Climate concern is just a tax ruse

By S Singer, Financial Times
Published: Nov 26, 2003

From Mr S. Fred Singer.

Sir, You have to hand it to Al Gore, the former vice-president - he will not quit. Now he wants companies to disclose the "risks of climate change" to shareholders (report, November 24). To bludgeon the Securities and Exchange Commission, he assembled a vocal group of "climate experts", including Kofi Annan, United Nations secretary general (who acted as the host), a bevy of state treasurers, and assorted academics.

As history teaches us, the risks come from a cooling not a warming climate. Robert Mendelsohn, the Yale resource economist, and nearly two dozen co-authors have documented the benefits of warming. Agriculturalists concur that higher levels of carbon dioxide (from the burning of coal, oil and gas) will make crops and forests grow faster (as they did when CO2 levels were some 10 times higher in the geologic past). Even the UN's own science panel admits that a warming climate does not signal more severe storms, hurricanes, floods and droughts, although more evaporation from the oceans means more rain (and therefore more fresh water).

The irony is that there is no convincing evidence that the global climate is actually warming. Most of the temperature records from satellites, from weather balloons, from corrected US weather stations show no appreciable warming trend in the past 25 or 60 years. All observers agree that there was strong warming from about 1920 to 1940, not manmade but most likely caused by the changing sun; so it is certainly warmer now than 100 years ago. We can see the consequences as many glaciers and ice fields slowly adjust to this natural change.

Mr Gore and company are stirring the pot, trying to create public anxiety in order to impose a form of energy rationing on the economy - like the recently defeated Senate bill of McCain-Lieberman, which would have forced a cap on emissions, equivalent to an energy tax. President George W. Bush has termed such a policy "fatally flawed". President Vladimir Putin of Russia has gone one better, and last September pronounced it "scientifically flawed".

S. Fred Singer, President, Science & Environmental Policy Project, Adjunct Scholar, National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas, TX 75243, US