Vol. 25, No. 8 - Access to Energy Newsletter

Prior to the Kyoto extravaganza in December 1997, Access to Energy published its November 1997 issue summarizing the information on "global warming'' that we have discussed over the past few years. Little did we then realize that this summary would turn into a five-month activist odyssey into the world of Algore and his retainers.

Step one on this slippery slope occurred when a prominent man who reads Access to Energy recommended the November issue to an editor of The Wall Street Journal. The editor asked that we compress the issue to two figures and 1200 words. He accepted the resulting draft, assigned another editor to work with us on a final text, and published that text as the primary editorial the Journal printed against the global warming myth during the Kyoto meeting.

This editorial was well-received, caused a little trouble for the en-viros, and was, of course, yesterday's news within a few days. We were very happy to have had this unusual opportunity.

Then, however, the enviros made an error. They launched a remarkably strong attack on us for the contents of our editorial. Particularly enlightening was a Union of Concerned Scientists "physicist'' who offered radio listeners in New York the wisdom that Arthur Ro-binson is a "crackpot''; only one scientist in America agrees with him (Richard Lindzen at MIT); the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is not qualified to comment on global warming because it has no "mainframe computers;'' and our "secret sources of funding'' undoubtedly were oil-industry related. He also lied about the experimental data, but that is just normal enviro behavior.

This caused us to reread a manual published by UCS on tactics to be employed with the media. This UCS physicist's whole diatribe was straight out of their book. It also caused us to reflect upon the plight of our colleagues who have tried to bring the truth about the global warming myth to public attention - only to be personally marginalized in similar ways. The myth of an overwhelming scientific consensus that agrees with the global warming hypothesis has been thereby widely disseminated.

For example, the Microsoft Internet home page recently carried a long article in the weather section in which the featured enviros, with Microsoft endorsement, claimed that 2,000 scientists were in agreement with "global warming'' and that there were only 20 scientists opposed. While not quite so strident, highly politicized Science magazine has also fed this myth by selective editorial policies that favor the warmers, while more popularized outlets like Scientific American have published truly blatant warmer propaganda. It is not surprising, then, that ordinary news writers parrot this nonsense.

Underlying the entire Kyoto process is the perceived, yet false notion that human-caused carbon dioxide release is warming the atmosphere and is going to lead to catastrophic weather disruptions - and that virtually all scientists agree with this. So overwhelming is this support supposed to be within the scientific community that most politicians on both sides of the issue are not even asking questions about the science. The fact is, however, that this perceived consensus does not exist. The perception of it, however, is giving the enviros all

So, we decided to take away their perceived consensus by circulating a petition among the silent majority of scientists. This undertaking was quite difficult for us. We needed to: raise enough money to make the effort credible; write a review paper that communicated the facts and literature references to potential signers in the language scientists understand; obtain appropriate mailing lists; design, print, and send the mailing; and receive, computerize, and disseminate the results - all in a short time period - with volunteers who were already occupied with other work. The truth is that we are neither large enough nor financially strong enough for this sort of undertaking.

Money for printing and postage was provided by Access to Energy readers and their friends. (We still have not had time to send individual thank you letters. These will be sent soon.) The labor was largely provided by volunteers at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine who, because of this, have been working almost non-stop 16-hour-per-day schedules since the project began. Access to Energy readers also paid another price as AtE arrived later each month as we fell behind with all of our work. (This will be the last unusual issue. Next month, our format and schedule will return to normal.)

We did absolutely everything we possibly could to mail these petitions to as great a number of scientists as possible. The exact number we mailed remains a secret because we do not want the enviros to be able to calculate our percentage return and then claim that everyone who did not sign agrees with them. We are continuing to mail to additional scientists whose research specialties are of particular political value. Moreover, more than 4,000 of the initial signers have asked for more petitions for their colleagues. We are sending these, too.

The 8-page review we produced could not be published in an ordinary scientific journal before the petition drive because of the long time required for publication (usually at least several months) and because acceptance of the manuscript would have transferred copyright to the journal and thereby prevented its use in the petition project. It has recently been submitted for publication. The enviros are now attacking it as "not peer reviewed.'' Even in the pages of Science, this weak complaint is all that they have mustered against us.

The result - during a six-week period, more than 15,000 American basic and applied scientists have signed the petition (wording reprinted below). As we write this, these initial results are being released. A complete account, including lists of the signers, is available at www.oism.org/pproject/ and at www.sitewave.net/pproject/ .

Scientists who are subscribers to Access to Energy were the first approximately 1,000 signers. They have now been joined by more than 14,000 of their colleagues throughout the United States.

By contrast, the best effort the enviros have ever made was that by the group that calls itself the "Union of Concerned Scientists,'' which gathered a reported 1,558 pro-global warming signatures of scientists in 1997. Even this is doubtful. I talked with one Nobel prize winner who signed the UCS petition. The document he signed, however, only asked that research on climate change not be discontinued.

The enviros' perceived consensus is now dead. Furthermore, our results indicate that their support is very weak among scientists.

Six weeks before the November 1996 Congressional election, Science magazine published a bar graph that explains much about the nonscience in science today. (See Access to Energy 24-3, November 1996, p 3, figure 3.) The graph clearly demonstrated that Democrats, on average, vote more tax-financed subsidies for non-defense related "scientific work'' than do Republicans. This non-defense welfare program for those with educational degrees in science costs American taxpayers $33 billion per year. Science loudly reminded its readers of the identities of their favorite political sugar daddies just before the election. The Science editorial policy is similarly structured.

Science, of course, publishes professional papers reporting serious research work and has done so for many decades. The first research paper I ever published was in Science in 1965, reporting work that I had done as an undergraduate at Caltech.

Besides reporting new research, however, Science (along with the similar British publication, Nature) serves as a gossip column for scientists throughout the world. News of special interest and popularized summary reports of noteworthy advances in a wide variety of research fields are also published.

Unfortunately, as tax financing of non-defense research has grown since World War II, the "news'' in Science and Nature has become increasingly preoccupied with keeping the welfare payments flowing. Concomitantly, the editorial policy of these journals has become slanted. Research reports that imply an excuse for more tax funding are favored over those that imply the opposite.

In keeping with this slant, scientists who claim that "climate change'' is a major problem that justifies the billions of dollars of tax money now being spent each year to study it have found publication of their reports in Science and Nature to be quite easy and quick. Those who report, however, that natural factors explain climate variations and that their research results do not support the expensive global warming bandwagon find publication much more difficult. One such prominent scientist told me of waiting two years for review of a paper by Science - only to have the research report then rejected.

[It is important to realize that, while tax funding of research is wasteful and unprincipled, these adjectives cannot be fairly applied to all scientists who currently have government grants. Most academic scientists have such grants - including many of America's most brilliant scientists. These people have little choice for support, since government grants have pushed down or out alternative private sources of funds that would otherwise be available to them.]

In connection with our Petition Project, reporters for both Science and Nature have telephoned here. Both were professional in their interviews - although the reporter from Nature was clearly suspicious of a scientific institution (Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine) that did not solicit or accept tax funding. He actually asked me if I did not agree with him that tax funding (and the bureaucratic process involved in awarding government grants) is an important part of the "peer review'' process. The reporter from Science was preoccupied with the format issue and declined to discuss any aspect of the scientific facts.

Nature has not yet reported about the project, but Science has - with a predictable slant. Their article emphasizes the red herring about format that the enviros have been using unsuccessfully in their efforts to counter the Petition Project. "Climate Change: Advocacy Mailing Draws Fire'' by David Malakoff, Science 280 (1998), p 195 reads: "In early March, tens of thousands of U. S. scientists received a bulk-mailed letter from Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and of Rockefeller University in New York City. It invited them to sign an enclosed petition urging lawmakers to reject the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty (Science, 19 De-cember, p. 2048), which awaits approval by the U. S. Senate.

"The substance of the mailing might have attracted little notice in the flurry of position papers that the treaty has spawned. But some scientists and environmentalists are crying foul because its centerpiece is an article that looks like - but is not - a reprint from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review.' says Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Chicago.

"The eight-page review article concludes that predictions of global warming 'are in error' and that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are 'a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution,' because they have produced 'an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals.' Its co-authors are chemist Arthur Ro-binson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine; Robinson's 22-year-old son, Zachary; and astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank and vocal critic of any government efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

"Pierrehumbert says he became concerned when a colleague, confused by Seitz's affiliations, called to ask whether the academy had indeed taken a stand against the Kyoto treaty. The call moved Pierrehumbert to post an email harshly criticizing the mailing to several scientific mailing lists. He was not the only scientist angered by the faux reprint. 'We've gotten several hundred calls from scientists asking what we are going to do about this,' reports Darren Goetz of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Boston, an advocacy group that last year signed up 1558 scientists in urging the federal government to take action on global warming. Officials at the Sierra Club and the NAS say they, too, have gotten a flurry of complaints. Researchers are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them,' says atmospheric chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, NAS foreign secretary.

"Robinson admits it is no coincidence that the article, which he designed on his computer, looks like one published by the academy. 'I used the Proceedings as a model.' he says, 'but only to put the information in a format that scientists like to read, not to fool people into thinking it is from a journal.' He says he plans to submit a version shortly to a peer-reviewed journal.

"Robinson says he didn't want to wait for formal publication of his article, for fear that the Senate might vote on the Kyoto treaty before he could distribute his petition. The goal, he says, is to counter the perception created by the UCS petition and other statements that there is a scientific consensus in favor of the Kyoto treaty. 'Scientists who have spoken out [against the treaty] keep getting marginalized as nuts. I want to demonstrate that there is no consensus.' he says. Critics are attacking his mailing's style, he believes, to sidestep a debate on its scientific substance.

"Robinson says his petition has gathered 15,000 signatures. But Pierrehumbert and others say that Robinson's views on climate change are suspect, because he has never published research in the field.'' The Malakoff Science article also includes a picture of the first page of our 8-page article. The photo clearly shows no journal name, no submission date, no submitting scientist (required by the Proceedings), and "January 1998'' printed in a format never used by a journal. The article is also twice as long as permitted in the Proceedings (in which I have published several papers) and has other textual and format differences that I introduced to make it easier to read. It actually never occurred to me that this format complaint would be made - probably because I actually expected more. Even while not agreeing with them, I could defend the enviros' claims far more effectively than they have.

We have received more than 500 requests from scientists for a literature reference to this article - most of them friendly scientists who want to reference it in their own writings. There have, indeed, been a few who have mistaken it for a journal reprint - from several different journals that have widely varied formats.

An appropriate version of this article has been submitted for publication. The journal reference will be sent to all petition signers after it is published. Until then, the journal name is confidential.

It is remarkable that virtually none of the people leveling attacks against our petition project attempt to discuss science. With the enviros apparently unable to attack our science and with enemies like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club, and Sherwood Rowland, we must be doing a lot that's right. Rowland, of course, is one of the "Ozone Three'' - the antics of whom in promoting and profiting from the unnecessary ban of CFCs are an embarrassment to the field of chemistry. The UCS and Sierra Club, whatever the merits of those who worked under those names in the past, have become shallow organizations that are obviously in very poor hands.

Other than complaints from these sources, our only other direct link to the opposition has been through the 1.4% of negative replies we receive to the petition. For every 100 scientists who sign the petition, we receive, on average, 1.4 negative responses. Of the approximately 200 negative comments received in the first six weeks, about 90% consisted solely of profanity scrawled across the petition card, usually with the name of the writer removed. The other 10% included an occasional reasoned comment - usually based on incorrect information.

Global warmer support within the scientific community is turning out to be much weaker than we had previously thought - even though, through clever use of the press and false representations about their "consensus,'' they have been winning the public debate.

If victory in the global warming wars goes to the warmers - a loss that would ultimately condemn vast numbers of the world's people to misery and death as technology is withdrawn, it will not be a win by the warmers - it will be a loss by real scientists and technologists. Our most dangerous enemies are not the pathetic "scientists'' at the UCS and Sierra Club. We have in fact other, more effective opposition.

First, there are unprincipled people in business who are attempting to profit from the global warming mania. Among these is, for example, the nuclear power industry, which has been promoting global warming because nuclear power does not produce carbon dioxide. Second, there are individuals in the press and politicians and bureaucrats who perceive ways in which the global warming mania can be utilized to promote themselves and their agendas. Third, there are those who actually oppose the mania - but do so in a lukewarm way calculated to serve their own interests. If, while pursuing their own self-interests, such people become widely quoted spokesmen - but speak in ineffectual, half-hearted ways, they prevent better spokesmen from being heard.

I am more concerned about people supposedly on our side of this issue who have been trying to minimize and downplay the more outspoken critics of global warming than about the enviros themselves. We are hopeful that the signatures on this petition will help to overcome this problem, too. The petition states:

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.'' During the first six weeks, 16,900 people signed this petition. These included more than 15,000 basic scientists and applied scientists (mostly engineers), two-thirds with advanced degrees.

Initial signers include approximately 2,100 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, and environmental scientists who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate.

Initial signers also include approximately 4,400 scientists whose fields of specialization make them especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide upon the Earth's plant and animal life.

Approximately 1,800 individuals have signed the petition who are trained in fields other than science or whose field of specialization was not specified on their returned petition.

The costs of the petition have been paid entirely by private donations. No industrial funding or money from sources within the coal, oil, natural gas or related industries has been utilized. The petition's organizers, who include some faculty members and staff of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, do not otherwise receive funds from such sources. The Institute itself has no such funding. Also, no funds of tax-exempt organizations have been used for this project.

This project is titled "Petition Project'' and uses a mailing address of its own because we desired an independent, individual opinion from each scientist based on the scientific issues involved - without implied endorsements of individuals, groups, or institutions.

Today, we received a copy of the Union Of Concerned Scientist's April 17 press release against the petition. Listing offices in Washing-ton, Cambridge, and Berkeley, the UCS release contains numerous factual errors and falsehoods of omission. It is, however, interesting in that it is the enviros who are reacting. Up until now, the enviros have been acting and everyone else has been reacting. It is encouraging to see these roles reversed.

We do not expect to see immediate widespread news coverage of the petition or any sudden change in public attitude. What we expect is that the news of this directly expressed opinion by more than 15,000 scientists (the number will probably grow more slowly now - unless we find enough money for extensive new mailings, in which case the number of signatures could easily be raised to 50,000) will gradually erode the enviros' credibility. This is the reason that they are attacking us - attacks that only raise awareness of the petition, increase its effectiveness, and likely lead to some additional signatures.

While I was writing the previous paragraph, a hostile reporter from The New York Times called. He refused to talk about science - only format. He also brought news that the National Academy of Sciences has issued a statement about our project. Apparently, Sherwood Row-land convinced a majority on the governing council to put out a statement that the petition project is not an NAS activity. No one thought that it was an NAS activity, but Rowland thinks he can get some negative political mileage out of this disclaimer.

The enviros must smear the project. They are being drowned in the signatures of scientists who oppose the global warming mania. Without their perceived consensus, years of enviro preparations and many billions of dollars in propaganda designed to seize control of the world's energy supplies and turn down the flow of energy to industry, technology, and individuals may be lost.

It must be understood that Access to Energy and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine are not going to stop the global warming bandwagon. If it is stopped, the individual and institutional infrastructure of opposition to global warming hysteria that has arisen throughout America will stop it. We have been fortunate to be able to do one thing for this opposition - to lift the burden of implied scientific consensus and to provide a potent political weapon in this list of signatures. The readers of Access to Energy and five months of very hard work made this possible. We are now beginning to be brutally smeared by the enviros. Good! This shows that we have definitely hurt them.

The best the enviros are managing to do in reaction to the fact that they are being buried by a blizzard of signatures by scientists opposed to their agenda is to carp about the lack of "peer review'' of our review paper (for reasons of time and copyright).

Actually, reviews are often not peer reviewed at all, since they do not contain original research and do contain complete references to the peer-reviewed literature for all of their data - as is true of our paper. The most cited paper that I have ever written was a review article that stood as the primary reference in a specialized area of protein chemistry for more than 20 years. This paper was never peer reviewed.

Peer review arose - and still functions - as a mechanism for journal editors to reduce the number of submitted manuscripts to that number which will physically fit into their journal. It consists of sending each manuscript to two or three other scientists who give opinions, usually anonymously, as to its quality. Many manuscripts are objectively assessed in this way. If, however, the editor wants to publish the paper regardless, he simply selects reviewers known to be friends of the author or else known to be lenient in their opinions. If he does not want to publish the paper, he sends it to the author's enemies and competitors or to reviewers known to harshly criticize all manuscripts.

Since new ideas are often less popular, they are more difficult to publish. There are a very large number of journals, however, so most worthwhile work is eventually accepted somewhere. For many years, as a help in ensuring this, the Proceeding of the National Academy had a policy of accepting any manuscript approved by three members (one submitter and two others of his choice). Unfortunately, this PNAS policy was abandoned as a result of an argument over the controversial submissions of one academy member. Peer-reviewed publication has actually become very easy, however, because there has been a virtual explosion in the number of journals - in large part as a response to the need for scientists to accumulate long lists of publications in order to compete successfully for tax-financed grants.

In any case, peer review usually consists of opinions by two or three other scientists. A paper with four authors and no reviewers has the approval of as many scientists as a single-author paper that has been peer reviewed.

Mediocre scientists, when reading the literature, often use peer review in an unintended way. They depend upon the reviewers to evaluate the work, and they read just the abstract and conclusions of the paper. They trust and parrot - by citing this superficially evaluated work in their own papers. Excellent scientists do not do this. They read the paper, check critical references, and reach their own conclusions.

Although signature of our petition does not prove that the signer approves our review paper, there is a partially implied link. In that case, our paper has certainly passed peer review by more scientists than any other scientific paper that will be published in 1998.

A secondary enviro complaint has been that two of the four authors of our review article (Zachary and I) have not published research on climate change - that I am out of my field of specialization and therefore should not be believed. The truth is that I should not be believed in any case. To the enviros, science is a religion to which converts are added by belief. The reason the 8-page review was written was to communicate the fully referenced facts on both sides of this issue to scientists - so that they could easily locate the information needed to reach their own objective conclusions. Criticizing scientists for being out of their field is a purely polemical exercise than has been used repeatedly in science - usually by mediocre people who cannot protect their turf from interlopers of greater ability. The reporter from Nature raised this issue with me, but retreated when I started listing research fields that had been revolutionized by scientists from other fields.

In this case, we do not even claim to have done original research. Climate science is indeed quite simple. Very few parameters have been measured, and, since reliable data are not available with which to study the detailed complexities, interpretation is necessarily empirical and uncomplicated. Actually, biochemists are especially appropriate here because they are practiced in obtaining definitive information about far more complicated systems than the atmosphere, whereas physicists specialize in much simpler systems. Physicists tend, however, to have more rigorous standards of intellectual honesty than do biologists. This may be part of the the reason that a disproportionately high number of physicists are signing the petition.

In fact, virtually anyone with a good education in any scientific discipline has more than enough training to evaluate the information relevant to global warming and reach a sensible conclusion - if he is not blinded by ideological prejudices as are most of the enviros.

The Sierra club is now screeching that the "Bogus Petition Project'' has been "exposed'' - mostly on the basis of Raymond Pierre-humbert's remarks. Pierrehumbert turns out to be the author of no less than 332 epistles of wisdom catalogued by the Deja News Internet service. There we learn that he opposes: sport utility vehicles, currently installed refrigeration, incandescent lights, short and medium-distance air travel, nuclear power, strategic defense, logging, private gun ownership, and fuel-bearing transport. He says that, "On balance, the US doesn't produce ANY [his caps] of the world's goods. We are a net importer of other peoples' goods. Can you say 'trade deficit.' Therefore, I propose that a large fraction of China's CO2 emissions should be attributed to the US, in the Kyoto discussions. Japan's too.''

Pierrehumbert also opposes farming: "It makes little difference if you pave over an ecosystem with corn instead of concrete, but you can pave a lot more with corn a lot faster.'' He proposes that people be moved into dense city environments because suburban living requires more energy. He also favors population reduction, and has proposed, in his words, "a huge tax on energy.'' A member of the Union of Concerned Scientists' "Sound Science Initiative,'' Pierrehumbert displayed his scientific acumen to one hapless Internet user who wrote "Sorry no formulae. Just a simple observation that warm water evaporates faster than cold water.'' Pierrehumbert's reply: "But it doesn't!'' Then after describing a contrived scenario in which the warm water is covered with water-saturated air and the cold water is not, he finishes with the flourish: "You ought to go away and learn some physics and stop making a fool of yourself. Come back to the card table when you've got the ante.''

This worthy is the principal "scientist'' that Science magazine and the Sierra Club are quoting in their campaign against the Petition Project. They apparently could not find anyone better.

"Greenhouse Warming Hurts Arctic Ozone'' by R. Monastersky, Science News 153 (1998), p 228, reviews a paper in Nature by NASA scientists claiming that global warming is making the Arctic colder and thereby destroying ozone. We previously reviewed the similar claims that global warming will cause a new ice age and that global warming will give London an Arctic climate.

The real problem is that all of the scary, fried planet scenarios have been advertised. Their originators have reaped the associated funding benefits. New players and old players whose sweatingly hot scenarios are wearing thin need new ways to get attention and more fame and fortune. Cold weather from hot weather was a scenario not yet claimed (for obvious reasons), so the race for this new mania is now on.

We may not need to stop these guys completely - only slow them down enough that, in desperation, they overreach into further wild claims that most people will find ridiculous.

Early Warning Report by Richard Maybury, March-April 1998, available from Henry-Madison Research, PO Box 84908, Phoenix, AZ 85071, which comments, "Politicians acquire power by promising to defend us against threats. Any threat will do - communism, unemployment, global warming, global cooling, global freeze drying. Most of politics is about the cultivation of threats. A healthy government is one with a big inventory of threats, and a threat shortage is a disaster to be avoided at all costs.''
"Will the EPA Make America Safe for Cockroaches?'' by Mi-chael Fumento in The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1998, p A22. The EPA is on another pogrom against insecticides. Insecticide bans generally tend to drive up food costs, lower consumption of healthful foods, and increase the spread of disease. Then other branches of government demand more of our tax money to protect us from the resulting government-created ill health.
"Shanghaied in Kyoto'' by Ronald Bailey in The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 1997, p A22. The Clinton Administration plans to implement the Kyoto global warming treaty whether or not is ratified by the United States Senate. Senate refusal to ratify will just be the first in many actions that will be necessary to prevent energy rationing. The Administration will use our tax money to try to ration our energy, and we will use our after-tax income to try to stop them.
Publications by Environmental Education Enterprises, 6011 Houseman Rd., Ostrander, OH 43061. These are written by Jay Lehr, who is a professional speaker devoted to sensible action on environmental matters. He has been giving speeches about the global warming hoax and is available for this purpose.
Press relations for the Petition Project are being handled by Dr. Jane Orient. She has written some excellent materials, which are available from 1601 N. Tucson Blvd., Ste 9, Tucson, AZ 85716.