Science behind Kyoto Treaty unsound, experts say
Consensus boosted by media myths

CAMBRIDGE, England, March 1 – The science behind the Kyoto climate treaty is faulty and the apparent consensus behind the drive to implement its provisions is based on media myths, a group of experienced and respected experts said.

A report, published by the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF) said the science used to justify future government action to curb carbon dioxide emissions was leading politicians to take flawed actions which could actually be harmful or counter-productive.

Politicians were being urged to solve a problem that might not exist.

“This (ESEF) distinguished workgroup has concluded that the IPCC’s findings about human influence on the climate are not supported by the underlying science,” said William O’Keefe of the U.S. Marshall Institute, who helped prepare the report.

The Kyoto treaty was a response to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reported in 1996 that it had identified human influence on climate change.

This committed the industrialised nations to cut output of carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other so-called greenhouse gases - said to trap heat from the Sun and warm the climate - to an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.

Humans cause Global Warming?
The IPCC report was interpreted by governments as meaning that global warming was happening and that it was being caused by human industrial activity, mainly the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

Some environmentalists, often from politically active organisations seeking socialistic solutions to problems, said the increased temperature would cause havoc with the world's climate over the next century. Melting polar ice would raise sea levels, inundating low-lying areas and wiping out some island nations. Agriculture would be decimated, causing starvation and disease. Severe storm frequency would increase inexorably.

But many reputable scientists contested the IPCC findings. Some said a warming climate, natural or human induced, would actually have great benefits for agriculture in some areas.

And last year President George W Bush said the U.S. would not ratify the Kyoto treaty, effectively killing it. Bush said the treaty was based on unsound science, would be ineffective anyway because developing nations like India and China, huge emitters of CO2, were not included, and would do great damage to the U.S. economy to no real purpose.

Last month Bush announced his own greenhouse-gas initiative aimed at controlling emissions related to economic output, rather than Kyoto’s absolute targets.

The ESEF scientists in the report also said biased or lazy reporting in the media had left the impression with the public that only a few, unrepresentative scientists disagreed with the governmental drive to implement the Kyoto treaty provisions.

Lazy or Biased reporting?
News organisations like the BBC, Britain’s state-controlled TV and Radio organisation, report human induced global warming as a proven fact and never add that it is an area of great controversy.

Reporters from organisations like the BBC also leave an impression that only a few extreme and probably unbalanced right-wingers argue against IPCC dogma, when in fact there are many reputable scientists across Europe and the United States who doubt that human action is leading to global warming, or if it is, that the proof is far from conclusive.

“In the UK, it is a media myth that there are only a few scientists who disagree with the view of global warming on which the Kyoto Protocol is predicated,” said the University of London’s Professor Philip Stott.

Climate change science totally uncertain
“This new publication, compiled by some of the finest climate scientists and economists, undermines this comfortable conceit. Stressing anew the total uncertainty of climate change science, the authors challenge the key antinomy at the heart of Kyoto – namely that climate is one of the most complex systems known, yet we claim we can manage it by trying to control a small set of factors, namely greenhouse gas emissions. The dangers of such a viewpoint for public policy are made abundantly apparent,” Stott said.

The study concludes that IPCC projections of climate change are based on inadequate models and assumptions about the future that are unknown, and wants a particular government agency to take over responsibility for future research.

The ESEF is a science and policy think tank.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger, Robert Sproull of the University of Rochester, and Dr Lenny Bernstein, compiled the report. Other participants were –

Albert Arking (Johns Hopkins University, Richard Cooper (Harvard), Will Happer (Princeton) David Legates (University of Delaware) Richard Lindzen (MIT), Rodney Nichols (President, New York Academy of Sciences) Roger Sedjo (Resources for the Future)

Neil Winton - March 2002

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