New climate change offensive

The doomsayers of climate change have launched a new offensive against fossil fuels (see related story, p. 40). The oil industry's first response must be to point out the many weaknesses in the United Nations document from which the assault emerged.

"The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," says a ministerial declaration from the second conference of parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The declaration goes on to say that, unless something is done, the "global average surface temperature" by 2100 will be 1-3.5° C. higher than it was in 1990. Average sea level as a consequence will be 15-95 cm higher than it is at present.

The changes, says the ministerial declaration, will "result in significant, often adverse, impacts on many ecological systems and socio-economic sectors, including food supply and water resources, and on human health. In some cases, the impacts are potentially irreversible." Naturally, developing and small island countries will suffer more than others.

Sacrifice to weather

Most significant about this latest U.N. effort to make nations render sacrifice to the weather is new support from the U.S. Timothy Wirth, under-secretary of State for global affairs, made passage of the declaration possible when he announced the U.S. would support a definite schedule for specific limits on emissions from oil and coal.

International pressure thus will build to curb use of fossil fuels even though reasons to incur the huge costs of doing so are, if anything, weaker than ever.

The tone of the ministerial declaration betrays a prejudice toward alarmist and excessive remedy. A "discernible human influence" on the climate should surprise no one. The climate is a complex and reactive system of which human life is a growing part-but just a part. People have influenced the climate since the first person took his or her first breath. That the effect is now discernible says as much about human powers of observation as it does about human populations and emissions of carbon dioxide, all of which are indeed growing. The effect is no reason to panic.

Human contributions to climate change occur within a constantly changing and very adaptive system. In predicting the size of the increment by which the "global average surface temperature" will rise in the next half-century, the U.N. conference presumes ridiculously much. The climate does not hold still long enough to allow its temperature to be taken in a manner sufficient to produce such a handy baseline average. And the best available measurements of global temperatures, those available from satellite observations, are reported to indicate no warming trend at all. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that change, whether it comes from human activity or not, worsens conditions overall.

A revealing controversy erupted after the U.N. conference made its declaration public. It seems a statement attesting to scientific uncertainty over climate change disappeared from the text. The obviously political maneuver discredits the process.

Scientific uncertainty is the issue; hiding it amounts to deception. The U.N., now with U.S. support, is warming up to a demand that the world forgo a measure of economic progress. The reasons should be specific and compelling. The science of climate change does not provide such reasons and probably never will. At this point, the "threat" of climate change is a political concoction and nothing else.

Pattern of manipulation

The oil and gas industry must show how the latest ministerial declaration fits a pattern of political manipulation built on unwarranted fears and the distortion of science. It won't be easy, and it won't be enough.

The industry also must resist the unfair notion that its obvious economic interest in the issue disqualifies it from a voice in the discussion. Then it must communicate a position that contrasts the politically muddled science of climate change to the certainty of sacrifice that the U.N. would extract from the people of the world.