The real story behind Europe’s support of Kyoto

Published June 1, 2001

When EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced to the press in March that President George W. Bush did not intend to implement the Kyoto global warming protocol, Europe exploded with such venom one would have thought he had initiated a nuclear war.

In Europe, global warming has become a religion intended to humble the United States. Now Bush has blasphemed that religion. Until now, the green groups across the pond had reveled in their apparent ability to throw American industrial power into disarray over planned CO2 reductions.

It was never about science. It was always about bringing the U.S. to its knees.

Global warming was invented in 1988 to replace two earlier myths with the same intentions: nuclear winter and the advent of a new ice age (how soon they forget). Global warming would contain all the negative seeds the greens had been sowing for the past 30 years, including overpopulation, unsustainable growth, pollution, anti-corporate anti-Americanism, and Al Gore’s view of human greed disturbing the ecological balance.

The battle between good and evil, science versus myth, is exhibited in the newest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to which Europe turns for its support. The report is actually two documents.

First, there is the summary, written by a handful of politically motivated panelists who fully ignore the text of the report. The more important document, the text of the report itself, describes barely a shred of certain scientific evidence for global warming.

“In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible,” notes the report’s conclusion. “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible.”

Of course, the European media did not mention this incredibly significant point, choosing instead to focus entirely on the political summary–which bears no resemblance to the science that does exist in the report. Richard Lindzen, a meteorology professor at MIT and member of the IPCC, offers scathing commentary on the political summary elsewhere in this issue of E&CN.

Unlike the U.S., where the media does on occasion take a look at the seriously deficient science behind the flawed global warming theories, throughout Europe the media has ignored the tremendous uncertainty in all global warming data. Instead, they take global warming theory as an absolute prophecy of the future resulting from America’s corporate energy-wasting greed.

In the past few months, scientists have continued to pile questions upon the global warming theory in major science journals, including Nature, Climate Research, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The latter concludes no global climate model can adequately express the relationship between CO2 and global temperature. The other papers call into question the role of all gas emissions, methods of recording temperatures over the oceans, and the role of the most significant greenhouse gas, water vapor.

The global warming theory is an empty suit, full of scientific flaws and political motivations. The idea that we can control the climate–which is governed by literally thousands of variables–by controlling a couple of earthly gas emissions is truly silly. But that is not the point.

The point of it all, from both the foreign and green perspectives, is to ride this crazy horse till it humbles the most successful governing system ever devised by man.

We are a free and capitalist nation, and thereby have achieved more wealth than our less-free socialist adversaries. In the wrongheaded decision not to emulate our system of government and economic freedom, they have chosen instead to attempt to bring us down to their less-productive level with the incessant drumbeat the of global warming ruse.