Notes on the Science of Greenhouse Warming

by Gregory F. Rehmke

Recent articles in Science and The New Scientist magazine have sharply questioned the much-reported consensus that man-caused greenhouse warming has arrived. "Greenhouse Forecasting Still Cloudy" by Richard Kerr in Science (May 16, 1997, p. 1040) and "Greenhouse Wars" in The New Scientist (July 19,1997) provide a dose of skepticism about greenhouse warming rarely glimpsed in The New York Times and other national publications.

The subtitle of The New Scientist article is "They're among the world's top scientists. They don't believe in global warming. And they think their time has come." Yet as scientists are discovering more evidence to counter the projections of mathematical greenhouse warming models, politicians are stepping in to chastise the doubters. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt claims these scientific doubts are part of a corporate conspiracy: "It's an unhappy fact that the oil companies and the coal companies in the U.S. have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts, and then begin raising political arguments that are essentially fraudulent. ... I think the energy companies need to be called to account because what they are doing is un-American in the most basic sense." As the Wall Street Journal reported (August 8, 1997, A12), Babbitt argued that energy companies skeptical of global warming engaged in "a deliberate attempt to distort the facts and to mislead and simply stall any kind of progress for their own short-term advantage with possibly really catastrophic effects in the long run."

Bruce Babbitt is a politician, not a scientist, yet he is attempting to bring the power of the federal government against people who are credentialed scientists and whose research and empirical findings indicate that Babbitt's confidence in enhanced global warming is misplaced. Leading scientists disagree about global warming, but in science their differing research findings are discussed and developed before an audience of thousands of other scientists in academic journals and conferences.

Energy companies are not able to distort this process. Corporations can subsidize research and fund individual scientists, but they cannot force leading journals to publish articles that favor their firms. Neither should the Department of the Interior or any other government agency be able to silence scientists whose research undercuts proposed government policies.

[originally published in Econ Update in 1997.]

-- Gregory F. Rehmke is Director of High School Outreach at the Foundation for Economic Education, and has an economics degree from the University of Washington. He is an Adjunct Scholar of the Mackinac Center in Midland Michigan.