NCPA Transcript: A BRIEFING ON GLOBAL WARMING

Transcript

September 29, 1997

A BRIEFING
ON GLOBAL
WARMING,
THE OTHER SIDE
OF THE STORY

Sponsored by
the National
Center for Policy
Analysis and
Competitive
Enterprise
Institute.

Briefing participants include Senator Chuck Hagel, co-sponsor of the Hagel-Byrd Senate Resolution against signing the global warming treaty in its current form; H. Sterling Burnett, environmental policy analyst for the NCPA; Jonathan Adler, director of environmental studies for CEI; Roy Spencer, NASA senior scientist; Sallie Baliunas with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Marshall Institute; Sidney Shindell, Professor Emeritus at Medical College of Wisconsin; Glenn Schleede, environmental consultant with the National Consumer Coalition; and Frank Gaffney with the Center for Security Policy.

JONATHAN ADLER
(Director of
Environmental Studies,
Competitive Enterprise
Institute):
Good morning and welcome. My name is Jonathan Adler. I'm director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On behalf of CEI and the National Center for Policy Analysis, we welcome you to today's briefing on the subject of climate change and global warming, subjects that you certainly have been hearing a lot about recently and will continue to be hearing a lot about in the coming weeks.

As I believe everyone here knows, next Monday the White House is sponsoring a briefing on climate change policy and has been hosting a series of country-wide townhall meetings, on these issues, the issue of climate change and what, if anything, should be done about it - whether or not there should be a national treaty signed this December in Kyoto.

Because this is an issue that people hear so much about, and is talked about so much; and because what they hear is often so different, at CEI and NCPA, we thought it would be helpful to bring some individuals that study various aspects of climate change or climate change policy to share their perspectives and their opinions about what we do and don't know, both about climate change itself and some of the policy options, and in the case of policy options, whether or not -- what types of policies may or may not be warranted.

Obviously, this is a subject where you could have a panel of 50 people expressing different views on 50 different subjects. The issues involving climate change are immense. Beyond the issues that are going to be discussed today, there is more information available at CEI's Web site, WWW.CEI.ORG, as well as NCPA's Web site which I'm going to forget Web address for.

STERLING BURNETT:
WWW.NCPA.ORG.

MR. ADLER:
And certainly there are many sites that discuss this issue from many perspectives.

To begin, I noted that this is a subject that people hear a lot about. For example, some of you may have noticed yesterday in "The New York Times" an article in the Week in Review section with pictures going back to 1910 of the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park; and how it's been shrinking over this century, and how some experts believe that it will disappear within the coming decades.

But yet just a week or so earlier, there was an article in the Science Times section of "The New York Times" pointing out the role that solar activity may be having on climate change and that this may be an under-represented factor in climate change.

In today's "Washington Post," we see an article about a paper just published, co-authored by one of our speakers today, on satellite data and whether or not the satellite data is accurate in its measurement of a marginal cooling trend over the past two decades. Yet a couple months ago, some people may also remember "The Washington Post" also published an article in the Outlook section saying that there is no debate and that the effects of climate change are already being felt.

And lastly, just to point out, some of you may be aware that just recently the Department of Energy released a study saying that addressing climate change and reducing emissions will cost us nothing. But yet only a few months ago, the same Department of Energy released another study saying that it will be devastating for major U.S. industries that are energy-intensive, were we to try and significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

So I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of information coming from a lot of sources, and at CEI and NCPA, we thought it would be helpful if we pulled together a panel of some experts to give you some perspective on this issue. And I would certainly recommend that for those that are involved in developing policy on this issue or reporting on this issue, that they diligently continue to research and find information from all available sources.

Now, our first speaker today to give perspective on this issue is Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska. I am very pleased to be able to introduce him today. It is an honor, as he is someone that has been intimately involved in this issue, has been one of the leaders in the Senate on this issue. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and he is chairman of the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion.

Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Senator Hagel served as president of McCarthy and Company, a privately owned investment banking firm in Omaha, Nebraska. So he has first-hand experience and knowledge about the effect that decisions made here in Washington -- has seen the effects those decisions can have upon the private sector and upon businesses.

Until joining McCarthy and Company, he was president and chief executive officer of the Private Sector Council in Washington. He also served as deputy director and chief operating officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. He was also co-founder, director and executive vice president of Vanguard Cellular Systems, a publicly traded corporation. And during the Reagan administration, he served as deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration.

And perhaps most importantly for our discussion today, he was one of the lead sponsors of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which, as I believe everyone here knows, passed 95 to nothing, something that is not very common on high-profile, controversial issues, a resolution that made clear to the Clinton administration and all those involved with the climate change issue, that the United States Senate wanted to be sure that any treaty that the United States is involved with does not compromise U.S. competitiveness and does not place an undue burden on the U.S. economy and on American consumers.

So without any further ado, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Senator Hagel.

(Applause.)

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL (R-Nebraska):
Jonathan, thank you very much. Thank you all. I appreciated an opportunity to say hello and want to thank all of you for participating, and especially your distinguished panelists today, because I suspect there is very little that will impact the future of the world -- and not just economic impact, standard of living impact, but in more global terms, national sovereignty, national security and how we move into the next century -- than this issue that you are doing a rather masterful job at helping inform, educate.

And one of the great revelations of all time last week, when it was announced, Sallie, that the sun may in fact have something to do with the environment and how the earth is warmed. And thank you for your role in that.

But you know, I have always approached this in a very direct way, direct meaning that common sense should be at the base of how we approach what this issue is about, how we debate it, how we educate each other, and how we inform on this issue. And I think that if we in fact move forward on the basis of not running away from the issue or denying the issue, but approach it forthrightly on the basis of let's seek the answers to the questions and do it honestly, intellectually honestly, then I think we can not only make converts here on this issue, but I think we can have a rather dramatic effect over the next few years on all environmental issues.

It seems to me some of us who are essentially laypersons in this business have allowed ourselves to be painted into the corner by individuals who challenge us not on the merits of the issue, but challenge us on the emotion of the issue. And if you dare challenge, if you are so arrogant to challenge certain people about global climate change or any other environmental issue, then as certain individuals have said, you are un-American, you're uninformed, you truly want to leave a dirty world to your children and your grandchildren.

And so we have kind of found ourselves in a no-win situation, I think partly as a result of how we've taken these issues on, and we must be smarter than we have been on how we forthrightly size up the issue and explore it and debate it and take it on. I think this issue will have immense consequences for further debate on all environmental issues well into the next century. I have been very, very proud to have played a small role in this so far, and this is not unlike all issues, and really great issues of our time, because I think this is a great issue of our time that deserves a great amount of debate.

And when you have these large issues, the filtering process impacts considerably, the filtering process of the media, the filtering process of the so-called elite, the intelligentsia, the environmental groups, and the rest of us -- most of us -- fall somewhere out there in outer space on these issues.

And what has impressed me about this effort has been not only the leadership that has been brought to focus on this issue, and a leadership in a way that's been, I think, the right kind of leadership because it's been focused on education, information, not running away from the issue, being honest about it. If there is a problem, let's find out what the problem is, and then let's seek a solution to that problem.

And this is a confidence-building process that many people are watching, and we want to use this opportunity on this issue to develop that confidence and trust that hopefully will win converts in the press, within environmental organizations, with the people, with Congress, worldwide, because if we can demonstrate that we have taken this issue on with a certain amount of common sense, with a certain amount of intelligence, concern for our planet, concern for our future, concern for the environment, I think we have accomplished something rather dramatically. And this won't be the last challenge that we have on these issues.

And the more we hear from people like Brian Tucker, who no matter how you describe the organization that he had headed recently and those involved, just because they disagree with those who think that they have the answers on this issue, you can't dismiss the Meteorological Association and those associated and people like Brian Tucker, who has given a lifetime of balance, of insight, of expertise in these issues and to these issues.

And so the more time we have to listen and learn and explain what we believe and ask the right question, that redounds to the benefit of what we're trying to do here.

And I would say one other thing. I was asked recently, "Well, Senator Hagel, aren't you trying to torpedo the treaty, and aren't you trying to set back global environmental issues? I mean, isn't that the objective?" And I said, "No, it is not the objective. It is absolutely not the objective. The objective is to fully understand the issue first, and then if we have a problem, deal with it."

But I have to tell you, the more time I spend on understanding this issue and every dynamic of it, whether it's economics, whether it's scientific, whether it's national sovereignty, whether it's national defense, any perspective, it becomes clearer and clearer to me, this would be a disastrous course of action to take for this country and the world if we were to move forward and sign a treaty in Kyoto, Japan, based on the Berlin Mandate, based on the requisites of that Berlin Mandate, it would be a disaster, the consequences of which we have no idea and can't measure in any way, if we would go forward with this.

I surely do not want to embarrass the president of the United States, nor do any of my colleagues. My colleagues and I do not want to embarrass this country nor this administration nor our efforts to do the right thing with the environment.

But what we wish to do, what we have a constitutional obligation to do, is to in fact render advice and consent to the president of the United States on this treaty and other treaties, this course of action and all courses of action, because this is not a Republican-Democrat issue. This is not a House/Senate versus executive issue. This is an issue that affects us all, and we should all engage in this debate and be informed about the issues dominating this debate.

So again, I very much appreciate what you all do, the forums that you all have allowed us to develop and allowed eminent panelists like you have here this morning to be able to take the issue, and dissect that issue so that we all can understand the issue better from all the perspectives that your panelists will do today. That's the way we should debate in a free society. And that's what you've been able to do, and for some of us who were engaged in this a little bit, we're grateful for that.

As I think you know, here in the Senate, at least, we're going to continue to stay very focused. Senator Murkowski has a hearing tomorrow in his Energy Committee. I will hold another hearing, I believe next week, in my subcommittee, as a matter of fact, in this room. We'll continue to engage the United States Senate and the Congress. As you all know, Speaker Gingrich has just gone forward with putting together a House observer team like we have as a result of the Byrd-Hagel resolution here in the Senate, an observer group. So I think that enlarges the process to some extent and helps inform our congressmen from at least their perspective on what this issue is about and allows them to participate because we want their participation.

So again, I'm grateful for your leadership on this and for your help. And I'm sure we'll have another opportunity to say hello. And when I see Frank Gaffney walk in, I always know it's time to leave, because Frank's going to send a missile.

(Laughter.)

But I want to say one thing about what Frank's doing. Part of this debate is truly about national defense. That's an area that gets overlooked in this debate. Frank has developed that very well and will continue to develop it very well. But I, for example, was with Secretary Cohen for breakfast Friday morning, and we talked about a lot of things. And some of you may know that Senator Jim Inhofe and I sent a letter to Secretary Cohen based on what an undersecretary of Defense had said about what an executive order coming out of the White House to all of government would do to our national defense readiness and capabilities all the other dynamics of national defense if we, through an executive order started to mandate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

I think Senator Inhofe is going to hold a hearing on that. I am one, I suspect, among many who would be very intrigued to understand what kind of predicament would that put our American military capability and readiness in if we start taking our national security interests and subjecting to them environmental interests.

Now, when that happens, ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem; we have a major problem. And this is going to be an issue that we are going to go after in a lot more detail than we have. And the second part of that, which we're going to talk more about and we have talked some about, is national sovereignty. When you subject American industry and business and jobs and all dynamics of our society, of our culture, of our country, of our government to international bodies with awesome powers, the power to dictate industries being shut down, levying fines, we've crossed another line here. We have crossed another line.

And that may be, of all the problems that we have, that may be the most significant and severe. So we have yet to engage in some of the issues that are, in my opinion, just as important as the economics of this issue and the other issues, but yet we still -- we still -- have not found solid science to work from. That is still the most elusive piece, which should be the most solid and foundational piece to any decision we make on any of these issues.

I know you'll find all the answers today and we'll look forward to those. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. ADLER:
Thanks, Senator Hagel, again for making time and being able to be here today. I do hope we could -- or would like to think we could come up with all the answers today. I think that might be a pretty large mandate for any panel on this subject, particularly any single panel.

Senator Hagel mentioned, one of the key elements of this issue is the science and what the science does say and what it doesn't say. And as I noted, that is something we see a lot of differing views on in the media. And kind of to start today off, we have asked Dr. Roy Spencer, who is a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to give his view of kind of where we are, of what the science does say and what it doesn't say, what we can say with certainty about either empirical data about the climate or about global circulation models upon climate predictions are always -- are often based.

Dr. Spencer directs the research and new development and application of satellite passive microwave remote sensing techniques for measuring global temperature, water vapor and precipitation. And as I believe I noted this morning, in today's "Washington Post," there is a note about a recent paper that he co-authored about the satellite measurement of temperature.

Dr. Spencer received the American Meteorological Society's 1966 (sic) Special Award for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work and is a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.

One final note I would make is that Dr. Spencer is here going to present his views as a scientist as actively involved in researching climate-related issues and that these views are not necessarily, or should not be taken to reflect the, quote, unquote, "official" views of NASA or any other government entity. They are the views of a researcher that's actively involved in researching these issues. Dr. Spencer.

ROY SPENCER
(Senior Scientist,
NASA):
Thank you, Jonathan. Please excuse me for sitting while I do this presentation, but I have to be close to the mike, I'm told. I don't know how well everyone can see these charts with the lights on, but we'll do the best we can.

As you see, there I've said, "Some Personal Views and Perspectives on Climate Science." And it's really important when you start asking for scientific facts that you recognize that more than just the facts affect a scientist's judgment, especially when we deal with an issue that has certain philosophical or world view implications. So here I've listed some of the potential influences on a scientist's judgment, in no particular order, although I did put "Search for the Truth" at the top, since we want to -- scientists want to make ourselves look reasonably good in front of the public.

But also there are other things which affect scientists' judgment. These things include the quest for research funding. We also develop and defend pet theories. Once we've developed a theory, we don't let it go very easily. There is also a desire to save the earth. Science community peer pressure -- now, this is one that's fairly important because scientists will tend to band together, and of course all areas of society these days are becoming very detailed -- what's the word I'm looking for? We specialize.

We specialize in all areas of society, and that's true in the sciences as well, so that there are only a few people in the world, really, that have a total view of global warming and all of the component parts of the theory in order for it to be a valid theory. But all the other scientists, the vast majority of climate scientists are all working on individual pieces of the whole global warming puzzle.

So what you hear when you hear people's views on global warming, or scientists' views in the newspaper or on TV, is generally spokespersons that have taken it upon themselves to be spokespersons, to take the big picture view, when in fact the vast majority of the scientists really don't have the big picture view and don't go along with what these people that interface with the media decide is important and the conclusions they make.

So we tend to band together as scientists and figure, well, the people that have the big picture view, that have looked at all of the elements must know what they're talking about. So there is peer pressure within the community to band together and agree with those that are interfacing with the media.

Of course, there's media interest and influence. Typically, people's answers and the certainty with which they provide those answers change when the media is present. And also world view. This is an issue that Dr. Richard Lindzen has testified about or has mentioned in his testimony that I think is very important.

Ultimately, the global warming issue comes down to the basic, almost philosophical issue of whether the earth is very sensitive to perturbations. That is, when it's influenced by anything, when the climate system is influenced by anything, does it tend to deviate away from a normal state; is it very sensitive? Or is it very insensitive? And my view is that it's relatively insensitive.

In fact, I'm not here to tell you today that I don't think global warming is a problem. I think it's a problem that's worthy of study, but I think we are still at a point where we don't have enough knowledge about how the climate system works to give good quantitative estimates of what global warming is going to be in the next century. This is a very long time-scale phenomenon. It's not something that we have to do something about right now. It's something that is going to occur over a very long period of time. We're not sure about its magnitude yet.

But I thought I'd list some of the things that we know. What do we know? In fact, I was tempted to title this slide, "What do we know for sure?" But then I thought, well, in science there really isn't anything we know for sure. We know that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing. In fact, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to give everyone a little meteorology lesson, but I think it will help you to better understand this issue of global warming.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It doesn't affect solar radiation, which heats the earth. It affects infrared radiation, which goes out away from the earth and cools the earth. Infrared radiation is the radiation you feel, say, from a fireplace at a distance. For all the solar radiation that comes into the earth, an equal amount has to escape from the earth in order for the temperature to remain constant. Okay?

Right now, we've put enough CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to where we have increased the infrared trapping ability of the atmosphere by about 1 percent, 1 percent above what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

Now, that certainly sounds like something that is worthy of study and might change climate in a discernible way; but the next thing you have to recognize is that carbon-dioxide, the major contributor to supposed global warming, carbon-dioxide is not the main greenhouse gas. About 95 percent of the earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, which unlike carbon-dioxide is variable. Its amount varies a lot in space and time. Okay? Carbon-dioxide is a well-mixed gas. It's uniformly mixed throughout the atmosphere, but 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is water vapor, and that gas varies quite a bit.

Now, back in the '60s, when global warming theory first got some of the serious first scientific articles on the issue, it was mainly scientists that knew physics and radiation and didn't know much about the weather that were advancing catastrophic theories of global warming. And it's because they were just looking at it from a radiation point of view. You've got sunlight coming in, you've got infrared radiation going out cooling the earth. Those two have to balance, but we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping more radiation. The planet should heat up.

Well, the trouble is, and in fact, this misconception still occurs today in some scientific papers, is that for the most part, even though the earth itself is in radiation balance, the surface -- I should say the earth as a whole is in radiation balance -- the surface of the earth is way out of radiation balance. The temperature we experience here at the earth outside today isn't the result of radiation balance. It's more the result of evaporation, water and convection.

And this is where I like to use this diagram. It may be a little difficult to see. The point is that that wind that you feel outside today, every puff of wind on the earth, every raindrop that falls is because the earth is doing its first job, which is to get rid of excess heat. The atmosphere creates wind, forms clouds and rain all in an effort to move heat from areas where there's excess heat building up to areas where there's a deficit of heat. Now, that applies both horizontally and vertically. And typically, the atmosphere forms circulation cells like this, where water is evaporated from the surface, which cools the surface greatly. If it weren't for water, the average surface temperature of the earth would be about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

That water is carried up -- water vapor is carried up. It forms clouds, rain falls out. That cloud material then goes way up in the upper troposphere and re-evaporates and moistens the upper troposphere. We've learned through recent research that this is the area that seems to be the most important for controlling climate, this area up here that has very little water vapor in it, because all you have to do is change that clear-air water vapor by a little bit, and you change the earth's ability to cool itself by a lot.

Now, how is it that the earth can go through big fluctuations in temperature -- this shows our satellite temperature record of the global average temperature since 1979 on a monthly basis. The earth goes through temperature extremes, up and down and up and down. Associated with these are big changes in the water vapor content of the atmosphere. This is the greenhouse gas that dominates the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.

How is it that the earth can go through these huge fluctuations and not run off into a hot box, a super-greenhouse effect where we all burn up or something, like Venus? And basically, it comes down to whether there are negative feedbacks in the system which always bring the temperature back into equilibrium, in other words, some force will cause cooling and it will -- other feedbacks will come into the system and cause cloudiness to change or water vapor or something, which will cause it to shoot back towards the opposite, and you get this oscillation of temperature. That is a sign of negative feedbacks in the system.

Early climate models had, I would say, mostly positive feedbacks, and that's where we had our early estimates of catastrophic global warming is you put a perturbation into the earth's system, like increasing CO2, and the temperature just keeps going up. Now, as these general circulation models, or GCMs, improve and they put more and more physics into them that are more and more realistic, we get lower and lower estimates of global warming.

So I've already covered a couple of these points at the bottom, that the climate system goes through natural fluctuations. I mean, the climate does vary, and it's not because of us. And that's what makes it hard to see the human influence on climate yet. I don't think we have reached the point yet where we have seen unequivocally the human influence on climate, except maybe in the urban environment. You know, where we've built big cities, we do have a heat island effect.

And finally, I would argue that the real climate system is more stable than these general circulation models, these GCMs.

One of the recent findings that we've made on this issue of water vapor and its dominating effect on the greenhouse effect of the earth -- this shows tropical humidity distributions, and it's a little hard to see, I guess, with all these lights on. But if you look down here, here's Australia and India and Africa. These clear areas are areas where the humidity in the free troposphere, and this is an altitude of about 6 to 12 kilometers, averages 10 percent in relative humidity or less.

Now, you usually think of the tropics as being very moist. That's down near the surface. As you go up in the atmosphere, the air becomes very dry. That sunny tropical atmosphere that you see, that blue sky, there's very little water vapor up there. The lower the water vapor amount up there, potentially the more sensitive the earth's system is to changes because if the air is very dry, all you have to change is the humidity. Change the humidity by a little bit and you really change the greenhouse effect.

And yet the earth's climate system is very stable, and I believe that's evidence for the existence of negative feedbacks, which always pull the system back into equilibrium.

Now, I know that a lot of this is complicated. Unfortunately, the earth's system is complicated; the climate system is complicated. And unfortunately, some decisions, policy decisions are going to have to be made based on a lot of uncertainty. I just want to warn you that scientists will be arguing as much from a lack of evidence as they will be from evidence. They'll be arguing from their world view, and I've betrayed mine to some extent here, this belief that the earth is fairly stable to perturbations.

So you need to take all these things into consideration when you're evaluating the state of climate science, because there's still a lot we don't know about the climate system. And I guess I'll just wrap up my presentation with that.

(Applause.)

MR. ADLER:
Thank you, Dr. Spencer. One issue that has gotten a lot of attention recently, particularly in last week's "New York Times" Science Times section is the question of whether or not the sun and changes in solar output may be affecting the climate. And some folks would say, you know, well, of course the sun has something to do with the fact that the earth is warm. But there are a lot of questions about whether or not changes in the sun and changes in the sun's output have an effect on temperatures on planet earth.

One person who's been very involved in that, looking at that question, is Dr. Sallie Baliunas. She is senior staff physicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. She serves as senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute here in Washington and chairs the institute's science advisory board. She is also visiting professor at Tennessee State University. Her awards include the Newton-Lacy-Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Petr Beckmann Award for Scientific Freedom and the Bok Prize from Harvard University.

She has written over 200 scientific research articles. In 1991, "Discover" magazine profiled her as one of America's outstanding women scientists. And this is something that I find very fascinating I'll probably want to ask her about after the program. She is apparently the technical consultant for a new science fiction television series, Gene Rodenberry's "Earth: Final Conflict," which begins airing this year.

And she received her MA and Ph.D. degrees in astrophysics from Harvard University. Dr. Baliunas.

SALLIE BALIUNAS
(Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for
Astrophysics/Marshall
Institute):
I want to make three points for you, briefly. The first one will be on what the computer predictions say will happen in the Arctic and its relevance to ice melting and sea level rise and what the data say in comparison to the models. The second point we'll discuss briefly is one natural factor of possible climate change, that is, changes in the brightness of the sun. And the third point is to bring out the hazards of ignoring natural climate changes, which have occurred and will continue to occur, while focusing on a distant and more remote human effect on the climate.

How do we know the computer forecasts of the climate 100 years into the future are believable? Now, the rules of science give us clear guidance on how to test this or any other hypothesis. The Nobel Laureate Prize winner in physics, Richard Feynman, reminds us of the following:

"The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth."

So we start by noting, in testing the global warming models, that the increase in greenhouse gases from human activities over the last 100 years, added all together, are equivalent to a 50 percent increase in carbon-dioxide alone. This is halfway to the benchmark of doubling of effective carbon-dioxide that the IPCC predictions and other computer models deal with.

The 50 percent effective increase in carbon-dioxide gives us a good way to test the accuracy of the climate forecasts because we simply measure the climate's response to the increase in greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that has already taken place.

Now, one of the very most stringent tests of the validity of the computer simulations of the climate of the earth is based on records from the Arctic. Now, according to the computer forecasts, the polar areas are very sensitive to global warming. The forecasts say that the polar region should have warmed enough in the last 50 to 100 years to begin melting polar ice. Melting the polar ice would then produce a positive feedback that would amplify any warming already present. The reason is that ice reflects sunlight and helps keep the polar regions cold, but as the temperature rises and the ice melts, the bare ground or the sea underneath would absorb more of the sun's energy and thus magnify the warming.

Now, according to the computer simulations, an average warming of about 1 to 4 degrees Centigrade annually is projected to have already occurred in the last 50 years in the latitude band of 60 to 90 degrees North because of recent increases in the greenhouses gases and the model's expectations of amplified Arctic warming.

And in this first chart, we show the balloon radiosonde measurements that start back in the mid-1950s and also one of the predictions for warming. So the temperature measurements show that there has been no net warming over the past several decades, and while I haven't shown it, this is especially true in the winter, which is the season projected by the computer simulations to have the fastest increased temperature of all. And in fact, all the observational information in the literature confirms this, whether we look at the more sparsely situated surface measurements or the balloon measurements or the satellite measurements of Dr. Spencer's.

The greenhouse-induced warming just has not been detectable in the Arctic either in the troposphere or at the surface over this last -- this 40-year period. So on the average, the temperature has not risen in the north polar region. And in the test of the Arctic temperature record, the computer forecasts exaggerate the warming that should have already occurred due to the present accumulation of the minor greenhouse gases by a large amount. The exaggeration of the projections above reality is more than a factor of 10.

And if the computer simulations are exaggerating the warming that should have already occurred, presumably they are also exaggerating the warming that should be occurring in the future.

Now, I chose this example of testing the models to also talk about a related projection of severe and rapid Arctic warming that would then produce the polar ice to melt and cause rapid sea level rise. First notice that there has been no warming in the Arctic.

Now, remember, the only amount of flooding from polar ice would come from ice that is not already floating in the sea. And often the west Antarctic ice sheet is pictured as the archetype for landlocked ice that will soon and rapidly melt and cause severe flooding as the sea level rises. But such claims have ignored the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics. A recent article in "Science" magazine explains that the ice sheet is so stable that the heat of climate warming, either natural or human-made, would take millennia to flow through the ice to the underlying rock bed carrying the ice.

And the author of that article says: "It would be difficult to see how climate warming could trigger a collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet in the next century or two."

<AUDIO BREAK>

-- sea level rise estimates by the year 2100 have been lowering. They're now down to under a foot or so, and some modelers even predict on the behavior of ice in the high-latitude regions a decline in sea level with global warming as more snow at high latitudes becomes landlocked on inland mountains and then gets removed from ocean. So sea levels would drop in some models.

The computer forecasts exaggerate the greenhouse warming by a large factor, but what is the maximum amount of warming due to increased greenhouse gases that can be expected to occur if we correct the exaggerated forecasts to the limits allowed by the actual temperature measurements, that is, the response of the earth?

The answer is that the corrected warming in the next century at the present rates of increase in greenhouse gases will be less than a few tenths of a degree Centigrade. Spread over a century, that will be insignificant compared to the natural variability of the climate.

Now, as for the stories we read in the newspaper on increased hurricanes, increased blizzards, destructive rainfall, butterfly extinctions, glaciers melting in Glacier National Park, these are hyperbolic stories which have no scientific basis in the popular media. In fact, I drew up the temperature from a colleague of the summertime temperatures in Glacier National Park over the last -- well, these start 1895 -- last hundred years, and there's been no summertime warming in the Glacier National Park that would cause those glaciers to retreat. Of course, the scientific issue is that glaciers respond not just to temperature, but to other effects as well.

Now, the most important feature of the temperature record of the last 100 years is that most of the warming occurred before about 1940. But most of the greenhouse gases from human activities entered the atmosphere after 1940. That means most of the temperature rise of the last 100 years that occurred early in the century did not come from greenhouse gas activities because it came before these gases existed in the atmosphere. So the recent increase greenhouse gases cannot be the cause of the half-degree Centigrade warming or so that occurred early in the 20th century. Most of this warming must have been natural.

Now, those natural changes must be understood in order to make an accurate assessment of the effect of human influences that would be added to the natural changes. Many of the natural changes of the climate system are poorly understood and certainly are poorly modeled by the computer simulations.

And incomplete knowledge is certainly the case for one possible cause of global climate change, variations in the brightness of the sun. You probably know that the magnetism of the sun changes dramatically every 11 years or so. As it does, NASA satellites have told us that the sun brightens and fades in step with the changes in surface magnetism. This chart goes back 240 years and shows two different records, a record of the Northern Hemisphere land temperature of the earth -- there are no global temperatures that go back that far -- but also changes in the sun's magnetism, which is a marker for the brightness change.

Now, you can see these two are highly correlated, and they suggest that brightness changes of the sun are one of the causes of temperature changes of the earth.

Now, every few centuries or so, the sun's magnetism drops to very low levels for several decades. One example is the very low level of sun's magnetism during the 17th century, which pre-dates this chart. This fainter sun likely helped to cause a very cold climate period called the Little Ice Age, when the average global temperature was about 1 degree Centigrade cooler than today. Now, note that that isn't a major Ice Age. It's called the Little Ice Age, which is somewhat confusing in its name.

And the final graph shows more quantitative records of the sun's magnetism going back over millennia that come from measurements of radio-carbon, that is, carbon-14 from tree rings, and beryllium-10 in ice core samples. These isotope records confirm the occurrence of the monder minimum every few centuries, for example, in the 13th, 15th and 17th centuries, those low dips in the curve, but also occasional grand magnetic maxima of the sun. Now, during the magnetically low periods, the sun should dim compared to the magnetically high intervals, when the sun should brighten.

The brightness changes have to be estimated from computer models, and they're thought to be small, perhaps a few tenths percent or so, during these large swings in magnetism. But those tiny changes added up over decades are enough to explain global temperature swings on the order of 1 to 2 degrees Centigrade, depending on how sensitive you believe the climate to be.

Now, the influence of the sun on the climate has also been seen in indirect records of temperature change going back 5,000 and 10,000 years. In the last 5,000 years, six out of seven coolings of about 1 or 2 degrees Centigrade correspond to long-term lulls in the solar magnetism. Records from Scandinavia, a more limited region, over the last 10,000 years, find 17 out of 19 coolings that are coincident with major drops in the sun's magnetism.

As for the present time, simulations of the earth's climate over the last 100 years indicate that changes of several tenths of 1 percent sustained over several decades does explain at least half the variance in the temperature record, but here I must emphasize that we are very ignorant of the exact mechanism of the sun's changes and what the response of the climate system to them would be.

Now, the past climate is an interesting indicator of the potential for warming catastrophes. Over the last 1,000 years or so, some climate change has tended to follow the changes in solar magnetism, but not solely, and such changes have had a profound effect on human health and the environment. Yet the knowledge of the physics of such natural causes of climate change is lacking.

An interesting case study on the consequences of natural change is Europe over the past millennium. First to set the stage, Europe experienced its warmest temperatures in the last 2,000 years in the 10th to 12th centuries, when the sun was at sustained high levels of magnetism, higher than today's. This period was called the medieval climate optimum, and vineyards flourished in Britain. Additionally, it was a time of not only exploration, but cathedral, university and town building.

But by the 13th century, the temperature was cooling Northern Europe. The prolonged winters and cold temperatures culminated in the Little Ice Age that lasted until the late 1800s, very recently. Although the global average temperature was only 1 degree Centigrade cooler than today, high latitude regions such as the North Sea were about 5 degrees Centigrade cooler than average. The harshest intervals were coincident with the sun's lulls in magnetism in the 13th, 15th and 17th centuries. As a result of the cooling, the severity and frequency of storms and sea flooding increased dramatically.

Note that increased havoc in the climate record is closely linked, in the climate of the last thousand years, to cooler rather than warmer temperatures, which suggests that a little bit of global warming could mean less storm destruction.

The sudden deterioration of the climate in the late Middle Ages following the decline in solar magnetism was devastating to pre-industrial Europe and is a tragic story of the environmental and human costs of cold global temperatures and the lack of technology to cope with the cold. For example, frequent shortened growing seasons of the 14th century produced severe famines and deaths from starvation and disease. Cannibalism was reported even in Western Europe. The life expectancy decreased by 10 years, from about 48 to 38 years.

And of course, climate scientist Hubert Lamb has noted that it's probably not a coincidence, but part of a series of events, linking a disastrous flood in China in 1331 and 1332, which killed 7 million people and has to be the worst weather disaster in history, and that is linked to subsequent epidemics of the bubonic plague both in China and Europe. And during the cold in Europe and China in the 14th century, the population was cut in half between bubonic plague and war.

Storminess increased in these cold intervals as well, and the climate history suggests that times of global cooling, not warming, are greater calamities. Storms back in the 17th century Little Ice Age were about three times more disastrous than floods in the 20th century.

The point is that climate change is a natural feature of the earth's environment and has done so in the past and will continue in the future to have a great impact on humankind. The maximum amount of warming expected by correcting the exaggerated computer forecasts is a few tenths of a degree Centigrade. Spread over a century, that change will be insignificant compared to natural swings in the climate.

And there are much greater upheavals in the climate as well. For example, at the end of the last ice age, when the temperature in Greenland rose 20 degrees Centigrade, from ice age to near current conditions, in less than 50 years.

Now, we've been lucky compared to that period at the end of the last ice age, the Holocene. It has been relatively warm and stable, with global temperatures varying less than a few degrees Centigrade. However, even during the relative calm, the historical record shows sometimes severe consequences from modest climate variability, especially at the edges of the climate zones. Natural disasters from the climate are seen from human history to be important factors for policy planning. Considering how poorly the models perform, one must first develop better climate science before embarking on extremely costly mitigation whose efficacy for mitigation is slight. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. ADLER:
Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Baliunas. Now, Dr. Baliunas noted, one of the primary reasons climate change is such a concern is because changes in the climate certainly affect humanity, certainly have affected humanity throughout history and will continue to do so.

One possible impact that has been discussed and that has certainly received a fair amount of media attention is the potential impact that climate could have on changes in disease, in particular, concerns that if the earth warms, that tropical diseases will migrate northward and that populations will be exposed to -- human populations will be exposed to diseases that they are unprepared for. Diseases like malaria and the like will increase.

This is obviously a very real concern, and to discuss this concern, we have with us today Dr. Sidney Shindell, who is professor emeritus in the Department of Preventative Medicine, the Medical College of Wisconsin.

He has a CV that is too voluminous to go through in total, but let me just give some of the highlights. He holds his BS from Yale University, his MD from the Long Island College of Medicine and his LLB from George Washington University. He has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and the Public Health Service. In the past year, he is the recipient of the Frank L. Babbitt Memorial Award given by the SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn and the recipient of the 50-Year Recognition Award of the Wisconsin State Medical Society.

Currently, he is working on a panel that is being coordinated by the American Council on Science and Health, looking at the question of whether or not climate change will have a significant impact on disease in the United States and around the world. Dr. Shindell.

SIDNEY SHINDELL
(Professor Emeritus,
Medical College
of Wisconsin):
Thank you very much. I think that to tell you why I'm really here is because I've spent virtually my entire professional career trying to keep people from being sick rather than trying to treat them after they are.

And my first job after my internship was to work with the Centers for Disease Control on the very monumental task of keeping South Pacific malaria out of this country at the end of World War II. We succeeded. And the way we succeeded was to get rid of the malaria that we had so that the new malaria could not get a foothold.

Now, my work subsequently took me to a substantial portion of the world, and I've lived and worked in five other countries. I've been to 35 countries all told. My work took me to Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East initially, then to the Caribbean, Central Africa and the Pacific Rim, and then primarily Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and of course China and Japan.

Now, in all of these places, disease patterns of course differ, and in many, I'm sorry to say, insufficient efforts are made -- were made and are made -- to control what we would term preventable diseases. Whether this happens through choice or because of lack of sufficient resources is not something I can address adequately at this brief presentation, but both must be considered when we project the possible effects of climate change should global warming occur.

Now, let me tell you also, I'm not going to discuss whether global warming will occur. I will just say, if it does, these are the kinds of things we ought to look for.

First of all, though, there are only six things that one can do, or one needs to do to prevent preventable disease, and they're simple. First, a safe water supply. And it's amazing to me how little of this earth has a safe water supply for its population. It is unquestionably the most precious commodity in the whole world. And this entails, of course, not simply a sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of your specific population, but adequate sewage treatment, avoidance of dangerous contaminants, things like that. And if we want to leave anything to our children and grandchildren, it's got to be safe water.

Two, we have to provide adequate nutrition. This entails, of course, having sufficient foodstuffs available to provide nutrients needed for the feeding of a population of a specific area. And I think we could have a long discussion about, you know, how many people can the earth feed safely, adequately, even under the current situation? I won't get into that. At the moment, we do know that there are many hundreds of thousands of people in various parts of the world who are dying because there is insufficient food for them. Now, whether it's because we don't distribute it appropriately is not what I want to get into.

The third thing is what we have to do is control the disease-bearing insects, as we did when we controlled malaria in this country. Those specific mosquitoes that carry malaria and the specific mosquitoes -- or I'm sorry, insects that are contaminating food are the most important and most common disease carriers in all parts of the world.

Then we have to provide for basic medical services, especially at the point of delivery, the pre- and postnatal periods and the time of the birth of a new baby. When I first got to Iran, for example, many years ago, before we introduced some of our program, the chance of a child born there then was 50-50 to get to age 5. In one year's time, we could get them up to about 95 percent of the expected level in the United States. It can be done if we put our resources in the right place.

Five, you have to immunize the children against the communicable diseases that are common in childhood and that do kill people, and the adults against infectious diseases that they may be exposed to.

And then lastly, we need to control the dangerous substances, like narcotics and tobacco. And it's a study -- it's a whole, you know, discussion in itself. But the use of cigarettes alone are estimated to be associated with about a third of all cancers, and it increases heart disease by at least 50 percent.

What would be the effect of global warming on these six items? Well, global warming would be expected to affect the availability of water, the ability to grow food, and it would be expected to modify the habitats of some of the disease-bearing insects. It could also affect the economy of some countries that currently enable their population to obtain the central medical services and are associated with, say, childbirth and immunization protection against some diseases.

What then should we be doing in anticipation of global warming? The American Council on Science and Health has recently prepared a detailed analysis of the global climate change and human health on the assumption that it is going to change. And those who wish to obtain a copy can see me after. I have some forms that you can send in to ACSH, and the document will be out very, very shortly. I have a draft of it with me, and it should be done next week.

Basically, what we're saying, though, is that nearly all of the potential adverse health effects of the projected climate change are significant real life problems today that have long persisted under stable climatic conditions. Bolstering efforts to eliminate or alleviate such problems would both decrease the current incidence of premature death and facilitate dealing with the health risks of any future climate change that might occur.

Secondly, policies that weaken economies tend to weaken public health programs. Thus, it is likely that implementation of such policies would, A, increase the risk of premature death, and B, exacerbate any adverse health effects of a future climate change.

What then is the optimal policy for dealing with hypothetical adverse health effects of projected human-induced climate change? The conclusions I will be presenting are those of the ACSH based on the working assumption that the predictions of the intergovernmental panel on climate change concerning the magnitude of the change and the adverse effects are correct.

And these are these. The global burden of disease is formidable. Well understood public health measures could significantly decrease the current incidence of premature death, but resources for applying these measures are currently inadequate. Thus, work toward increasing these resources is prudent, regardless of the prospect for climate change.

Second, measures to adapt economies, health care systems and living conditions to existing and foreseeable challenges to human health, such as infectious diseases, undernourishment, weather disasters, should be the focus of any policy concerning climate change and human health.

And then lastly, the optimal approach for dealing with the prospect of climate change would include improvement of health infrastructures and exclude any measures that would limit public health resources.

Now, with the above in mind, dealing with current and future public health problems should include: increased investment in improved drinking water and sanitation, in developing countries especially, of course; increased investment in the control of organisms that cause and spread disease, especially in developing countries; increased investment in improving food production and distribution in developing countries; increased investment in systems of emergency responses to extreme weather events; increased investment in the economic and health infrastructure of developing countries to increase access to medical services; increased investment in medical research regarding additional vaccines against infectious diseases; and then increased investment in research regarding energy technologies that entail low greenhouse gas emissions; and finally, further research on the potential health effects of projected climate changes in specific geographic areas.

As I said before, ACSH has a document that expands extensively on my limited remarks, and I'd be happy to assist you in obtaining a copy. I hope that what I have presented here has been helpful, and I'd be happy to answer any questions when we get to the question and answer period. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. ADLER:
Thank you, Dr. Shindell. I think one point that Dr. Shindell mentioned which I think everyone always needs to keep in mind in policy discussions about climate changes is the point that he made that insofar as mitigation policies reduce our economic well-being, that does have effects throughout the economy and can affect, for example, the availability of resources for medical care and the like. And CEI will this fall be publishing a study that looks at that specific question and tries to quantify and detail what are some of the public health implications of policies that do have as a result reducing economic growth and economic activity.

Our next speaker is going to discuss some of the potential economic impacts of climate change policy, and this is an issue, as I mentioned before, about which there are many differing views. The Department of Energy, as I noted, has itself published studies on different sides of this issue in the past year alone. Our next speaker to address some of these concerns is Glenn Schleede, who is president of Energy Market and Policy Analysis, Incorporated, a consulting practice providing analysis, advice and assistance to organizations in industry and government on energy and related environmental and economic matters.

Prior to forming EMPA, Mr. Schleede was vice president of New England Electric System and president of New England Energy, Incorporated. He also was executive associate director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and senior vice president of the National Coal Association and associate director for energy and science of the White House Domestic Council.

Most recently, on behalf of the National Consumer Coalition, he did an analysis looking at the predicted economic impact for the state of Texas of policies to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. And he'll be discussing some of those findings and also the question of whether or not improvements in energy efficiency and the like can be seen as a cost-effective fix to climate change problems.

GLENN SCHLEEDE (Environmental
Consultant,
National Consumer Coalition):
Thank you very much for coming this morning, and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this distinguished panel.

I am here to talk a little bit about the findings in a paper that I completed recently for the National Consumer Coalition. I believe there are copies of this out on the table. If not, if you'd give me your card later, I'd be happy to give you a copy. Unfortunately, I didn't listen very well when the instructions were given, so I didn't bring my copies of my overheads, and they may be rather difficult to see.

But basically, I want to make two comments about this paper on the impact of potential greenhouse gas emission limits on the people and the economy of Texas.

First, the objective of the analysis was to identify the impact of potential emission limits on real people, real families, real organizations, and real communities. As those of you who sit in Washington know and those of you who live outside of Washington probably often suspect, people sitting here often seem not to understand the impact of their decisions on real people outside the beltway, most of whom make a lot less money than they do, who will bear the costs of the decisions that are made here and don't enjoy a lot of the benefits that those of us who live in the Washington area do, like for example, a modern mass transit system paid for largely by the taxpayers throughout the country.

It's still the case, though things are gradually improving, I think, and despite the best efforts and the work of the National Consumer Coalition and the other sponsors of this event, that consumers and taxpayers continue to be the people who are least represented in official Washington, unfortunately.

Now, turning to the study, and I'm not going to say a lot about it, but I will make a few points. First of all, the basic approach was to rely on official government data. Second, to use arithmetic, not sophisticated models. There have been a lot of economic analyses done using macro-economic models. They've been done very well and the conclusions are good, but in this case, we wanted to see what's the real impact on real people out there in the real world.

And what was done here was to calculate the cost of alternative actions that have been considered by the Clinton-Gore administration or by various environmental groups. I should add quickly here, these are not proposals that are necessarily on the table at this time. The administration has been very careful not to divulge what it really will propose or what it will accept in the negotiations in Kyoto. And there's good reason for not disclosing that in advance, because the impacts of those proposals could be rather significant and they might never be made or agreed to if they were well understood.

So the approach here was to try to provide some information that would help people understand the impacts of these proposals that have been considered in the past and are likely to be seen again in the future. Even if these specific proposals that were looked at in the study are not made, other actions that would be necessary to reduce greenhouse gases are going to have similar kinds of effects.

We just want to keep in mind here the magnitude of what is being discussed. Just looking at the carbon-dioxide emissions, one of the proposals that is on the table is to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2010. And this, I should point out, is one of the least ambitious proposals that are on the table. If you look at what European countries have proposed, they're much more severe than this.

But just to reduce CO2 levels to 1990 levels would mean a 350-million metric ton reduction in carbon by 2010, which is a 20 percent reduction from the levels projected at that time. You would have a 427-million metric ton reduction by 2015 for a 24 percent reduction from projected levels. Those are just to get back to 1990 levels.

If you took some of the more ambitious proposals, like cutting below the 1990 levels, then of course the numbers go up, the percentages go up. And remember, much of this CO2 that is of concern comes from burning fossil-based fuels. We have to think in terms of how much coal would we have to stop using, how much gasoline would we have to stop using, how much natural gas would we have to stop using in order to get to reductions like this?

This next chart is merely a graph to show what the implications are of a 10 percent reduction out in the year 2010 and 2015, and I won't spend a lot of time on that. Basically, the study points out that there would have to be a significant reduction, in the case of Texas, in the coal, oil and natural gas that's used to produce electricity. Texas relies on those three fossil fuels for 85 percent of the energy it uses to produce electricity.

Obviously, that means a -- if you were to tax that energy that's used there, that's going to push up electricity rates. If you push up electricity rates, that hits every home, business, organization in the country, and affects schools, government organizations. Schools, of course, will have to pay more money. That means more taxes to pay for the schools or reductions in services.

Another idea that's often around is a gasoline tax, and there are numbers in the paper that show what the impact of that would be. But a tax on gasoline would, even at the 50-cent level that's been quite popular in a lot of discussions, mean $5 billion for Texas, because think in terms of that tax on gasoline, if it were to be imposed, means dollars coming out of every community across the country. If you just think in terms of a small community of 500 people, it costs $142,000 a year. And what does that mean for that small community? That means $142,000 less is spent in grocery stores, clothing stores, to pay for medical care, to pay for housing, education, or all the other things that people normally want to spend their money on.

The statewide average annual earnings in Texas is around $27,000. That basically means, if that were the average salary in a small community, that's five jobs that have just disappeared. Chances are that the salaries are less than that in small communities, so it's maybe seven or eight jobs that have just gone out the door headed for Washington.

The dollar outflow for any of these taxes is huge. You undoubtedly hear that don't worry about that, we will recycle that money and it'll all come back to you. And if you believe that, we'll think of something else that we can tell you.

Now, just look at the costs of four of the tax alternatives. A 50-cent-per-gallon motor fuel tax would per capita basis in the state of Texas cost $287 per person per year for an average household with 2.75 people. I've never met one of those .75 people, but it's a useful number. Now we're up to $788,000, and you can see the other numbers on the list.

Something I'd like to point out to you here is if you had a -- it's not really visible on the chart, but in the per-average household numbers, they range on this chart from $490 to $788 per year. That's for an average household. So if you take someone above average, if you take a couple with one child, the numbers are going to be slightly higher than this.

Remember that the Congress just has been very proud of itself for giving a $500-per-child tax credit. Most any one of these taxes will take that and more, too, back.

I want to close just by making a couple of comments on a report that was released by the Department of Energy on Friday, and I suspect the trucks are rolling to bring copies of it to every office on the Hill. The title of it, "The Scenarios of U.S. Carbon Reductions, the Potential Impacts of Energy Technologies by 2010 and Beyond." I don't know whether the media has looked over this or had a chance to look at this report yet, or I suspect not many on the Hill here have had a chance to look at it.

I'd just like to suggest some things to keep in mind when you do look at it. It is filled with numerous unrealistic assumptions, one piled on top of another. First it assumes that the technologies that are described in the study will be successfully developed, that they'll be available when DOE estimates they will and will be as cheap and environmentally benign as DOE hopes.

Any of you who have followed government-funded R&D efforts know that technologies always, if they are successful at all, they always become available later than promised, they cost more than promised and they have more environmental side effects than promised.

The second major assumption in here is that governments will adopt the laws, the taxes and the tax incentives necessary to force adoption of these technologies, many of them as early as 2010. It also assumes that individuals and families will be able to afford these technologies and still have money left to pay for food, shelter, clothing, education, medical expenses. It also assumes that business and industry will be able to afford the technologies while still paying for their employees and staying in business. And it further assumes that the economy will be able to stand the displacement and the transfer payments that are involved in this effort.

I've been looking at DOE's energy R&D spending for some time and that of its predecessor agencies. And DOE and those predecessor agencies have a sad history of unsuccessful R&D efforts and failed technology promises. Over a hundred billion (dollars) has been spent on energy R&D through those agencies. But nearly all the R&D successes that the country has had have been produced either by the private sector or by spin-offs from Defense R&D, such as now we're seeing great success with combined cycle facilities for generating electricity, gas-fired combined cycle facilities. That technology came heavily from U.S. Air Force-sponsored work on gas turbine technology for aircraft.

The third point I would make in here, that DOE has a sad history of false claims about energy and energy cost savings from its R&D and regulatory programs, and if you'd like to have some specific examples, I'd be happy to provide them.

What is this report? In my view, it's a cleverly written bit of propaganda designed to garner public, media and congressional support for pouring more tax dollars into DOE, its national laboratories and other contractors. Note that it was written by DOE national laboratories. Virtually all the so-called peer reviewers are present or former employees of DOE, its contractors, grantees, and subcontractors. The report doesn't tell you how many tax dollars DOE wants for its, quote, "vigorous commitment to develop and deploy new technologies."

The release of the report was timed to support the president's recent unrealistic statement that greenhouse gas reductions could be achieved without cost in the upcoming October 6th White House conference on global warming. This is the first of three reports that you'll see in the next few days. There's another one by the DOE national laboratory directors that apparently hasn't been released yet, and there's a third panel of the President's Council for Science and Technology, a panel headed by Dr. Holdrin of Harvard, that will be unleashing more rhetoric to support spending more tax dollars.

You can count on DOE, its labs and contractors touting this report, along with the various advocacy groups. You might also look when you're reading this report, and I urge the people that work here on the Hill to look at what DOE does with its so-called R&D money. Much of that money doesn't go for efforts that increase scientific knowledge or move the technology ball forward. Instead, a lot of it goes for out-and-out promotional activities.

A lot of it -- I just pulled up some stuff on the DOE's Internet to look at where some of that so-called R&D money goes. Here's the Solar Energy Industry Association received $1.629 million for solar energy market promotion. Energy Efficient Export Council received $2.7 million for more export efficient technology. Here's the U.S. Export Council for Renewable Energy, $1.3 million. Alliance to Save Energy has several grants, a $500,000 one; $173,000 one; $1.25 million one; and a $58,000 one -- (unintelligible).

But the point is a lot of this money is not R&D. It is purely propaganda activity. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. ADLER:
Thank you, Mr. Schleede. On the subject of energy conservation technologies and renewable energy technologies, I would just make two comments. First is those of you who have not already seen it, the Cato Institute a few weeks ago published an excellent report looking at the record of renewable energy both in terms of its economic effects, but also its environmental impacts. It was written by Dr. Robert Bradley, who is president of the Institute for Energy Research. It provides a really good overview of both the economic and environmental impacts of renewable energy, pointing out, for example, that some forms of renewable energy have not had the environmental benefits that some thought.

Hydropower, once touted as the environmentally sound energy source, no longer is promoted as such. And many environmental groups are now calling for moratoria on the expansion of wind farms because of the problems involved with bird kills that have been experienced in this country and elsewhere when farms have been put up.

The other thing is a comment that when I hear that we're going to have new energy-efficient technologies that are going to work just as well, I think that some may want to think about the current controversy that is raging about low-flow toilets and low-flow shower heads, which were also promised to perform just as well as their predecessors, but are currently the subject of a lot of congressional oversight and public debate given -- or due to consumer -- or lack of consumer satisfaction.

Now, our final speaker before we go to questions and answers is someone that you would necessarily immediately think of as talking about the issue of climate change and climate change policy. And that is Frank Gaffney, who is the founder and director of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.

On Capitol Hill, Frank Gaffney needs no introduction. His work on defense and national security policy is well known and widely recognized, whether it's the security briefs he faxes out regularly, his columns in "The Washington Times" or his columns in "Defense News." And he's also known because in the Reagan administration, he was deputy assistant secretary of Defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy and also assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy.

But he has also become very interested in this issue because when you begin to think about the federal government and the largest users of carbon-based fuels, you realize that the military is probably the largest user of carbon-based fuels in the U.S. government. And secondly, whenever you're talking about signing a treaty or participating in a treaty, an international treaty that could subject certain U.S. economic or other decisions to multilateral control or input, that there are national security concerns to be raised there as well.

To discuss some of these concerns and the reason why the Center for Security Policy has become interested in this issue, let me introduce Frank Gaffney.

(Applause.)

FRANK GAFFNEY
(Center for
Security Policy):
Thank you very much. I feel as though all of my punches have been telegraphed between what you've said, Jonathan, and what Senator Hagel said.

But I come to you with a sense of real humility not only because I am not normally involved in these sorts of issues and because I'm in the company of people who are vastly more familiar with the science and many of the other related issues than am I. I also am going to tell you right up front what may be a somewhat unusual admission, certainly for me, and perhaps anybody in a briefing like this, I haven't a clue what the precise implications of this treaty are for our national security.

But what really worries me is I don't think anybody else does either. Not in the Pentagon, certainly not in the White House, and apart from those like Senator Hagel who have taken a keen interest in this, even people here on the Hill. And even he, I think -- as he said, he'd like real answers -- even he is dealing mostly on the basis of gut instinct. And that's basically what I'm going to be trying to do here as well, and just amplify some of the areas that we think ought to be of concern and ought to be the subject of very intense scrutiny, analysis and, not least, debate, certainly before the United States commits itself to this treaty, to say nothing of imposing unilaterally through executive orders the sorts of constraints that are apparently under active consideration by the Clinton administration.

Let me just tick off a couple of the places where I think concerns ought to be given this kind of scrutiny. It is after all the case that the Defense Department and the military services that comprise the tooth part of the tooth-tail regime over there are the largest consumers in the country of fossil fuels, and therefore the most serious emitters of greenhouse gases from those fuels.

Consequently, as one goes through the sorts of areas that will be at issue or at risk if we are obliged by fiat, executive or multinational, to reduce our military's fossil fuel emission, are the following. First, the readiness of our forces, and by that I mean, obviously, the literal, day-to-day ability to go fight the nation's wars if we have to. And I hope I don't have to, you know, put the caveat out, but let me just say it: I'm hoping that we won't ever have to do it again, but history does not give us much confidence that

<Audio Break>

flying hours, steaming hours, movement of tanks or other armored or jet vehicles, to prepare our forces to fight the nation's wars. Now, an area that I'm rather more comfortable than the science of global climate change is the condition of our forces today. And I will tell you I believe they are dangerously close to being hallowed out already as a result of the sustained reduction of the investment we've been making in them for over 12 years now.

This is showing up in readiness and we can debate it if you would like, whether airplane crashes like the kind we saw in the past week are a reflection of that, or whether they're a reflection of other problems that I think are not unrelated. But the reality is if you make our forces -- force them to go to war without knowing how to fight in the equipment they have, they will be killed in war even if they don't get killed in peace time. This is a tradeoff that has to be very seriously and carefully weighed out.

A related issue is presence. Our nation's ability to maintain forces overseas. As I'm sure you can appreciate, steaming naval battle groups in the Western Pacific, to say nothing of the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, consumes lots of fossil fuels. Even nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are escorted by ships that are not, and they fly aircraft of course that are not. And one will have to weigh out whether if you are going to have some cap on the amount of the emissions we produce, whether in peace time the nation will be able to afford to have these battle groups and air wings and so on, consuming our allotment.

A related question, and again I don't know the answer to this, but it has to be thought out. If we have foreign bases overseas, a key part of presence, are we going to have our emissions count against our host government's quotas, or will they count against ours somehow. And if they count against theirs, will they really want us there, which may mean that they don't, which may mean in turn that we're not, which may mean in turn that people are thinking, well, the United States isn't around. Or the United States, going back to readiness, isn't fit, so this is a pretty good time to start a war. Or at least to see if we can press our agenda perhaps at their expense.

The willingness to go to war -- again, not because we seek out opportunities to do it, but because we believe it is imperative in our interests to do it, may also be affected. If suddenly in a much more material way than is ordinarily the case, the price for the economy of fighting the nation's wars may be within this zero sum allotment that you have to destroy the rest of the economy, because there go all those fossil fuel emissions. Again, to some extent all of this will depend on where the levels are set and how they're set and by whom and when. The fees are tradeoffs that may, I fear, cause others to sense an opportunity for aggression at the expense of our national security and interests.

And finally, and this is very hard to get your hands around again without all the answers to the other questions I've just mentioned, but there are real procurement issues. Just to give you one, perhaps absurd, example -- will we have to in the future subordinate decisions about the survivability, or the mission effectiveness of our armed forces equipment to their fuel efficiency? Could we see smaller, lighter, main battle tanks that don't have the armor, that don't have the guns, that don't have the powerful engines and mobility that we believe are required so that our troops can survive the battlefields, let alone prevail on them because they're gas guzzlers?

And if you think I'm making this up, last week the deputy undersecretary of defense, a new position, for environmental security -- the woman Senator Hagel was speaking of a moment ago, touted an advanced aircraft engine that will go in the next generation, she says, of bombers and air transports and fighter aircraft and that has greatly reduced expenses and maintenance and so on. But offers, she thinks, a 40 percent savings in fuel consumption. Now that's a very good thing. I mean, if you're involved in combat and logistics and so on, you understand that you'd like to reduce that. And if it does not come in fact at the expense of the performance of those aircraft, I think nobody would complain.

But let's be under no illusion, ladies and gentlemen, even if that pans out as a technology, that is a technology that isn't here today, may or may not be here in time for the next generation, assuming we can afford to buy the next generation of aircraft. But if we're really serious about reducing the environmental impact of the nation's military in terms of these greenhouse gasses, somebody's going to have to not only perfect that technology, but retrofit it into all of the existing aircraft and the similar things would apply of course for ships and tanks and so on. Well, again, that may be a very good thing if it doesn't reduce our military capabilities. But trust me, nobody has budgeted for that retrofit. To the contrary, there isn't enough money to even buy the next generation of these pieces of equipment, let alone go back and make the current generations that will be retained for some considerable period of time, fuel efficient, environmentally friendly, green -- whatever you want to call it.

So, let me just close by saying I think there is in addition to all these concerns one perhaps overarching concern. If, as I understand it, one of the schemes that's being cooked up in order to try to address the very legitimate concern that you're going to have a bunch of countries that pollute a lot, but not just up to our standards yet, left out of the treaty, you're going to have them brought into the treaty with some sort of admission credit system that they can barter with those of us who emit more than we're supposed to. Well first of all, you've got this super national mechanism that is going to be created presumably to arbitrate and manage and regulate these sorts of barter transactions, which I personally find unappetizing as an American, to say nothing of someone who generally doesn't favor over-regulation anyway -- domestic, let alone international.

But, think about it in a national security context. What if it turns out the war we have to fight is with a country that is a net negative emitter? Could it be the case that in a war situation, we have to get them to sell us some of their unutilized emissions so that we can go fight them? Or if not them, if that is too absurd, how about their friends in the non-aligned movement who will also have these things to trade? So, I mean at some point I think it becomes clear that if this thing is not so absurd as to be ludicrous, it is at least problematic -- highly problematic from the national security point of view. And if so, it would seem to me that one has to be absolutely positively convinced of the science, and dead certain that the therapy that is being proposed here addresses the scientists' concerns before one would go down this road with potentially devastating consequences. Yes, for our sovereignty, but also for our national security and our national interests. Thank you.

JONATHAN ADLER:
Now I would like to turn the podium over to Sterling Burnett, who's my counterpart at the National Center for Policy Analysis and heads their environmental program and he will open the floor for questions and give some concluding remarks.

MR. STERLING
BURNETT:
First I'd like to just thank everyone for showing up today. We've had a good turnout and it's an important issue I believe will go far beyond December in Kyoto. That's not going to settle anything. Then I'd like to take time to thank all of our panelists once again for being here.

(Applause.)

To conclude before I open up for questions, the question is, it seems to me, why now? Why are we holding this briefing now rather than next week or next year? And it's because something's going to happen in December that we have to make a policy decision on, and scientists don't make these decisions -- science supposedly is a value neutral discipline. You try and find facts. You try and discover what will happen if we do this, or what will happen if we do that. Economics is supposedly a value free discipline. It can tell you what it will cost the economy if we undertake this action as opposed to that action. But it doesn't tell us which action to take, nor does science. These are value decisions.

In December we're going to be making some pretty serious value decisions. What course should America and the rest of the world take to solve what may be a problem? Now, is it a problem? You consistently hear -- constantly hear about the consensus in the scientific community. If you haven't gotten it before, you should've gotten it from the scientists that we have here -- there is no consensus within the scientific community that humans are causing catastrophic global climate change. It's just not there. Scientists disagree on this matter. And the scientists, most importantly, who work on this closest, climatologists, really disagree on this matter.

What about the economics? Well there is largely a consensus on the economic side. And, in every study done up till now, except for one done by the World Resources Institute, who has a horse in this race, and the new one by the Department of Energy, shows enormous economic consequences flowing from these treaties. Why is that important? Not because of dollars and cents. We're a relatively wealthy country. We can give up a lot. But poorer countries, the developing countries, are harmed as well. Even if only we are capped, countries that must grow economically trade with us and we can't buy their goods if our economy slows down. They have no place to go. And these are the very countries that Dr. Shindell pointed out, don't have the health infrastructures now. They can't take care of themselves now. If their economies can't grow -- wealth is what makes you healthy. And if their economies can't grow, they will never be healthy. They will always live under the threats of plague, pestilence and famine. And I think that is what's important.

If we want a better world, I mean, it's a value judgment. If we want a better world for human beings, we're going to have to let people grow economically. We're going to have to let countries grow economically. This treaty won't do that. So it will affect their health, it will affect their economic well being, and as John or I could either one talk ad nauseam, and it won't help the environment, which is what they're touting this as. We must save the environment. I'll close with that. You can see more of my comments on disease and some of the economics (and stuff?) in the package you've all received. I'll answer questions very briefly. We ran a little late. Questions?

MR. BURNETT:
Please identify yourself as you ask the questions.

MR. DEROY MURDOCK:
Hi. My name's DeRoy Murdock (ph). I'm with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and also write political commentary, most frequently for MSNBC and the Washington Times. I have a specific question and a general one. I think for Dr. Baliunas, on the question of computer models that you say have been exaggerating climatological phenomena, is there some bias in the programming that causes this exaggeration? Are they looking at the figures somewhat honestly and yet coming up with exaggerated results? Is there something in the programming that is causing this exaggeration?

And then a more general question for anyone else who wishes to answer it. There was a quote last week from Ted Turner who said, referring to global warming, "Have you been outside? It's boiling out there." My experience as someone who lives in New York City, we have just finished up our second incredibly mild summer, so much so that I've gone out on summer evenings in July and August wearing flannel shirts. I remember very well waking up the morning of July 16th. It was so cold in my apartment July 16th, that I went into my closet, dragged out the space heater, plugged it in and warmed up my apartment in July. Is this something unusual? Can we draw any conclusions from this? Is there in fact some global cooling going on, or at least cooling in New York City that we don't know about?

DR. BALIUNAS:
I'll start with the models. As Dr. Spencer mentioned, the models make an important assumption which is that (really?) effective water vapors amplify any warming that comes from the minor greenhouse gasses. His data challenged the strength of that positive feedback and theoretical work that's been done by a Professor Lindzen at MIT -- also has challenged this notion. The warming that the models produced is not unexpected based on that assumption.

I wanted to hold up -- if you can see it or you can pass it around -- also another bias in the models is the uncertainties. The uncertainties of (the physics), not only about water vapor. The effect of doubling CO2 is this small bar over here. That's the amount of energy going into the climate system. These are uncertainties in just three effects and clouds are not even on this chart. These are flux adjustments of 25 times larger than the effect of doubling CO2 that have to be made in the models is the uncertainty of motions of energy going from the equator to the poles, is the uncertainty of our knowledge of humidity. But we're trying to calculate the effect of this, given uncertainties as large as this and this isn't even a definitive comprehensive listing of the uncertainties. So the models do have uncertainties.

DR. SPENCER:
Or high margin of error, if you will.

DR. SPENCER:
Or another way of looking at it is that they can only -- the atmosphere is very complex. They can only put in a certain amount of that complexity in the models. The models are incomplete. They approximate some very important processes in a very crude way, so they can't put in all of the things that if a cloud forms and causes this thing to happen, which then causes something else to happen, which then causes something else to happen -- they don't have that level of sophistication. And it turns out that the way the atmosphere likes to work is to get rid of deviations from what's normal. You know, to smooth things out.

So that again we get back to this idea of feedback that until they have the physics of the negative feedbacks that are in the real climate system in the GCNs, the GCMs are going to produce estimates of global warming which are too high. And we see that as the models get better, their estimates of global warming keep coming down. The latest global warming has now been reduced 30 percent between the forecast in 1990 and the forecast in 1995.

MR. BURNETT:
Not only has the rate of warming decreased, but the time span over which the warming is supposed to occur has doubled, and that's another interesting topic. As far as the general question, I don't know if we need to answer it, but I'll say this -- 1995 was touted as being the warmest year on record. Dr. Baliunas had some stuff to say about that at one time. But 1996 was one of the coldest years in the last 70 years and it completely confounded the models. The models keep showing every year should get warmer, not that all of sudden '96 and '97, unusually cold years so far -- so far. We may get a lot of warming in December. I doubt it, but we may. But so far, it's one of the coldest years since recording. And Texas has had a very mild Summer. Being from Texas, I appreciate that.

MR. MURDOCK:
Thank you.

MR. MARK
WHITTINGTON:
I'm Mark Whittington. I work with Senator Larry Craig. I was wondering if any of the panelist have been invited to the October 6 White House show?

DR. SPENCER:
No.

DR. BALIUNAS:
I'm sure that
my invitation is in
the mail, but
I haven't gotten it.

MR. GAFFNEY:
(Inaudible).

MR. GAFFNEY:
I'd like to say on that, because it does seem to me that if one takes anything away from this discussion, it ought to be that there are reasonable arguments to be made at odds with the administration's position. And I, as a taxpayer, find it offensive in the extreme if we wind up being obliged to pay as taxpayers for some White House conference that does not in fact permit a real give and take between people who have respectable, albeit discordant views on this issue. If it turns out to be an amen chorus for the Clinton Administration's particular spin, that's frankly an abuse of taxpayer dollars. It should be billed as a campaign expense or some other financing scheme that might be arranged.

MR. BURNETT:
Perhaps the Clinton Administration doesn't want to invite un-American people to the White House for their treaty. Since anyone who disputes this according to the gentleman that was unnamed earlier, but I will go ahead and name, Bruce Babbitt, the Secretary of Interior, called anyone that disputes the science behind global climate change theory un-American. We can no longer debate the science in the scientific community. If you disagree or if you're skeptical, you're un-American.

MR. BURNETT:
You. And this will be the last question. Go ahead.

SPEAKER:
(Off-mike).

MS. BALIUNAS:
I'll answer the solar question. Maybe I'll leave to you the time scale. The solar radiation within one solar cycle, 10 years -- 11 years, changes by about a tenth percent or so. That is too small an amplitude and too short a time scale to have much of an impact. But the question is what about the decade or century time scale, and that's where research indicates indirectly that changes of up to several tenths percent occur on this time scales, and those several tenths percent changes would then have an influence on the climate of (inaudible) degree, seven grade or so. Several tenths -- yes, four tenths percent say over a time scale of 100 years. Less than half percent.

DR. SPENCER:
The point you made about carbon dioxide having a very long time scale. That's true, but that wasn't my point. My point was since water vapor is 95 percent of our natural greenhouse effect, why isn't it that we don't see global warming when water vapor varies by tremendous amounts? Why doesn't it cause the climate to go off into a warmer state when water vapor happens to increase due to whatever, El Ninos, for instance. El Nino is probably the best example because it causes a net global warming and increase in water vapor. And the answer is because there are other feedbacks involving water which cause the climate system to cool down again. And that's the part that we really don't understand yet is the effect of moisture in all its myriad forms, clouds, water vapor in the lower and the upper atmosphere, and how they can have a negative feedback on any temperature change.

So but what you said is true. Yes. The CO2 is a very long time scale, but that's a different issue.

MR. BURNETT:
I'd like to just close by recommending that what the science is pretty clear on is that there's no decision that has to be made by December of 1997. Scientists who support the theory of human caused global climate change have written that we can wait up to 25 years before we have to take action and only suffer a .02 degree centigrade warming. This is negligible.

As a result, we can make drastic deep cuts in CO2 energy now, or we can make slightly deeper cuts in 2020 when A, we have more scientific evidence one way or the other for this and, B, we have better technologies so any changes we will make will have less economic dislocation, and C, hopefully in the meantime we will have taken care of some of the public health problems in developing countries and that still remain in the US. We have kids that go un-immunized here. But if we're spending money to halt global warming, we're not spending money on them to immunize and take care of other diseases. So there's no need to precipitous action now. Thank you all for being here.

(End of tape.)

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Transcript
September 29, 1997
A BRIEFING ON GLOBAL WARMING, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY Sponsored by the National Center for Policy Analysis and Competitive Enterprise Institute.	Briefing participants include Senator Chuck Hagel, co-sponsor of the Hagel-Byrd Senate Resolution against signing the global warming treaty in its current form; H. Sterling Burnett, environmental policy analyst for the NCPA; Jonathan Adler, director of environmental studies for CEI; Roy Spencer, NASA senior scientist; Sallie Baliunas with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Marshall Institute; Sidney Shindell, Professor Emeritus at Medical College of Wisconsin; Glenn Schleede, environmental consultant with the National Consumer Coalition; and Frank Gaffney with the Center for Security Policy.
JONATHAN ADLER (Director of Environmental Studies, Competitive Enterprise Institute):	Good morning and welcome. My name is Jonathan Adler. I'm director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On behalf of CEI and the National Center for Policy Analysis, we welcome you to today's briefing on the subject of climate change and global warming, subjects that you certainly have been hearing a lot about recently and will continue to be hearing a lot about in the coming weeks. As I believe everyone here knows, next Monday the White House is sponsoring a briefing on climate change policy and has been hosting a series of country-wide townhall meetings, on these issues, the issue of climate change and what, if anything, should be done about it - whether or not there should be a national treaty signed this December in Kyoto. Because this is an issue that people hear so much about, and is talked about so much; and because what they hear is often so different, at CEI and NCPA, we thought it would be helpful to bring some individuals that study various aspects of climate change or climate change policy to share their perspectives and their opinions about what we do and don't know, both about climate change itself and some of the policy options, and in the case of policy options, whether or not -- what types of policies may or may not be warranted. Obviously, this is a subject where you could have a panel of 50 people expressing different views on 50 different subjects. The issues involving climate change are immense. Beyond the issues that are going to be discussed today, there is more information available at CEI's Web site, WWW.CEI.ORG, as well as NCPA's Web site which I'm going to forget Web address for.
STERLING BURNETT:	WWW.NCPA.ORG.
MR. ADLER:	And certainly there are many sites that discuss this issue from many perspectives. To begin, I noted that this is a subject that people hear a lot about. For example, some of you may have noticed yesterday in "The New York Times" an article in the Week in Review section with pictures going back to 1910 of the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park; and how it's been shrinking over this century, and how some experts believe that it will disappear within the coming decades. But yet just a week or so earlier, there was an article in the Science Times section of "The New York Times" pointing out the role that solar activity may be having on climate change and that this may be an under-represented factor in climate change. In today's "Washington Post," we see an article about a paper just published, co-authored by one of our speakers today, on satellite data and whether or not the satellite data is accurate in its measurement of a marginal cooling trend over the past two decades. Yet a couple months ago, some people may also remember "The Washington Post" also published an article in the Outlook section saying that there is no debate and that the effects of climate change are already being felt. And lastly, just to point out, some of you may be aware that just recently the Department of Energy released a study saying that addressing climate change and reducing emissions will cost us nothing. But yet only a few months ago, the same Department of Energy released another study saying that it will be devastating for major U.S. industries that are energy-intensive, were we to try and significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. So I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of information coming from a lot of sources, and at CEI and NCPA, we thought it would be helpful if we pulled together a panel of some experts to give you some perspective on this issue. And I would certainly recommend that for those that are involved in developing policy on this issue or reporting on this issue, that they diligently continue to research and find information from all available sources. Now, our first speaker today to give perspective on this issue is Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska. I am very pleased to be able to introduce him today. It is an honor, as he is someone that has been intimately involved in this issue, has been one of the leaders in the Senate on this issue. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and he is chairman of the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion. Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Senator Hagel served as president of McCarthy and Company, a privately owned investment banking firm in Omaha, Nebraska. So he has first-hand experience and knowledge about the effect that decisions made here in Washington -- has seen the effects those decisions can have upon the private sector and upon businesses. Until joining McCarthy and Company, he was president and chief executive officer of the Private Sector Council in Washington. He also served as deputy director and chief operating officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. He was also co-founder, director and executive vice president of Vanguard Cellular Systems, a publicly traded corporation. And during the Reagan administration, he served as deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration. And perhaps most importantly for our discussion today, he was one of the lead sponsors of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which, as I believe everyone here knows, passed 95 to nothing, something that is not very common on high-profile, controversial issues, a resolution that made clear to the Clinton administration and all those involved with the climate change issue, that the United States Senate wanted to be sure that any treaty that the United States is involved with does not compromise U.S. competitiveness and does not place an undue burden on the U.S. economy and on American consumers. So without any further ado, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Senator Hagel. (Applause.)
SEN. CHUCK HAGEL (R-Nebraska):	Jonathan, thank you very much. Thank you all. I appreciated an opportunity to say hello and want to thank all of you for participating, and especially your distinguished panelists today, because I suspect there is very little that will impact the future of the world -- and not just economic impact, standard of living impact, but in more global terms, national sovereignty, national security and how we move into the next century -- than this issue that you are doing a rather masterful job at helping inform, educate. And one of the great revelations of all time last week, when it was announced, Sallie, that the sun may in fact have something to do with the environment and how the earth is warmed. And thank you for your role in that. But you know, I have always approached this in a very direct way, direct meaning that common sense should be at the base of how we approach what this issue is about, how we debate it, how we educate each other, and how we inform on this issue. And I think that if we in fact move forward on the basis of not running away from the issue or denying the issue, but approach it forthrightly on the basis of let's seek the answers to the questions and do it honestly, intellectually honestly, then I think we can not only make converts here on this issue, but I think we can have a rather dramatic effect over the next few years on all environmental issues. It seems to me some of us who are essentially laypersons in this business have allowed ourselves to be painted into the corner by individuals who challenge us not on the merits of the issue, but challenge us on the emotion of the issue. And if you dare challenge, if you are so arrogant to challenge certain people about global climate change or any other environmental issue, then as certain individuals have said, you are un-American, you're uninformed, you truly want to leave a dirty world to your children and your grandchildren. And so we have kind of found ourselves in a no-win situation, I think partly as a result of how we've taken these issues on, and we must be smarter than we have been on how we forthrightly size up the issue and explore it and debate it and take it on. I think this issue will have immense consequences for further debate on all environmental issues well into the next century. I have been very, very proud to have played a small role in this so far, and this is not unlike all issues, and really great issues of our time, because I think this is a great issue of our time that deserves a great amount of debate. And when you have these large issues, the filtering process impacts considerably, the filtering process of the media, the filtering process of the so-called elite, the intelligentsia, the environmental groups, and the rest of us -- most of us -- fall somewhere out there in outer space on these issues. And what has impressed me about this effort has been not only the leadership that has been brought to focus on this issue, and a leadership in a way that's been, I think, the right kind of leadership because it's been focused on education, information, not running away from the issue, being honest about it. If there is a problem, let's find out what the problem is, and then let's seek a solution to that problem. And this is a confidence-building process that many people are watching, and we want to use this opportunity on this issue to develop that confidence and trust that hopefully will win converts in the press, within environmental organizations, with the people, with Congress, worldwide, because if we can demonstrate that we have taken this issue on with a certain amount of common sense, with a certain amount of intelligence, concern for our planet, concern for our future, concern for the environment, I think we have accomplished something rather dramatically. And this won't be the last challenge that we have on these issues. And the more we hear from people like Brian Tucker, who no matter how you describe the organization that he had headed recently and those involved, just because they disagree with those who think that they have the answers on this issue, you can't dismiss the Meteorological Association and those associated and people like Brian Tucker, who has given a lifetime of balance, of insight, of expertise in these issues and to these issues. And so the more time we have to listen and learn and explain what we believe and ask the right question, that redounds to the benefit of what we're trying to do here. And I would say one other thing. I was asked recently, "Well, Senator Hagel, aren't you trying to torpedo the treaty, and aren't you trying to set back global environmental issues? I mean, isn't that the objective?" And I said, "No, it is not the objective. It is absolutely not the objective. The objective is to fully understand the issue first, and then if we have a problem, deal with it." But I have to tell you, the more time I spend on understanding this issue and every dynamic of it, whether it's economics, whether it's scientific, whether it's national sovereignty, whether it's national defense, any perspective, it becomes clearer and clearer to me, this would be a disastrous course of action to take for this country and the world if we were to move forward and sign a treaty in Kyoto, Japan, based on the Berlin Mandate, based on the requisites of that Berlin Mandate, it would be a disaster, the consequences of which we have no idea and can't measure in any way, if we would go forward with this. I surely do not want to embarrass the president of the United States, nor do any of my colleagues. My colleagues and I do not want to embarrass this country nor this administration nor our efforts to do the right thing with the environment. But what we wish to do, what we have a constitutional obligation to do, is to in fact render advice and consent to the president of the United States on this treaty and other treaties, this course of action and all courses of action, because this is not a Republican-Democrat issue. This is not a House/Senate versus executive issue. This is an issue that affects us all, and we should all engage in this debate and be informed about the issues dominating this debate. So again, I very much appreciate what you all do, the forums that you all have allowed us to develop and allowed eminent panelists like you have here this morning to be able to take the issue, and dissect that issue so that we all can understand the issue better from all the perspectives that your panelists will do today. That's the way we should debate in a free society. And that's what you've been able to do, and for some of us who were engaged in this a little bit, we're grateful for that. As I think you know, here in the Senate, at least, we're going to continue to stay very focused. Senator Murkowski has a hearing tomorrow in his Energy Committee. I will hold another hearing, I believe next week, in my subcommittee, as a matter of fact, in this room. We'll continue to engage the United States Senate and the Congress. As you all know, Speaker Gingrich has just gone forward with putting together a House observer team like we have as a result of the Byrd-Hagel resolution here in the Senate, an observer group. So I think that enlarges the process to some extent and helps inform our congressmen from at least their perspective on what this issue is about and allows them to participate because we want their participation. So again, I'm grateful for your leadership on this and for your help. And I'm sure we'll have another opportunity to say hello. And when I see Frank Gaffney walk in, I always know it's time to leave, because Frank's going to send a missile. (Laughter.) But I want to say one thing about what Frank's doing. Part of this debate is truly about national defense. That's an area that gets overlooked in this debate. Frank has developed that very well and will continue to develop it very well. But I, for example, was with Secretary Cohen for breakfast Friday morning, and we talked about a lot of things. And some of you may know that Senator Jim Inhofe and I sent a letter to Secretary Cohen based on what an undersecretary of Defense had said about what an executive order coming out of the White House to all of government would do to our national defense readiness and capabilities all the other dynamics of national defense if we, through an executive order started to mandate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. I think Senator Inhofe is going to hold a hearing on that. I am one, I suspect, among many who would be very intrigued to understand what kind of predicament would that put our American military capability and readiness in if we start taking our national security interests and subjecting to them environmental interests. Now, when that happens, ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem; we have a major problem. And this is going to be an issue that we are going to go after in a lot more detail than we have. And the second part of that, which we're going to talk more about and we have talked some about, is national sovereignty. When you subject American industry and business and jobs and all dynamics of our society, of our culture, of our country, of our government to international bodies with awesome powers, the power to dictate industries being shut down, levying fines, we've crossed another line here. We have crossed another line. And that may be, of all the problems that we have, that may be the most significant and severe. So we have yet to engage in some of the issues that are, in my opinion, just as important as the economics of this issue and the other issues, but yet we still -- we still -- have not found solid science to work from. That is still the most elusive piece, which should be the most solid and foundational piece to any decision we make on any of these issues. I know you'll find all the answers today and we'll look forward to those. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
MR. ADLER:	Thanks, Senator Hagel, again for making time and being able to be here today. I do hope we could -- or would like to think we could come up with all the answers today. I think that might be a pretty large mandate for any panel on this subject, particularly any single panel. Senator Hagel mentioned, one of the key elements of this issue is the science and what the science does say and what it doesn't say. And as I noted, that is something we see a lot of differing views on in the media. And kind of to start today off, we have asked Dr. Roy Spencer, who is a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to give his view of kind of where we are, of what the science does say and what it doesn't say, what we can say with certainty about either empirical data about the climate or about global circulation models upon climate predictions are always -- are often based. Dr. Spencer directs the research and new development and application of satellite passive microwave remote sensing techniques for measuring global temperature, water vapor and precipitation. And as I believe I noted this morning, in today's "Washington Post," there is a note about a recent paper that he co-authored about the satellite measurement of temperature. Dr. Spencer received the American Meteorological Society's 1966 (sic) Special Award for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work and is a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. One final note I would make is that Dr. Spencer is here going to present his views as a scientist as actively involved in researching climate-related issues and that these views are not necessarily, or should not be taken to reflect the, quote, unquote, "official" views of NASA or any other government entity. They are the views of a researcher that's actively involved in researching these issues. Dr. Spencer.
ROY SPENCER (Senior Scientist, NASA):	Thank you, Jonathan. Please excuse me for sitting while I do this presentation, but I have to be close to the mike, I'm told. I don't know how well everyone can see these charts with the lights on, but we'll do the best we can. As you see, there I've said, "Some Personal Views and Perspectives on Climate Science." And it's really important when you start asking for scientific facts that you recognize that more than just the facts affect a scientist's judgment, especially when we deal with an issue that has certain philosophical or world view implications. So here I've listed some of the potential influences on a scientist's judgment, in no particular order, although I did put "Search for the Truth" at the top, since we want to -- scientists want to make ourselves look reasonably good in front of the public. But also there are other things which affect scientists' judgment. These things include the quest for research funding. We also develop and defend pet theories. Once we've developed a theory, we don't let it go very easily. There is also a desire to save the earth. Science community peer pressure -- now, this is one that's fairly important because scientists will tend to band together, and of course all areas of society these days are becoming very detailed -- what's the word I'm looking for? We specialize. We specialize in all areas of society, and that's true in the sciences as well, so that there are only a few people in the world, really, that have a total view of global warming and all of the component parts of the theory in order for it to be a valid theory. But all the other scientists, the vast majority of climate scientists are all working on individual pieces of the whole global warming puzzle. So what you hear when you hear people's views on global warming, or scientists' views in the newspaper or on TV, is generally spokespersons that have taken it upon themselves to be spokespersons, to take the big picture view, when in fact the vast majority of the scientists really don't have the big picture view and don't go along with what these people that interface with the media decide is important and the conclusions they make. So we tend to band together as scientists and figure, well, the people that have the big picture view, that have looked at all of the elements must know what they're talking about. So there is peer pressure within the community to band together and agree with those that are interfacing with the media. Of course, there's media interest and influence. Typically, people's answers and the certainty with which they provide those answers change when the media is present. And also world view. This is an issue that Dr. Richard Lindzen has testified about or has mentioned in his testimony that I think is very important. Ultimately, the global warming issue comes down to the basic, almost philosophical issue of whether the earth is very sensitive to perturbations. That is, when it's influenced by anything, when the climate system is influenced by anything, does it tend to deviate away from a normal state; is it very sensitive? Or is it very insensitive? And my view is that it's relatively insensitive. In fact, I'm not here to tell you today that I don't think global warming is a problem. I think it's a problem that's worthy of study, but I think we are still at a point where we don't have enough knowledge about how the climate system works to give good quantitative estimates of what global warming is going to be in the next century. This is a very long time-scale phenomenon. It's not something that we have to do something about right now. It's something that is going to occur over a very long period of time. We're not sure about its magnitude yet. But I thought I'd list some of the things that we know. What do we know? In fact, I was tempted to title this slide, "What do we know for sure?" But then I thought, well, in science there really isn't anything we know for sure. We know that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing. In fact, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to give everyone a little meteorology lesson, but I think it will help you to better understand this issue of global warming. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It doesn't affect solar radiation, which heats the earth. It affects infrared radiation, which goes out away from the earth and cools the earth. Infrared radiation is the radiation you feel, say, from a fireplace at a distance. For all the solar radiation that comes into the earth, an equal amount has to escape from the earth in order for the temperature to remain constant. Okay? Right now, we've put enough CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to where we have increased the infrared trapping ability of the atmosphere by about 1 percent, 1 percent above what it was before the Industrial Revolution. Now, that certainly sounds like something that is worthy of study and might change climate in a discernible way; but the next thing you have to recognize is that carbon-dioxide, the major contributor to supposed global warming, carbon-dioxide is not the main greenhouse gas. About 95 percent of the earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, which unlike carbon-dioxide is variable. Its amount varies a lot in space and time. Okay? Carbon-dioxide is a well-mixed gas. It's uniformly mixed throughout the atmosphere, but 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is water vapor, and that gas varies quite a bit. Now, back in the '60s, when global warming theory first got some of the serious first scientific articles on the issue, it was mainly scientists that knew physics and radiation and didn't know much about the weather that were advancing catastrophic theories of global warming. And it's because they were just looking at it from a radiation point of view. You've got sunlight coming in, you've got infrared radiation going out cooling the earth. Those two have to balance, but we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping more radiation. The planet should heat up. Well, the trouble is, and in fact, this misconception still occurs today in some scientific papers, is that for the most part, even though the earth itself is in radiation balance, the surface -- I should say the earth as a whole is in radiation balance -- the surface of the earth is way out of radiation balance. The temperature we experience here at the earth outside today isn't the result of radiation balance. It's more the result of evaporation, water and convection. And this is where I like to use this diagram. It may be a little difficult to see. The point is that that wind that you feel outside today, every puff of wind on the earth, every raindrop that falls is because the earth is doing its first job, which is to get rid of excess heat. The atmosphere creates wind, forms clouds and rain all in an effort to move heat from areas where there's excess heat building up to areas where there's a deficit of heat. Now, that applies both horizontally and vertically. And typically, the atmosphere forms circulation cells like this, where water is evaporated from the surface, which cools the surface greatly. If it weren't for water, the average surface temperature of the earth would be about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. That water is carried up -- water vapor is carried up. It forms clouds, rain falls out. That cloud material then goes way up in the upper troposphere and re-evaporates and moistens the upper troposphere. We've learned through recent research that this is the area that seems to be the most important for controlling climate, this area up here that has very little water vapor in it, because all you have to do is change that clear-air water vapor by a little bit, and you change the earth's ability to cool itself by a lot. Now, how is it that the earth can go through big fluctuations in temperature -- this shows our satellite temperature record of the global average temperature since 1979 on a monthly basis. The earth goes through temperature extremes, up and down and up and down. Associated with these are big changes in the water vapor content of the atmosphere. This is the greenhouse gas that dominates the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere. How is it that the earth can go through these huge fluctuations and not run off into a hot box, a super-greenhouse effect where we all burn up or something, like Venus? And basically, it comes down to whether there are negative feedbacks in the system which always bring the temperature back into equilibrium, in other words, some force will cause cooling and it will -- other feedbacks will come into the system and cause cloudiness to change or water vapor or something, which will cause it to shoot back towards the opposite, and you get this oscillation of temperature. That is a sign of negative feedbacks in the system. Early climate models had, I would say, mostly positive feedbacks, and that's where we had our early estimates of catastrophic global warming is you put a perturbation into the earth's system, like increasing CO2, and the temperature just keeps going up. Now, as these general circulation models, or GCMs, improve and they put more and more physics into them that are more and more realistic, we get lower and lower estimates of global warming. So I've already covered a couple of these points at the bottom, that the climate system goes through natural fluctuations. I mean, the climate does vary, and it's not because of us. And that's what makes it hard to see the human influence on climate yet. I don't think we have reached the point yet where we have seen unequivocally the human influence on climate, except maybe in the urban environment. You know, where we've built big cities, we do have a heat island effect. And finally, I would argue that the real climate system is more stable than these general circulation models, these GCMs. One of the recent findings that we've made on this issue of water vapor and its dominating effect on the greenhouse effect of the earth -- this shows tropical humidity distributions, and it's a little hard to see, I guess, with all these lights on. But if you look down here, here's Australia and India and Africa. These clear areas are areas where the humidity in the free troposphere, and this is an altitude of about 6 to 12 kilometers, averages 10 percent in relative humidity or less. Now, you usually think of the tropics as being very moist. That's down near the surface. As you go up in the atmosphere, the air becomes very dry. That sunny tropical atmosphere that you see, that blue sky, there's very little water vapor up there. The lower the water vapor amount up there, potentially the more sensitive the earth's system is to changes because if the air is very dry, all you have to change is the humidity. Change the humidity by a little bit and you really change the greenhouse effect. And yet the earth's climate system is very stable, and I believe that's evidence for the existence of negative feedbacks, which always pull the system back into equilibrium. Now, I know that a lot of this is complicated. Unfortunately, the earth's system is complicated; the climate system is complicated. And unfortunately, some decisions, policy decisions are going to have to be made based on a lot of uncertainty. I just want to warn you that scientists will be arguing as much from a lack of evidence as they will be from evidence. They'll be arguing from their world view, and I've betrayed mine to some extent here, this belief that the earth is fairly stable to perturbations. So you need to take all these things into consideration when you're evaluating the state of climate science, because there's still a lot we don't know about the climate system. And I guess I'll just wrap up my presentation with that. (Applause.)
MR. ADLER:	Thank you, Dr. Spencer. One issue that has gotten a lot of attention recently, particularly in last week's "New York Times" Science Times section is the question of whether or not the sun and changes in solar output may be affecting the climate. And some folks would say, you know, well, of course the sun has something to do with the fact that the earth is warm. But there are a lot of questions about whether or not changes in the sun and changes in the sun's output have an effect on temperatures on planet earth. One person who's been very involved in that, looking at that question, is Dr. Sallie Baliunas. She is senior staff physicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. She serves as senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute here in Washington and chairs the institute's science advisory board. She is also visiting professor at Tennessee State University. Her awards include the Newton-Lacy-Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Petr Beckmann Award for Scientific Freedom and the Bok Prize from Harvard University. She has written over 200 scientific research articles. In 1991, "Discover" magazine profiled her as one of America's outstanding women scientists. And this is something that I find very fascinating I'll probably want to ask her about after the program. She is apparently the technical consultant for a new science fiction television series, Gene Rodenberry's "Earth: Final Conflict," which begins airing this year. And she received her MA and Ph.D. degrees in astrophysics from Harvard University. Dr. Baliunas.
SALLIE BALIUNAS (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Marshall Institute):	I want to make three points for you, briefly. The first one will be on what the computer predictions say will happen in the Arctic and its relevance to ice melting and sea level rise and what the data say in comparison to the models. The second point we'll discuss briefly is one natural factor of possible climate change, that is, changes in the brightness of the sun. And the third point is to bring out the hazards of ignoring natural climate changes, which have occurred and will continue to occur, while focusing on a distant and more remote human effect on the climate. How do we know the computer forecasts of the climate 100 years into the future are believable? Now, the rules of science give us clear guidance on how to test this or any other hypothesis. The Nobel Laureate Prize winner in physics, Richard Feynman, reminds us of the following: "The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth." So we start by noting, in testing the global warming models, that the increase in greenhouse gases from human activities over the last 100 years, added all together, are equivalent to a 50 percent increase in carbon-dioxide alone. This is halfway to the benchmark of doubling of effective carbon-dioxide that the IPCC predictions and other computer models deal with. The 50 percent effective increase in carbon-dioxide gives us a good way to test the accuracy of the climate forecasts because we simply measure the climate's response to the increase in greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that has already taken place. Now, one of the very most stringent tests of the validity of the computer simulations of the climate of the earth is based on records from the Arctic. Now, according to the computer forecasts, the polar areas are very sensitive to global warming. The forecasts say that the polar region should have warmed enough in the last 50 to 100 years to begin melting polar ice. Melting the polar ice would then produce a positive feedback that would amplify any warming already present. The reason is that ice reflects sunlight and helps keep the polar regions cold, but as the temperature rises and the ice melts, the bare ground or the sea underneath would absorb more of the sun's energy and thus magnify the warming. Now, according to the computer simulations, an average warming of about 1 to 4 degrees Centigrade annually is projected to have already occurred in the last 50 years in the latitude band of 60 to 90 degrees North because of recent increases in the greenhouses gases and the model's expectations of amplified Arctic warming. And in this first chart, we show the balloon radiosonde measurements that start back in the mid-1950s and also one of the predictions for warming. So the temperature measurements show that there has been no net warming over the past several decades, and while I haven't shown it, this is especially true in the winter, which is the season projected by the computer simulations to have the fastest increased temperature of all. And in fact, all the observational information in the literature confirms this, whether we look at the more sparsely situated surface measurements or the balloon measurements or the satellite measurements of Dr. Spencer's. The greenhouse-induced warming just has not been detectable in the Arctic either in the troposphere or at the surface over this last -- this 40-year period. So on the average, the temperature has not risen in the north polar region. And in the test of the Arctic temperature record, the computer forecasts exaggerate the warming that should have already occurred due to the present accumulation of the minor greenhouse gases by a large amount. The exaggeration of the projections above reality is more than a factor of 10. And if the computer simulations are exaggerating the warming that should have already occurred, presumably they are also exaggerating the warming that should be occurring in the future. Now, I chose this example of testing the models to also talk about a related projection of severe and rapid Arctic warming that would then produce the polar ice to melt and cause rapid sea level rise. First notice that there has been no warming in the Arctic. Now, remember, the only amount of flooding from polar ice would come from ice that is not already floating in the sea. And often the west Antarctic ice sheet is pictured as the archetype for landlocked ice that will soon and rapidly melt and cause severe flooding as the sea level rises. But such claims have ignored the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics. A recent article in "Science" magazine explains that the ice sheet is so stable that the heat of climate warming, either natural or human-made, would take millennia to flow through the ice to the underlying rock bed carrying the ice. And the author of that article says: "It would be difficult to see how climate warming could trigger a collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet in the next century or two." <AUDIO BREAK> -- sea level rise estimates by the year 2100 have been lowering. They're now down to under a foot or so, and some modelers even predict on the behavior of ice in the high-latitude regions a decline in sea level with global warming as more snow at high latitudes becomes landlocked on inland mountains and then gets removed from ocean. So sea levels would drop in some models. The computer forecasts exaggerate the greenhouse warming by a large factor, but what is the maximum amount of warming due to increased greenhouse gases that can be expected to occur if we correct the exaggerated forecasts to the limits allowed by the actual temperature measurements, that is, the response of the earth? The answer is that the corrected warming in the next century at the present rates of increase in greenhouse gases will be less than a few tenths of a degree Centigrade. Spread over a century, that will be insignificant compared to the natural variability of the climate. Now, as for the stories we read in the newspaper on increased hurricanes, increased blizzards, destructive rainfall, butterfly extinctions, glaciers melting in Glacier National Park, these are hyperbolic stories which have no scientific basis in the popular media. In fact, I drew up the temperature from a colleague of the summertime temperatures in Glacier National Park over the last -- well, these start 1895 -- last hundred years, and there's been no summertime warming in the Glacier National Park that would cause those glaciers to retreat. Of course, the scientific issue is that glaciers respond not just to temperature, but to other effects as well. Now, the most important feature of the temperature record of the last 100 years is that most of the warming occurred before about 1940. But most of the greenhouse gases from human activities entered the atmosphere after 1940. That means most of the temperature rise of the last 100 years that occurred early in the century did not come from greenhouse gas activities because it came before these gases existed in the atmosphere. So the recent increase greenhouse gases cannot be the cause of the half-degree Centigrade warming or so that occurred early in the 20th century. Most of this warming must have been natural. Now, those natural changes must be understood in order to make an accurate assessment of the effect of human influences that would be added to the natural changes. Many of the natural changes of the climate system are poorly understood and certainly are poorly modeled by the computer simulations. And incomplete knowledge is certainly the case for one possible cause of global climate change, variations in the brightness of the sun. You probably know that the magnetism of the sun changes dramatically every 11 years or so. As it does, NASA satellites have told us that the sun brightens and fades in step with the changes in surface magnetism. This chart goes back 240 years and shows two different records, a record of the Northern Hemisphere land temperature of the earth -- there are no global temperatures that go back that far -- but also changes in the sun's magnetism, which is a marker for the brightness change. Now, you can see these two are highly correlated, and they suggest that brightness changes of the sun are one of the causes of temperature changes of the earth. Now, every few centuries or so, the sun's magnetism drops to very low levels for several decades. One example is the very low level of sun's magnetism during the 17th century, which pre-dates this chart. This fainter sun likely helped to cause a very cold climate period called the Little Ice Age, when the average global temperature was about 1 degree Centigrade cooler than today. Now, note that that isn't a major Ice Age. It's called the Little Ice Age, which is somewhat confusing in its name. And the final graph shows more quantitative records of the sun's magnetism going back over millennia that come from measurements of radio-carbon, that is, carbon-14 from tree rings, and beryllium-10 in ice core samples. These isotope records confirm the occurrence of the monder minimum every few centuries, for example, in the 13th, 15th and 17th centuries, those low dips in the curve, but also occasional grand magnetic maxima of the sun. Now, during the magnetically low periods, the sun should dim compared to the magnetically high intervals, when the sun should brighten. The brightness changes have to be estimated from computer models, and they're thought to be small, perhaps a few tenths percent or so, during these large swings in magnetism. But those tiny changes added up over decades are enough to explain global temperature swings on the order of 1 to 2 degrees Centigrade, depending on how sensitive you believe the climate to be. Now, the influence of the sun on the climate has also been seen in indirect records of temperature change going back 5,000 and 10,000 years. In the last 5,000 years, six out of seven coolings of about 1 or 2 degrees Centigrade correspond to long-term lulls in the solar magnetism. Records from Scandinavia, a more limited region, over the last 10,000 years, find 17 out of 19 coolings that are coincident with major drops in the sun's magnetism. As for the present time, simulations of the earth's climate over the last 100 years indicate that changes of several tenths of 1 percent sustained over several decades does explain at least half the variance in the temperature record, but here I must emphasize that we are very ignorant of the exact mechanism of the sun's changes and what the response of the climate system to them would be. Now, the past climate is an interesting indicator of the potential for warming catastrophes. Over the last 1,000 years or so, some climate change has tended to follow the changes in solar magnetism, but not solely, and such changes have had a profound effect on human health and the environment. Yet the knowledge of the physics of such natural causes of climate change is lacking. An interesting case study on the consequences of natural change is Europe over the past millennium. First to set the stage, Europe experienced its warmest temperatures in the last 2,000 years in the 10th to 12th centuries, when the sun was at sustained high levels of magnetism, higher than today's. This period was called the medieval climate optimum, and vineyards flourished in Britain. Additionally, it was a time of not only exploration, but cathedral, university and town building. But by the 13th century, the temperature was cooling Northern Europe. The prolonged winters and cold temperatures culminated in the Little Ice Age that lasted until the late 1800s, very recently. Although the global average temperature was only 1 degree Centigrade cooler than today, high latitude regions such as the North Sea were about 5 degrees Centigrade cooler than average. The harshest intervals were coincident with the sun's lulls in magnetism in the 13th, 15th and 17th centuries. As a result of the cooling, the severity and frequency of storms and sea flooding increased dramatically. Note that increased havoc in the climate record is closely linked, in the climate of the last thousand years, to cooler rather than warmer temperatures, which suggests that a little bit of global warming could mean less storm destruction. The sudden deterioration of the climate in the late Middle Ages following the decline in solar magnetism was devastating to pre-industrial Europe and is a tragic story of the environmental and human costs of cold global temperatures and the lack of technology to cope with the cold. For example, frequent shortened growing seasons of the 14th century produced severe famines and deaths from starvation and disease. Cannibalism was reported even in Western Europe. The life expectancy decreased by 10 years, from about 48 to 38 years. And of course, climate scientist Hubert Lamb has noted that it's probably not a coincidence, but part of a series of events, linking a disastrous flood in China in 1331 and 1332, which killed 7 million people and has to be the worst weather disaster in history, and that is linked to subsequent epidemics of the bubonic plague both in China and Europe. And during the cold in Europe and China in the 14th century, the population was cut in half between bubonic plague and war. Storminess increased in these cold intervals as well, and the climate history suggests that times of global cooling, not warming, are greater calamities. Storms back in the 17th century Little Ice Age were about three times more disastrous than floods in the 20th century. The point is that climate change is a natural feature of the earth's environment and has done so in the past and will continue in the future to have a great impact on humankind. The maximum amount of warming expected by correcting the exaggerated computer forecasts is a few tenths of a degree Centigrade. Spread over a century, that change will be insignificant compared to natural swings in the climate. And there are much greater upheavals in the climate as well. For example, at the end of the last ice age, when the temperature in Greenland rose 20 degrees Centigrade, from ice age to near current conditions, in less than 50 years. Now, we've been lucky compared to that period at the end of the last ice age, the Holocene. It has been relatively warm and stable, with global temperatures varying less than a few degrees Centigrade. However, even during the relative calm, the historical record shows sometimes severe consequences from modest climate variability, especially at the edges of the climate zones. Natural disasters from the climate are seen from human history to be important factors for policy planning. Considering how poorly the models perform, one must first develop better climate science before embarking on extremely costly mitigation whose efficacy for mitigation is slight. Thank you. (Applause.)
MR. ADLER:	Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Baliunas. Now, Dr. Baliunas noted, one of the primary reasons climate change is such a concern is because changes in the climate certainly affect humanity, certainly have affected humanity throughout history and will continue to do so. One possible impact that has been discussed and that has certainly received a fair amount of media attention is the potential impact that climate could have on changes in disease, in particular, concerns that if the earth warms, that tropical diseases will migrate northward and that populations will be exposed to -- human populations will be exposed to diseases that they are unprepared for. Diseases like malaria and the like will increase. This is obviously a very real concern, and to discuss this concern, we have with us today Dr. Sidney Shindell, who is professor emeritus in the Department of Preventative Medicine, the Medical College of Wisconsin. He has a CV that is too voluminous to go through in total, but let me just give some of the highlights. He holds his BS from Yale University, his MD from the Long Island College of Medicine and his LLB from George Washington University. He has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and the Public Health Service. In the past year, he is the recipient of the Frank L. Babbitt Memorial Award given by the SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn and the recipient of the 50-Year Recognition Award of the Wisconsin State Medical Society. Currently, he is working on a panel that is being coordinated by the American Council on Science and Health, looking at the question of whether or not climate change will have a significant impact on disease in the United States and around the world. Dr. Shindell.
SIDNEY SHINDELL (Professor Emeritus, Medical College of Wisconsin):	Thank you very much. I think that to tell you why I'm really here is because I've spent virtually my entire professional career trying to keep people from being sick rather than trying to treat them after they are. And my first job after my internship was to work with the Centers for Disease Control on the very monumental task of keeping South Pacific malaria out of this country at the end of World War II. We succeeded. And the way we succeeded was to get rid of the malaria that we had so that the new malaria could not get a foothold. Now, my work subsequently took me to a substantial portion of the world, and I've lived and worked in five other countries. I've been to 35 countries all told. My work took me to Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East initially, then to the Caribbean, Central Africa and the Pacific Rim, and then primarily Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and of course China and Japan. Now, in all of these places, disease patterns of course differ, and in many, I'm sorry to say, insufficient efforts are made -- were made and are made -- to control what we would term preventable diseases. Whether this happens through choice or because of lack of sufficient resources is not something I can address adequately at this brief presentation, but both must be considered when we project the possible effects of climate change should global warming occur. Now, let me tell you also, I'm not going to discuss whether global warming will occur. I will just say, if it does, these are the kinds of things we ought to look for. First of all, though, there are only six things that one can do, or one needs to do to prevent preventable disease, and they're simple. First, a safe water supply. And it's amazing to me how little of this earth has a safe water supply for its population. It is unquestionably the most precious commodity in the whole world. And this entails, of course, not simply a sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of your specific population, but adequate sewage treatment, avoidance of dangerous contaminants, things like that. And if we want to leave anything to our children and grandchildren, it's got to be safe water. Two, we have to provide adequate nutrition. This entails, of course, having sufficient foodstuffs available to provide nutrients needed for the feeding of a population of a specific area. And I think we could have a long discussion about, you know, how many people can the earth feed safely, adequately, even under the current situation? I won't get into that. At the moment, we do know that there are many hundreds of thousands of people in various parts of the world who are dying because there is insufficient food for them. Now, whether it's because we don't distribute it appropriately is not what I want to get into. The third thing is what we have to do is control the disease-bearing insects, as we did when we controlled malaria in this country. Those specific mosquitoes that carry malaria and the specific mosquitoes -- or I'm sorry, insects that are contaminating food are the most important and most common disease carriers in all parts of the world. Then we have to provide for basic medical services, especially at the point of delivery, the pre- and postnatal periods and the time of the birth of a new baby. When I first got to Iran, for example, many years ago, before we introduced some of our program, the chance of a child born there then was 50-50 to get to age 5. In one year's time, we could get them up to about 95 percent of the expected level in the United States. It can be done if we put our resources in the right place. Five, you have to immunize the children against the communicable diseases that are common in childhood and that do kill people, and the adults against infectious diseases that they may be exposed to. And then lastly, we need to control the dangerous substances, like narcotics and tobacco. And it's a study -- it's a whole, you know, discussion in itself. But the use of cigarettes alone are estimated to be associated with about a third of all cancers, and it increases heart disease by at least 50 percent. What would be the effect of global warming on these six items? Well, global warming would be expected to affect the availability of water, the ability to grow food, and it would be expected to modify the habitats of some of the disease-bearing insects. It could also affect the economy of some countries that currently enable their population to obtain the central medical services and are associated with, say, childbirth and immunization protection against some diseases. What then should we be doing in anticipation of global warming? The American Council on Science and Health has recently prepared a detailed analysis of the global climate change and human health on the assumption that it is going to change. And those who wish to obtain a copy can see me after. I have some forms that you can send in to ACSH, and the document will be out very, very shortly. I have a draft of it with me, and it should be done next week. Basically, what we're saying, though, is that nearly all of the potential adverse health effects of the projected climate change are significant real life problems today that have long persisted under stable climatic conditions. Bolstering efforts to eliminate or alleviate such problems would both decrease the current incidence of premature death and facilitate dealing with the health risks of any future climate change that might occur. Secondly, policies that weaken economies tend to weaken public health programs. Thus, it is likely that implementation of such policies would, A, increase the risk of premature death, and B, exacerbate any adverse health effects of a future climate change. What then is the optimal policy for dealing with hypothetical adverse health effects of projected human-induced climate change? The conclusions I will be presenting are those of the ACSH based on the working assumption that the predictions of the intergovernmental panel on climate change concerning the magnitude of the change and the adverse effects are correct. And these are these. The global burden of disease is formidable. Well understood public health measures could significantly decrease the current incidence of premature death, but resources for applying these measures are currently inadequate. Thus, work toward increasing these resources is prudent, regardless of the prospect for climate change. Second, measures to adapt economies, health care systems and living conditions to existing and foreseeable challenges to human health, such as infectious diseases, undernourishment, weather disasters, should be the focus of any policy concerning climate change and human health. And then lastly, the optimal approach for dealing with the prospect of climate change would include improvement of health infrastructures and exclude any measures that would limit public health resources. Now, with the above in mind, dealing with current and future public health problems should include: increased investment in improved drinking water and sanitation, in developing countries especially, of course; increased investment in the control of organisms that cause and spread disease, especially in developing countries; increased investment in improving food production and distribution in developing countries; increased investment in systems of emergency responses to extreme weather events; increased investment in the economic and health infrastructure of developing countries to increase access to medical services; increased investment in medical research regarding additional vaccines against infectious diseases; and then increased investment in research regarding energy technologies that entail low greenhouse gas emissions; and finally, further research on the potential health effects of projected climate changes in specific geographic areas. As I said before, ACSH has a document that expands extensively on my limited remarks, and I'd be happy to assist you in obtaining a copy. I hope that what I have presented here has been helpful, and I'd be happy to answer any questions when we get to the question and answer period. Thank you. (Applause.)
MR. ADLER:	Thank you, Dr. Shindell. I think one point that Dr. Shindell mentioned which I think everyone always needs to keep in mind in policy discussions about climate changes is the point that he made that insofar as mitigation policies reduce our economic well-being, that does have effects throughout the economy and can affect, for example, the availability of resources for medical care and the like. And CEI will this fall be publishing a study that looks at that specific question and tries to quantify and detail what are some of the public health implications of policies that do have as a result reducing economic growth and economic activity. Our next speaker is going to discuss some of the potential economic impacts of climate change policy, and this is an issue, as I mentioned before, about which there are many differing views. The Department of Energy, as I noted, has itself published studies on different sides of this issue in the past year alone. Our next speaker to address some of these concerns is Glenn Schleede, who is president of Energy Market and Policy Analysis, Incorporated, a consulting practice providing analysis, advice and assistance to organizations in industry and government on energy and related environmental and economic matters. Prior to forming EMPA, Mr. Schleede was vice president of New England Electric System and president of New England Energy, Incorporated. He also was executive associate director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and senior vice president of the National Coal Association and associate director for energy and science of the White House Domestic Council. Most recently, on behalf of the National Consumer Coalition, he did an analysis looking at the predicted economic impact for the state of Texas of policies to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. And he'll be discussing some of those findings and also the question of whether or not improvements in energy efficiency and the like can be seen as a cost-effective fix to climate change problems.
GLENN SCHLEEDE (Environmental Consultant, National Consumer Coalition):	Thank you very much for coming this morning, and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this distinguished panel. I am here to talk a little bit about the findings in a paper that I completed recently for the National Consumer Coalition. I believe there are copies of this out on the table. If not, if you'd give me your card later, I'd be happy to give you a copy. Unfortunately, I didn't listen very well when the instructions were given, so I didn't bring my copies of my overheads, and they may be rather difficult to see. But basically, I want to make two comments about this paper on the impact of potential greenhouse gas emission limits on the people and the economy of Texas. First, the objective of the analysis was to identify the impact of potential emission limits on real people, real families, real organizations, and real communities. As those of you who sit in Washington know and those of you who live outside of Washington probably often suspect, people sitting here often seem not to understand the impact of their decisions on real people outside the beltway, most of whom make a lot less money than they do, who will bear the costs of the decisions that are made here and don't enjoy a lot of the benefits that those of us who live in the Washington area do, like for example, a modern mass transit system paid for largely by the taxpayers throughout the country. It's still the case, though things are gradually improving, I think, and despite the best efforts and the work of the National Consumer Coalition and the other sponsors of this event, that consumers and taxpayers continue to be the people who are least represented in official Washington, unfortunately. Now, turning to the study, and I'm not going to say a lot about it, but I will make a few points. First of all, the basic approach was to rely on official government data. Second, to use arithmetic, not sophisticated models. There have been a lot of economic analyses done using macro-economic models. They've been done very well and the conclusions are good, but in this case, we wanted to see what's the real impact on real people out there in the real world. And what was done here was to calculate the cost of alternative actions that have been considered by the Clinton-Gore administration or by various environmental groups. I should add quickly here, these are not proposals that are necessarily on the table at this time. The administration has been very careful not to divulge what it really will propose or what it will accept in the negotiations in Kyoto. And there's good reason for not disclosing that in advance, because the impacts of those proposals could be rather significant and they might never be made or agreed to if they were well understood. So the approach here was to try to provide some information that would help people understand the impacts of these proposals that have been considered in the past and are likely to be seen again in the future. Even if these specific proposals that were looked at in the study are not made, other actions that would be necessary to reduce greenhouse gases are going to have similar kinds of effects. We just want to keep in mind here the magnitude of what is being discussed. Just looking at the carbon-dioxide emissions, one of the proposals that is on the table is to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2010. And this, I should point out, is one of the least ambitious proposals that are on the table. If you look at what European countries have proposed, they're much more severe than this. But just to reduce CO2 levels to 1990 levels would mean a 350-million metric ton reduction in carbon by 2010, which is a 20 percent reduction from the levels projected at that time. You would have a 427-million metric ton reduction by 2015 for a 24 percent reduction from projected levels. Those are just to get back to 1990 levels. If you took some of the more ambitious proposals, like cutting below the 1990 levels, then of course the numbers go up, the percentages go up. And remember, much of this CO2 that is of concern comes from burning fossil-based fuels. We have to think in terms of how much coal would we have to stop using, how much gasoline would we have to stop using, how much natural gas would we have to stop using in order to get to reductions like this? This next chart is merely a graph to show what the implications are of a 10 percent reduction out in the year 2010 and 2015, and I won't spend a lot of time on that. Basically, the study points out that there would have to be a significant reduction, in the case of Texas, in the coal, oil and natural gas that's used to produce electricity. Texas relies on those three fossil fuels for 85 percent of the energy it uses to produce electricity. Obviously, that means a -- if you were to tax that energy that's used there, that's going to push up electricity rates. If you push up electricity rates, that hits every home, business, organization in the country, and affects schools, government organizations. Schools, of course, will have to pay more money. That means more taxes to pay for the schools or reductions in services. Another idea that's often around is a gasoline tax, and there are numbers in the paper that show what the impact of that would be. But a tax on gasoline would, even at the 50-cent level that's been quite popular in a lot of discussions, mean $5 billion for Texas, because think in terms of that tax on gasoline, if it were to be imposed, means dollars coming out of every community across the country. If you just think in terms of a small community of 500 people, it costs $142,000 a year. And what does that mean for that small community? That means $142,000 less is spent in grocery stores, clothing stores, to pay for medical care, to pay for housing, education, or all the other things that people normally want to spend their money on. The statewide average annual earnings in Texas is around $27,000. That basically means, if that were the average salary in a small community, that's five jobs that have just disappeared. Chances are that the salaries are less than that in small communities, so it's maybe seven or eight jobs that have just gone out the door headed for Washington. The dollar outflow for any of these taxes is huge. You undoubtedly hear that don't worry about that, we will recycle that money and it'll all come back to you. And if you believe that, we'll think of something else that we can tell you. Now, just look at the costs of four of the tax alternatives. A 50-cent-per-gallon motor fuel tax would per capita basis in the state of Texas cost $287 per person per year for an average household with 2.75 people. I've never met one of those .75 people, but it's a useful number. Now we're up to $788,000, and you can see the other numbers on the list. Something I'd like to point out to you here is if you had a -- it's not really visible on the chart, but in the per-average household numbers, they range on this chart from $490 to $788 per year. That's for an average household. So if you take someone above average, if you take a couple with one child, the numbers are going to be slightly higher than this. Remember that the Congress just has been very proud of itself for giving a $500-per-child tax credit. Most any one of these taxes will take that and more, too, back. I want to close just by making a couple of comments on a report that was released by the Department of Energy on Friday, and I suspect the trucks are rolling to bring copies of it to every office on the Hill. The title of it, "The Scenarios of U.S. Carbon Reductions, the Potential Impacts of Energy Technologies by 2010 and Beyond." I don't know whether the media has looked over this or had a chance to look at this report yet, or I suspect not many on the Hill here have had a chance to look at it. I'd just like to suggest some things to keep in mind when you do look at it. It is filled with numerous unrealistic assumptions, one piled on top of another. First it assumes that the technologies that are described in the study will be successfully developed, that they'll be available when DOE estimates they will and will be as cheap and environmentally benign as DOE hopes. Any of you who have followed government-funded R&D efforts know that technologies always, if they are successful at all, they always become available later than promised, they cost more than promised and they have more environmental side effects than promised. The second major assumption in here is that governments will adopt the laws, the taxes and the tax incentives necessary to force adoption of these technologies, many of them as early as 2010. It also assumes that individuals and families will be able to afford these technologies and still have money left to pay for food, shelter, clothing, education, medical expenses. It also assumes that business and industry will be able to afford the technologies while still paying for their employees and staying in business. And it further assumes that the economy will be able to stand the displacement and the transfer payments that are involved in this effort. I've been looking at DOE's energy R&D spending for some time and that of its predecessor agencies. And DOE and those predecessor agencies have a sad history of unsuccessful R&D efforts and failed technology promises. Over a hundred billion (dollars) has been spent on energy R&D through those agencies. But nearly all the R&D successes that the country has had have been produced either by the private sector or by spin-offs from Defense R&D, such as now we're seeing great success with combined cycle facilities for generating electricity, gas-fired combined cycle facilities. That technology came heavily from U.S. Air Force-sponsored work on gas turbine technology for aircraft. The third point I would make in here, that DOE has a sad history of false claims about energy and energy cost savings from its R&D and regulatory programs, and if you'd like to have some specific examples, I'd be happy to provide them. What is this report? In my view, it's a cleverly written bit of propaganda designed to garner public, media and congressional support for pouring more tax dollars into DOE, its national laboratories and other contractors. Note that it was written by DOE national laboratories. Virtually all the so-called peer reviewers are present or former employees of DOE, its contractors, grantees, and subcontractors. The report doesn't tell you how many tax dollars DOE wants for its, quote, "vigorous commitment to develop and deploy new technologies." The release of the report was timed to support the president's recent unrealistic statement that greenhouse gas reductions could be achieved without cost in the upcoming October 6th White House conference on global warming. This is the first of three reports that you'll see in the next few days. There's another one by the DOE national laboratory directors that apparently hasn't been released yet, and there's a third panel of the President's Council for Science and Technology, a panel headed by Dr. Holdrin of Harvard, that will be unleashing more rhetoric to support spending more tax dollars. You can count on DOE, its labs and contractors touting this report, along with the various advocacy groups. You might also look when you're reading this report, and I urge the people that work here on the Hill to look at what DOE does with its so-called R&D money. Much of that money doesn't go for efforts that increase scientific knowledge or move the technology ball forward. Instead, a lot of it goes for out-and-out promotional activities. A lot of it -- I just pulled up some stuff on the DOE's Internet to look at where some of that so-called R&D money goes. Here's the Solar Energy Industry Association received $1.629 million for solar energy market promotion. Energy Efficient Export Council received $2.7 million for more export efficient technology. Here's the U.S. Export Council for Renewable Energy, $1.3 million. Alliance to Save Energy has several grants, a $500,000 one; $173,000 one; $1.25 million one; and a $58,000 one -- (unintelligible). But the point is a lot of this money is not R&D. It is purely propaganda activity. Thank you. (Applause.)
MR. ADLER:	Thank you, Mr. Schleede. On the subject of energy conservation technologies and renewable energy technologies, I would just make two comments. First is those of you who have not already seen it, the Cato Institute a few weeks ago published an excellent report looking at the record of renewable energy both in terms of its economic effects, but also its environmental impacts. It was written by Dr. Robert Bradley, who is president of the Institute for Energy Research. It provides a really good overview of both the economic and environmental impacts of renewable energy, pointing out, for example, that some forms of renewable energy have not had the environmental benefits that some thought. Hydropower, once touted as the environmentally sound energy source, no longer is promoted as such. And many environmental groups are now calling for moratoria on the expansion of wind farms because of the problems involved with bird kills that have been experienced in this country and elsewhere when farms have been put up. The other thing is a comment that when I hear that we're going to have new energy-efficient technologies that are going to work just as well, I think that some may want to think about the current controversy that is raging about low-flow toilets and low-flow shower heads, which were also promised to perform just as well as their predecessors, but are currently the subject of a lot of congressional oversight and public debate given -- or due to consumer -- or lack of consumer satisfaction. Now, our final speaker before we go to questions and answers is someone that you would necessarily immediately think of as talking about the issue of climate change and climate change policy. And that is Frank Gaffney, who is the founder and director of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. On Capitol Hill, Frank Gaffney needs no introduction. His work on defense and national security policy is well known and widely recognized, whether it's the security briefs he faxes out regularly, his columns in "The Washington Times" or his columns in "Defense News." And he's also known because in the Reagan administration, he was deputy assistant secretary of Defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy and also assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy. But he has also become very interested in this issue because when you begin to think about the federal government and the largest users of carbon-based fuels, you realize that the military is probably the largest user of carbon-based fuels in the U.S. government. And secondly, whenever you're talking about signing a treaty or participating in a treaty, an international treaty that could subject certain U.S. economic or other decisions to multilateral control or input, that there are national security concerns to be raised there as well. To discuss some of these concerns and the reason why the Center for Security Policy has become interested in this issue, let me introduce Frank Gaffney. (Applause.)
FRANK GAFFNEY (Center for Security Policy):	Thank you very much. I feel as though all of my punches have been telegraphed between what you've said, Jonathan, and what Senator Hagel said. But I come to you with a sense of real humility not only because I am not normally involved in these sorts of issues and because I'm in the company of people who are vastly more familiar with the science and many of the other related issues than am I. I also am going to tell you right up front what may be a somewhat unusual admission, certainly for me, and perhaps anybody in a briefing like this, I haven't a clue what the precise implications of this treaty are for our national security. But what really worries me is I don't think anybody else does either. Not in the Pentagon, certainly not in the White House, and apart from those like Senator Hagel who have taken a keen interest in this, even people here on the Hill. And even he, I think -- as he said, he'd like real answers -- even he is dealing mostly on the basis of gut instinct. And that's basically what I'm going to be trying to do here as well, and just amplify some of the areas that we think ought to be of concern and ought to be the subject of very intense scrutiny, analysis and, not least, debate, certainly before the United States commits itself to this treaty, to say nothing of imposing unilaterally through executive orders the sorts of constraints that are apparently under active consideration by the Clinton administration. Let me just tick off a couple of the places where I think concerns ought to be given this kind of scrutiny. It is after all the case that the Defense Department and the military services that comprise the tooth part of the tooth-tail regime over there are the largest consumers in the country of fossil fuels, and therefore the most serious emitters of greenhouse gases from those fuels. Consequently, as one goes through the sorts of areas that will be at issue or at risk if we are obliged by fiat, executive or multinational, to reduce our military's fossil fuel emission, are the following. First, the readiness of our forces, and by that I mean, obviously, the literal, day-to-day ability to go fight the nation's wars if we have to. And I hope I don't have to, you know, put the caveat out, but let me just say it: I'm hoping that we won't ever have to do it again, but history does not give us much confidence that <Audio Break> flying hours, steaming hours, movement of tanks or other armored or jet vehicles, to prepare our forces to fight the nation's wars. Now, an area that I'm rather more comfortable than the science of global climate change is the condition of our forces today. And I will tell you I believe they are dangerously close to being hallowed out already as a result of the sustained reduction of the investment we've been making in them for over 12 years now. This is showing up in readiness and we can debate it if you would like, whether airplane crashes like the kind we saw in the past week are a reflection of that, or whether they're a reflection of other problems that I think are not unrelated. But the reality is if you make our forces -- force them to go to war without knowing how to fight in the equipment they have, they will be killed in war even if they don't get killed in peace time. This is a tradeoff that has to be very seriously and carefully weighed out. A related issue is presence. Our nation's ability to maintain forces overseas. As I'm sure you can appreciate, steaming naval battle groups in the Western Pacific, to say nothing of the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, consumes lots of fossil fuels. Even nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are escorted by ships that are not, and they fly aircraft of course that are not. And one will have to weigh out whether if you are going to have some cap on the amount of the emissions we produce, whether in peace time the nation will be able to afford to have these battle groups and air wings and so on, consuming our allotment. A related question, and again I don't know the answer to this, but it has to be thought out. If we have foreign bases overseas, a key part of presence, are we going to have our emissions count against our host government's quotas, or will they count against ours somehow. And if they count against theirs, will they really want us there, which may mean that they don't, which may mean in turn that we're not, which may mean in turn that people are thinking, well, the United States isn't around. Or the United States, going back to readiness, isn't fit, so this is a pretty good time to start a war. Or at least to see if we can press our agenda perhaps at their expense. The willingness to go to war -- again, not because we seek out opportunities to do it, but because we believe it is imperative in our interests to do it, may also be affected. If suddenly in a much more material way than is ordinarily the case, the price for the economy of fighting the nation's wars may be within this zero sum allotment that you have to destroy the rest of the economy, because there go all those fossil fuel emissions. Again, to some extent all of this will depend on where the levels are set and how they're set and by whom and when. The fees are tradeoffs that may, I fear, cause others to sense an opportunity for aggression at the expense of our national security and interests. And finally, and this is very hard to get your hands around again without all the answers to the other questions I've just mentioned, but there are real procurement issues. Just to give you one, perhaps absurd, example -- will we have to in the future subordinate decisions about the survivability, or the mission effectiveness of our armed forces equipment to their fuel efficiency? Could we see smaller, lighter, main battle tanks that don't have the armor, that don't have the guns, that don't have the powerful engines and mobility that we believe are required so that our troops can survive the battlefields, let alone prevail on them because they're gas guzzlers? And if you think I'm making this up, last week the deputy undersecretary of defense, a new position, for environmental security -- the woman Senator Hagel was speaking of a moment ago, touted an advanced aircraft engine that will go in the next generation, she says, of bombers and air transports and fighter aircraft and that has greatly reduced expenses and maintenance and so on. But offers, she thinks, a 40 percent savings in fuel consumption. Now that's a very good thing. I mean, if you're involved in combat and logistics and so on, you understand that you'd like to reduce that. And if it does not come in fact at the expense of the performance of those aircraft, I think nobody would complain. But let's be under no illusion, ladies and gentlemen, even if that pans out as a technology, that is a technology that isn't here today, may or may not be here in time for the next generation, assuming we can afford to buy the next generation of aircraft. But if we're really serious about reducing the environmental impact of the nation's military in terms of these greenhouse gasses, somebody's going to have to not only perfect that technology, but retrofit it into all of the existing aircraft and the similar things would apply of course for ships and tanks and so on. Well, again, that may be a very good thing if it doesn't reduce our military capabilities. But trust me, nobody has budgeted for that retrofit. To the contrary, there isn't enough money to even buy the next generation of these pieces of equipment, let alone go back and make the current generations that will be retained for some considerable period of time, fuel efficient, environmentally friendly, green -- whatever you want to call it. So, let me just close by saying I think there is in addition to all these concerns one perhaps overarching concern. If, as I understand it, one of the schemes that's being cooked up in order to try to address the very legitimate concern that you're going to have a bunch of countries that pollute a lot, but not just up to our standards yet, left out of the treaty, you're going to have them brought into the treaty with some sort of admission credit system that they can barter with those of us who emit more than we're supposed to. Well first of all, you've got this super national mechanism that is going to be created presumably to arbitrate and manage and regulate these sorts of barter transactions, which I personally find unappetizing as an American, to say nothing of someone who generally doesn't favor over-regulation anyway -- domestic, let alone international. But, think about it in a national security context. What if it turns out the war we have to fight is with a country that is a net negative emitter? Could it be the case that in a war situation, we have to get them to sell us some of their unutilized emissions so that we can go fight them? Or if not them, if that is too absurd, how about their friends in the non-aligned movement who will also have these things to trade? So, I mean at some point I think it becomes clear that if this thing is not so absurd as to be ludicrous, it is at least problematic -- highly problematic from the national security point of view. And if so, it would seem to me that one has to be absolutely positively convinced of the science, and dead certain that the therapy that is being proposed here addresses the scientists' concerns before one would go down this road with potentially devastating consequences. Yes, for our sovereignty, but also for our national security and our national interests. Thank you.
JONATHAN ADLER:	Now I would like to turn the podium over to Sterling Burnett, who's my counterpart at the National Center for Policy Analysis and heads their environmental program and he will open the floor for questions and give some concluding remarks.
MR. STERLING BURNETT:	First I'd like to just thank everyone for showing up today. We've had a good turnout and it's an important issue I believe will go far beyond December in Kyoto. That's not going to settle anything. Then I'd like to take time to thank all of our panelists once again for being here. (Applause.) To conclude before I open up for questions, the question is, it seems to me, why now? Why are we holding this briefing now rather than next week or next year? And it's because something's going to happen in December that we have to make a policy decision on, and scientists don't make these decisions -- science supposedly is a value neutral discipline. You try and find facts. You try and discover what will happen if we do this, or what will happen if we do that. Economics is supposedly a value free discipline. It can tell you what it will cost the economy if we undertake this action as opposed to that action. But it doesn't tell us which action to take, nor does science. These are value decisions. In December we're going to be making some pretty serious value decisions. What course should America and the rest of the world take to solve what may be a problem? Now, is it a problem? You consistently hear -- constantly hear about the consensus in the scientific community. If you haven't gotten it before, you should've gotten it from the scientists that we have here -- there is no consensus within the scientific community that humans are causing catastrophic global climate change. It's just not there. Scientists disagree on this matter. And the scientists, most importantly, who work on this closest, climatologists, really disagree on this matter. What about the economics? Well there is largely a consensus on the economic side. And, in every study done up till now, except for one done by the World Resources Institute, who has a horse in this race, and the new one by the Department of Energy, shows enormous economic consequences flowing from these treaties. Why is that important? Not because of dollars and cents. We're a relatively wealthy country. We can give up a lot. But poorer countries, the developing countries, are harmed as well. Even if only we are capped, countries that must grow economically trade with us and we can't buy their goods if our economy slows down. They have no place to go. And these are the very countries that Dr. Shindell pointed out, don't have the health infrastructures now. They can't take care of themselves now. If their economies can't grow -- wealth is what makes you healthy. And if their economies can't grow, they will never be healthy. They will always live under the threats of plague, pestilence and famine. And I think that is what's important. If we want a better world, I mean, it's a value judgment. If we want a better world for human beings, we're going to have to let people grow economically. We're going to have to let countries grow economically. This treaty won't do that. So it will affect their health, it will affect their economic well being, and as John or I could either one talk ad nauseam, and it won't help the environment, which is what they're touting this as. We must save the environment. I'll close with that. You can see more of my comments on disease and some of the economics (and stuff?) in the package you've all received. I'll answer questions very briefly. We ran a little late. Questions?
MR. BURNETT:	Please identify yourself as you ask the questions.
MR. DEROY MURDOCK:	Hi. My name's DeRoy Murdock (ph). I'm with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and also write political commentary, most frequently for MSNBC and the Washington Times. I have a specific question and a general one. I think for Dr. Baliunas, on the question of computer models that you say have been exaggerating climatological phenomena, is there some bias in the programming that causes this exaggeration? Are they looking at the figures somewhat honestly and yet coming up with exaggerated results? Is there something in the programming that is causing this exaggeration? And then a more general question for anyone else who wishes to answer it. There was a quote last week from Ted Turner who said, referring to global warming, "Have you been outside? It's boiling out there." My experience as someone who lives in New York City, we have just finished up our second incredibly mild summer, so much so that I've gone out on summer evenings in July and August wearing flannel shirts. I remember very well waking up the morning of July 16th. It was so cold in my apartment July 16th, that I went into my closet, dragged out the space heater, plugged it in and warmed up my apartment in July. Is this something unusual? Can we draw any conclusions from this? Is there in fact some global cooling going on, or at least cooling in New York City that we don't know about?
DR. BALIUNAS:	I'll start with the models. As Dr. Spencer mentioned, the models make an important assumption which is that (really?) effective water vapors amplify any warming that comes from the minor greenhouse gasses. His data challenged the strength of that positive feedback and theoretical work that's been done by a Professor Lindzen at MIT -- also has challenged this notion. The warming that the models produced is not unexpected based on that assumption. I wanted to hold up -- if you can see it or you can pass it around -- also another bias in the models is the uncertainties. The uncertainties of (the physics), not only about water vapor. The effect of doubling CO2 is this small bar over here. That's the amount of energy going into the climate system. These are uncertainties in just three effects and clouds are not even on this chart. These are flux adjustments of 25 times larger than the effect of doubling CO2 that have to be made in the models is the uncertainty of motions of energy going from the equator to the poles, is the uncertainty of our knowledge of humidity. But we're trying to calculate the effect of this, given uncertainties as large as this and this isn't even a definitive comprehensive listing of the uncertainties. So the models do have uncertainties.
DR. SPENCER:	Or high margin of error, if you will.
DR. SPENCER:	Or another way of looking at it is that they can only -- the atmosphere is very complex. They can only put in a certain amount of that complexity in the models. The models are incomplete. They approximate some very important processes in a very crude way, so they can't put in all of the things that if a cloud forms and causes this thing to happen, which then causes something else to happen, which then causes something else to happen -- they don't have that level of sophistication. And it turns out that the way the atmosphere likes to work is to get rid of deviations from what's normal. You know, to smooth things out. So that again we get back to this idea of feedback that until they have the physics of the negative feedbacks that are in the real climate system in the GCNs, the GCMs are going to produce estimates of global warming which are too high. And we see that as the models get better, their estimates of global warming keep coming down. The latest global warming has now been reduced 30 percent between the forecast in 1990 and the forecast in 1995.
MR. BURNETT:	Not only has the rate of warming decreased, but the time span over which the warming is supposed to occur has doubled, and that's another interesting topic. As far as the general question, I don't know if we need to answer it, but I'll say this -- 1995 was touted as being the warmest year on record. Dr. Baliunas had some stuff to say about that at one time. But 1996 was one of the coldest years in the last 70 years and it completely confounded the models. The models keep showing every year should get warmer, not that all of sudden '96 and '97, unusually cold years so far -- so far. We may get a lot of warming in December. I doubt it, but we may. But so far, it's one of the coldest years since recording. And Texas has had a very mild Summer. Being from Texas, I appreciate that.
MR. MURDOCK:	Thank you.
MR. MARK WHITTINGTON:	I'm Mark Whittington. I work with Senator Larry Craig. I was wondering if any of the panelist have been invited to the October 6 White House show?
DR. SPENCER:	No.
DR. BALIUNAS:	I'm sure that my invitation is in the mail, but I haven't gotten it.
MR. GAFFNEY:	(Inaudible).
MR. GAFFNEY:	I'd like to say on that, because it does seem to me that if one takes anything away from this discussion, it ought to be that there are reasonable arguments to be made at odds with the administration's position. And I, as a taxpayer, find it offensive in the extreme if we wind up being obliged to pay as taxpayers for some White House conference that does not in fact permit a real give and take between people who have respectable, albeit discordant views on this issue. If it turns out to be an amen chorus for the Clinton Administration's particular spin, that's frankly an abuse of taxpayer dollars. It should be billed as a campaign expense or some other financing scheme that might be arranged.
MR. BURNETT:	Perhaps the Clinton Administration doesn't want to invite un-American people to the White House for their treaty. Since anyone who disputes this according to the gentleman that was unnamed earlier, but I will go ahead and name, Bruce Babbitt, the Secretary of Interior, called anyone that disputes the science behind global climate change theory un-American. We can no longer debate the science in the scientific community. If you disagree or if you're skeptical, you're un-American.
MR. BURNETT:	You. And this will be the last question. Go ahead.
SPEAKER:	(Off-mike).
MS. BALIUNAS:	I'll answer the solar question. Maybe I'll leave to you the time scale. The solar radiation within one solar cycle, 10 years -- 11 years, changes by about a tenth percent or so. That is too small an amplitude and too short a time scale to have much of an impact. But the question is what about the decade or century time scale, and that's where research indicates indirectly that changes of up to several tenths percent occur on this time scales, and those several tenths percent changes would then have an influence on the climate of (inaudible) degree, seven grade or so. Several tenths -- yes, four tenths percent say over a time scale of 100 years. Less than half percent.
DR. SPENCER:	The point you made about carbon dioxide having a very long time scale. That's true, but that wasn't my point. My point was since water vapor is 95 percent of our natural greenhouse effect, why isn't it that we don't see global warming when water vapor varies by tremendous amounts? Why doesn't it cause the climate to go off into a warmer state when water vapor happens to increase due to whatever, El Ninos, for instance. El Nino is probably the best example because it causes a net global warming and increase in water vapor. And the answer is because there are other feedbacks involving water which cause the climate system to cool down again. And that's the part that we really don't understand yet is the effect of moisture in all its myriad forms, clouds, water vapor in the lower and the upper atmosphere, and how they can have a negative feedback on any temperature change. So but what you said is true. Yes. The CO2 is a very long time scale, but that's a different issue.
MR. BURNETT:	I'd like to just close by recommending that what the science is pretty clear on is that there's no decision that has to be made by December of 1997. Scientists who support the theory of human caused global climate change have written that we can wait up to 25 years before we have to take action and only suffer a .02 degree centigrade warming. This is negligible. As a result, we can make drastic deep cuts in CO2 energy now, or we can make slightly deeper cuts in 2020 when A, we have more scientific evidence one way or the other for this and, B, we have better technologies so any changes we will make will have less economic dislocation, and C, hopefully in the meantime we will have taken care of some of the public health problems in developing countries and that still remain in the US. We have kids that go un-immunized here. But if we're spending money to halt global warming, we're not spending money on them to immunize and take care of other diseases. So there's no need to precipitous action now. Thank you all for being here. (End of tape.) Home \| Support Us \| All Issues \| Social Security Debate Central \| Contact Us

Transcript

A BRIEFINGON GLOBALWARMING,THE OTHER SIDEOF THE STORYSponsored by the NationalCenter for PolicyAnalysis andCompetitive EnterpriseInstitute.

A BRIEFING
ON GLOBAL
WARMING,
THE OTHER SIDE
OF THE STORY

Sponsored by
the National
Center for Policy
Analysis and
Competitive
Enterprise
Institute.