Posturing and reality on warming

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For the first time, the Senate is about to vote on whether to restrict national emissions of carbon dioxide -- the respiration of our civilization and our economy -- in an attempt to control the world's uncontrollable climate. This legislation has absolutely no basis in science.

The bill in question is S.139, sponsored by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, and John McCain, Arizona Republican. Both are global-warming hawks who see an opportunity to bring about the Kyoto Protocol through a legislative back door. Both also know it won't do a measurable thing about the Earth's temperature and that it hasn't a snowball's chance in a Washington summer of passage.

But that's not the point. S.139 is designed to embarrass President Bush and to embolden the Senate's green posturers by neutralizing the 1997 Byrd-Hagel "Sense of the Senate" Resolution which, 95-0, stated the Senate would never entertain any climate change treaty that would cost American jobs. Instead, expect S.139 to get between 30 and 40 votes. No doubt, the green lobby will crow about rapidly growing support for instruments like the Kyoto Protocol and (egad) beyond.

Besides limiting emissions, S. 139 requires business and industry to tell the government precisely how much energy they are using, and in what forms. The purpose is to then allow businesses to "trade" their emissions with each other, for a price. Who do you think is going to pay for this? How few years does anyone think it will be before this is applied to individuals and their homes, in the form of some "environmentally responsible tax credit"? Do you want Uncle Sam knowing how you run your domicile?

All this is intrusion into business, the economy, and, eventually, into your home, is totally unnecessary.

Here's what every American needs to know about global warming. Contrary to almost every news report and every staged hearing, including one held by Mr. McCain on Oct. 1, scientists know quite precisely how much the planet will warm in the foreseeable future, a modest three-quarters of a degree (C), plus or minus a mere quarter-degree, according to scientific figures as disparate as this author and NASA scientist James Hansen. The uncertainty is so small, in fact, that publicly crowing this figure is liable to result in a substantial cut in our research funding, which is why the hundreds of other scientists who know this have been so reluctant to disgorge the truth in public.

All this has to do with basic physics, which isn't real hard to understand. It has been known since 1872 that as we emit more and more carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, each increment results in less and less warming. In other words, the first changes produce the most warming, and subsequent ones produce a bit less, and so on.

But we also assume carbon dioxide continues to go into the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate. In other words, the increase from year-to-year isn't constant, but itself is increasing. The effect of increasing the rate of carbon dioxide emissions, coupled with the fact that more and more carbon dioxide produces less and less warming compels our climate projections for the future warming to be pretty much a straight line.

Translation: Once human beings start to warm the climate, they do so at a constant rate. And yes, it's a sad fact that it took $10 billion of taxpayer money to "prove" something so obvious it can be written in a mere 100 words.