10 years to make drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions, lest we reach a "tipping point" at which the climate will be out of our control. Hansen may be a step ahead of the consensus -- but that doesn't mean he's wrong. In the brutally hot summer of 1988, Hansen testified before Congress that the signal of global warming could already be detected amid the noise of natural climate variation. Many of his colleagues scoffed. They thought he'd gotten ahead of the hard data. Judy Curry, a Georgia Tech climate scientist, says: "I thought he was playing politics. But, damn it, he was right."

Curry, who believes the skeptics have mounted a "brilliant disinformation campaign," thinks climate change is being held to a different standard than other societal threats. The skeptics want every uncertainty nailed down before any action is taken.

"Why is that standard being applied to greenhouse warming and not to other risks, like terrorism or military risks or avian flu?" she asks.

Mainstream climate scientists readily accept that there is natural variation in the system. For example, greenhouse gases alone can't melt the Arctic at the alarming rate that has been observed recently. Americans sorting through this issue may feel constrained by all the unknowns. Perhaps they need to adapt to uncertainty, to see uncertainty as the norm, and not as a sign of scientific failure.

Or as an excuse to do nothing.

Our Friend CO2

Ten years ago, Fred Smith says, the Competitive Enterprise Institute had contributions from companies across the board in the petroleum industry. It still gets money from Exxon Mobil, the biggest and most hard-line oil company on the climate change issue, but many of its donors have stopped sending checks.

"They've joined the club."

The club of believers in global warming.

The executives don't understand "resource economics." They lack faith in the free market to solve these issues. And they go to cocktail parties and find out that everyone thinks they're criminals.

"Or their kids come home from school and say, 'Daddy, why are you killing the planet?'"

Smith never sounds morose, though. He's peppy. He thinks his side is still winning the debate. Look at the polls: Americans don't care about global warming.

He'd like to get people believing once again in good old-fashioned industrial activity. CEI has created a new public-service TV spot. Smith and several colleagues gather round as we watch it on a computer monitor. The ad begins with images of people picnicking in Central Park on a beautiful day. A child is shown blowing the seeds of a dandelion. A woman's voice, confident, reassuring, says that all these people are creating something that's all around us:

"It's called carbon dioxide," she says, "CO2."

There's an image of an impoverished woman hacking the ground with a hand tool.

"The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a life of backbreaking labor."

We see kids jumping out of a minivan. There are politicians out there who want to label CO2 as a pollutant, the narrator says. We return to the child blowing the dandelion seeds.

"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."

End of ad.

"It should always bring a tear to your eye," Fred Smith says, delighted.

Joel Achenbach is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 11 a.m. Tuesday at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

may 2006 wapo

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