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Crying Wolf?

© Frank Monaldo

In 1969, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, professor of biology at prestigious Stanford University, painted a dire picture of 1979 for Ramparts magazine. He predicted that the oceans would be dead, that water quality would be so poor that a couple of thousand US localities would be rationing water. As water quality rapidly deteriorated, the 1970s would experience increases in "hepatitis and epidemic dysentery rates . . . [of] about 500 per cent.'' Ehrlich lamented that the promise of increased crop yields through the application of technology to agriculture, the ``Green Revolution,'' had failed. Famine on a global scale is a real possibility in Ehrlich's 1979. Perhaps most worrisome, air pollution in 1979 was causing dramatic climate change. In the words of Ehrlich's cataclysmic doomsday prediction:

"Man's air-polluting activities had by then [1979] caused gross changes in climatic patterns. The news, of course, played hell with commodity and stock markets. Food prices skyrocketed, as savings were poured into hoarded canned goods."

These predictions by Ehrlich of only a decade ahead were heady stuff in 1969. Of course in retrospect they were exceedingly alarmist and somewhat naive and simple-minded extrapolation. One can imagine the embarrassment they must now cause Ehrlich.

Now, just because one alarmist over-predicts, it does not logically follow that all predictions of environmental catastrophe are as inherently as silly as Ehrlich's. However, the apocalyptic descriptions of future global warming surrounding the recent Kyoto meeting deserve, at the very least, a healthy dose of skepticism. The notion is afoot that the choice is either between adhering to the Kyoto agreement or uncontrolled global warming with corresponding economic and ecological devastation.

The seminal documents in the global climate debate are the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports. The most recent IPCC Report projects that greenhouse gases caused by humans will increase global temperatures from 1 to 3.5 C over the next 100 years. This is down a factor of two from predictions in the 1990 IPCC Report. The decrease is simply a consequence of more sophisticated climatic modeling. The predictions warrant continued serious investigation, but hardly qualify the Kyoto agreements as critical to future Earth survivability.

In fact, Kyoto is almost irrelevant. Ignore for a moment the difficulty that current climate models have in even replicating the historic temperature record. The same models cited by the IPCC Report predict that if every nation signed the Kyoto agreement and even more importantly adhered to the Kyoto emission goals, the net effect over the next fifty years would be less than 0.2 C. This tiny level of change would even be difficult to measure.

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