To the editor:
This is in response to Philip Conkling’s “Global Warming — Fact or Hoax” [WWF Aug. 2006] and Ray Rhinehart’s subsequent letter on same [WWF Sept. 06].
As I read Conkling’s essay, I felt I was at last reading an even-handed treatment of a subject which the media, by and large, had resolved in Al Gore’s favor, hands down. This good feeling lasted only until I read Conkling’s report on a 2004 issue of Reason, which discussed Dr. Lindzen’s purported gambling on future global temperatures. I was stunned by these claims concerning MIT’s Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Physics and immediately contacted Dr. Lindzen, something that Conkling should have done before writing his slander. Although I had not had any previous contact with Dr. Lindzen, his response was immediate and complete. It is not appropriate for me to produce his full letter here, but I will give abstracts.
I quote, “As concerns the bet, the matter began with some journalist, Don Bailey, [who] wrote that I was willing to bet that it would be cooler in 20 years. His claim happened to be false…some of the false claims are that I am paid by the oil industry and that I claim that smoking is not harmful to one’s health. Some of the true claims are that I smoke and am overweight…it has, unfortunately, been characteristic of this issue that scientific arguments have been largely ignored, while claims have focused on extraneous (and generally false) claims about me personally.”
I suggest both Conkling and Rhinehart get in touch with Dr. Lindzen before accepting at face value anything in the blogosphere. While there is no doubt that the great majority of climate researchers do not agree with Dr. Lindzen’s view, that does not entitle anyone to question his motives or integrity. The paper given by Dr. Lindzen on Oct. 21, 2005, at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization is available. Study it and attack it as you will, but stop the character assassination.
Conkling’s article goes on to say that “the U.S. Government is betting that the doom-saying global warmers like Al Gore and a very substantial part of the scientific establishment are Chicken Littles.” Where did this come from? Sounds like a sound byte right out of the DNC Handbook for Campaign 2006. If you studied other parts of the Internet you would find such things as a billion dollar joint industry-government program to demonstrate a zero emission coal boiler, a program to reduce emissions growth 18 percent by 2012, tax incentives of $3.6 billion over five years to reduce emissions and the well publicized (and quite questionable) hydrogen fuel cell. Of course, it is easy to say it is too little, too late.
Many have faulted President Bush for not signing the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to reduce emissions. His reason is very simple: the treaty excludes certain countries from any obligation to reduce emissions. This is like telling Maine lobstermen that their catch must be reduced, but the rules don’t apply to Canada. It should be noted, however, that during the eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, there was not a single major piece of legislation concerning global warming. This is truly an inconvenient truth.
Conkling closes his article by promising to keep track of spring storms along the coast and paints a dire picture with his use of the subjunctive “if.” I presume this ad hoc research will tell us much about global warming and hurricanes. It ranks right up there with cold fusion, the biosphere and UFOs.
Justin Cooper
Castine
Philip Conkling responds: Mr. Cooper raises a fair question about whether I should have contacted Dr. Richard Lindzen before reporting on whether this global warming contrarian was willing to bet that the earth would be cooler in 20 years. No, he is not willing to bet and evidently never was, Mr. Cooper informs us. But Mr. Cooper misses the main point of the global warming column I wrote and he does a serious disservice to his argument by concluding that global warming “ranks right up there with cold fusion, the biosphere and UFO’s.” I cannot help but comment that including the biosphere, which is defined as that part of the earth’s atmosphere, water and land where organisms can live, along with such obvious hoaxes as UFOs and cold fusion, makes it difficult to understand my correspondent’s real complaints.
Over the last several years, I have participated in five scientific expeditions to various parts of the Arctic where the effects of global warming are plainly visible even to the uneducated, naked eye. My reporting from these expeditions published in The Working Waterfront and Island Journal has been informed by scientific colleagues on various of these voyages. These include Dr, Wallace Broecker, a physical oceanographer from Columbia’s Lamont Doherty lab; Dr. George Denton, a paleo-climatologist from the University of Maine who has studied glaciers from all over the world; and by Dr. Richard Alley of Penn State University, who worked on the original Greenland ice core project. These are not politicians. They are part of a much larger group of international scientists funded by the Comer Fellows Program in Abrupt Climate Change Research. These distinguished scientists are neither conservative nor liberal, but believe that it is no longer a matter of whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations will double in our children’s lifetime; that die, alas, has already been cast. The world may be able to prevent these gases from tripling to 720 ppt. if we begin to act soon. The last time the earth had carbon dioxide levels in that range was during the Eocene when crocodiles inhabited Baffin Island.
Although I applaud a billion-dollar joint industry-government program to demonstrate a zero emission coal boiler, the government’s program Mr. Cooper mentions to reduce emissions growth by 18 percent by 2012 is inconsequential compared to the ways we will need to reorganize our energy future. It would be useful to discuss equitable means of doing so sooner rather than later, because the world we leave to our children and grandchildren is likely to be vastly different from the environments that we have enjoyed.