by Kathy Read (NAPSA)—The year 2003 turned out to be a real bummer for global warming activists who still truly believe that the Earth’s temperature will warm by 8 to 10 degrees over the next 100 years and trigger an Apocalypse of famine, pestilence, destruction and death. Numeroussci- wits Global entific studies in 2008, including the most exten- Warming sive review ever of climate change NTEda) @ studies by two world-class scientists at Harvard’s Smithsonian Center, concluded that the Earth’s current warming trend is slight andreally nothing to get alarmed about. To make matters worse, Russian President Vladimir Putin—on the advice of his top economic and environmental advisers—balked at ratifying the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, thus denying its supporters of the one vote that could have putit into effect. Of the numerous studies that appear to debunk the theory of a world suddenly sweating a period of extraordinarily rapid warming, twostand tallest. The Harvard study by the leading astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon reviewed more than 102 previous studies and found the overwhelming majority debunked the idea that the Earth is in the midst of extraordinary warming. In fact, many found no sign of any warmingatall. Reinforcing Baliunas and Soon was an eye-opening finding by the University of Virginia’s William F. Ruddiman that showed humans were changing the global climate thousands of years before the industrial revolution and the invention of the internal combustion engine. His report in the scientific journal Climatic Change found that increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO,)—the main greenhouse gas that environmentalists believe causes global warming—began to occur about 8,000 years ago when humans shifted from hunters to farmers and then gradually increased as they started to cluster in cities. Scientific uncertainty surrounded the issue of climate change long before the spate of new studies emerged last year, but a U.S. media poorly trained in scientific matters seemed willingly to take the claims of eco-activists pretty much at “faith” value. The same studies caused Putin’s top scientific advisers to reexamine the entire field of cli- mate changeliterature. Their conclusion was inescapable: The Earth is in the midst of a naturally occurring, cyclical global warming trend, but the human contribution is so slight that even draconian reductions of factory and motor vehicle CO, emissions would befar too little to preventit. Yet members of the European Union, where stagnant welfare state economies are producing only modest increases in greenhouse gases, were pushing Putin to ratify the Kyoto Treaty—a pact that would have required him to cancel his plans to double Russia’s gross domestic product by the year 2010. Americans can only be thankful that the commonsense skepticism practiced by Presidents Putin and Bush and their advisers has derailed a treaty that likely would have triggered a worldwide recession in advanced nations and spelled outright disaster for poorerones. Kathy Read is the former publisher of The Wilson Quarterly, the journal of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
