THE GLOBAL WARMING THREAT

Like Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, Stephen Schneider of the Natl. Ctr. of Atmosph. Rsrch. is an abysmal charlatan; but it is arguable whether he also attains Ehrlich's standards of truthfulness. Oysters downstream from a nuclear plant "glowed in the dark," lied Ehrlich, a biology professor; and Schneider; as the Boston Globe (5/31/92) reports, recently made the remarkable statement "It is journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming issue] as though it were a question of balance. Given the distribution of views with groups like the National Academy of Science expressing strong scientific concern, it is irresponsible to give equal time to a few people standing out in left field."

Now who is it exactly who is standing out in left field? A Gallup poll of climatologists, meteorologists and geophysicists found that less than 19% believed that global warming (if any) was man-caused [AtE Apr 92]. In the same issue I reprinted a list of some 50 climatologists, meteorologists and atmospheric scientists, almost all with academic rank, who signed a declaration rejecting the global warming predictions as unreliable and þnot validated by the existing climate record." Many of the signatories are professors emeriti, others have spent decades in studying the issue of climate change. They are the ones who are out in left field, not Stephen Schneider, a pup who got his degree in the post-Vietnam degree inflation when almost any warm body would get a Ph. D., and who but a few years ago direly warned of the coming ice age. Apart from that, Schneider, just like DuPont and the refrigerator com-panies, is making profits (speaking fees) and promoting his name via this half-baked, improbable hypothesis, and stands to make more of both before it is killed off for good by legitimate science.

It would be journalistically irresponsible to deny that these peaks must have been hitherto unsuspected gigantic industries flourishing in bygone days. The Cretaceous period was also the time when the dinosaurs disappeared from, and humans appeared on, the planet: surprising biodiversity without a Rio protocol.

There is a controversy about what caused the dinosaurs' demise. But of course! How could we idiots in far-out left field have missed it? It would be journalistically irresponsible to deny that the newly arrived and not yet environmentally conscious humans hunted the dinosaurs down, killed them, and along with the abundant biomass of the age, burned them in their electric power plants.