Featuring sensational but implausible weather phenomena ― such as tornadoes ripping through Los Angeles, a blizzard in New Delhi, grapefruit-sized hail pounding Tokyo and a single day sweltering-to-freezing temperature change in New York City ― the movie’s unmistakable purpose is to scare us into submitting to the Greens’ agenda: domination of society through control of energy resources.

This column has addressed Green extremism and global warming many times in the past ― “Eco-Imperialism’s Deadly Consequences” ; “Global Warming not a WMD”; and “Global Warmers Admit No Solutions,” for example. So suffice it to say that there’s no credible evidence humans are altering global climate in any measurable way and, to the extent that global climate is changing ― as it always has and always will ― there’s nothing that humans can do about that change except to adapt.  

The oldest movie marketing strategy in the world is to tie in to some swirl of controversy ― it sells tickets. These filmmakers go one step further by pointing an accusing finger at each one of us with their plea to go “carbon-neutral.”

The film’s producers say they discovered that they were actually contributing to global warming by making the movie. To compensate for putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, they decided to go carbon-neutral ― a mix of energy conservation and tree planting, they claim, helped make up for their eco-error.

“It’s a small part of a very big problem, but it’s a start,” the producers reasoned. For what the rest of us can do, we’re directed to a Web site called futureforests.com, where you’ll learn that you (unfortunately) produce carbon dioxide, “well, just by living.”

Futureforests.com says you need to “make a commitment to reduce your emissions and have that published” and “buy products, which will compensate for every ton of carbon dioxide you produce, or buy gifts which neutralize a friend’s emissions.”

Futureforests.com also features a celebrity section where you can learn about what celebrities are doing to go carbon-neutral. The rock band Foo Fighters , for example, is also planting trees as their personal contribution to fighting global warming.

“We measured the amount of carbon dioxide” created by the production, manufacture and distribution of [the band’s latest album] and [we are] planting enough trees in the Tensas River forest and wildlife reserve in Louisiana, to re-absorb that carbon dioxide over their lifetime,” said the band.

But if global warming were a real problem and planting trees were the answer, forest products giant Weyerhaeuser would seem to have already solved a good part of the problem with the 130 million trees it plants every year.

The filmmakers’ nauseating elitism, ignorance and politics are displayed on the Web site, which features personal responses of the filmmakers to dopey questions such as “One last day, where on Earth would you spend it?”

Director Roland Emmerich said he’s spend his in “my house in Puerto Vallarta.” Editor David Brenner said, “On Kauai … as soon as they get a Starbucks.” VFX supervisor Karen Goulekas said, “Having a party on the beach in front of my house in Marina Del Ray.” Actor Jake Gyllenhall said “On Martha’s Vineyard, with all my friends.”

“Your message to the world, given a billboard for one final day, what would you put or say on it?,” is another deep question asked of the filmmakers. Writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff said, “Out of 20 million species, why is there always one who has to go out and ruin it for the others?” Emmerich said “No more Bush.”

Many of the cast and crew have yet to respond on the Web site to these and other penetrating inquiries ― I can hardly wait to learn more about why we should take global warming seriously. So far, global warming appears to be just an excuse for Hollywood hedonism, human-bashing and electing John Kerry.

The movie’s undeniable political overtones verge on the irresponsible, especially in an election year. Aside from the director’s acknowledged anti-Bush sentiment, the actor who plays the evil U.S. vice president has more than a coincidental physical resemblance to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The film is not rated yet, but perhaps the Motion Picture Association of America will consider a new rating for The Day After Tomorrow ― a zero.

Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).

Respond to the Writer

Cold Kills Hundreds in India and Bangladesh

South Asia has experienced a particularly cold winter this year, with the result that at least 380 people have died as a direct result, according to Agence France Presse (Jan. 4).

In India , 261 have died so far. AFP comments, Most of the cold deaths in India have been recorded in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which saw a weekend low of four degrees Celsius (39.2 F), registered at the Hindu holy city of Varanasi.

The causes of the deaths have mostly been linked to poverty and lack of access to energy it appears, Homeless people in Bangladesh lit waste to keep themselves warm, as the government and voluntary and political groups distributed warm clothes for the poor, officials said.

Hit by the Hand that Fed Them?

New Zealand s rent-seeking forest owners suffered an unexpected blow when the island nations government nationalized carbon credits at the end of last year.

New Zealands National Business Review reported (Dec. 30), A group representing the owners of forests planted after 1989, the only forests eligible to earn lucrative carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol, says the government is stealing $2.6 billion from them by fiat. In New Zealand , the government plans to hold the earnings for its own programmes and estimates the value of the credits during the first Kyoto commitment period, 2008 to 2012, to be worth $2.6 billion. Forest owners associations like the epyonymous Forest Owners Association (FOA) are on record as claiming that the decision to nationalise the income from carbon credits is an infringement of property rights, but the newly formed Kyoto Forest Owners Association (KFOA) says the decision is possibly the largest private property theft in New Zealands history.

The Review went on to relate how a KFOA spokesman had told a local newspaper exactly why his colleagues had sought these rents in the first place: A lot of investors had gone in partly because of this (carbon credits)and they had not expected to have the government take their return by fiat. After all, we grew them (the carbon sinks) in our trees–they are ours to do with what we like–they are not the Government’s, Mr. Dickie said.

Energy analyst Glenn Schleede has once again exposed the problems with wind power in comments he has submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is conducting an economic and environmental analysis of a proposed offshore wind farm.

The wind farm proposed by Winergy LLC would be located five miles off the coast of the eastern shore of Virginia. In a preliminary analysis, the Corps determined that the project would not require an Environmental Impact Statement. Schleede disagrees, saying that the Corps has “underestimated the potential environmental impactincluding onshore impact” of the project.

The wind farm would produce approximately 2.5 billion kWh of electricity per year, assuming a generous 30 percent capacity factor. The wind turbines themselves would cover 57 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, yet would produce slightly less electricity than a “new baseload 350 MW gas-fired combined cycle generating unit,” which would “occupy only a few acres.” Moreover, the amount of electricity produced would only equal approximately 3.3 percent of the total electricity produced in Virginia.

Schleede points out several potential adverse effects that should be mitigated as a condition to awarding any permits, including impacts that would not be limited to the 57 square miles of ocean. “Feeding such a potentially large (975 MW, at times), highly variable (from 0 to 975 MW), and often unpredictable amount of electricity into an onshore transmission line and electric grid would be a significant burden on existing onshore transmission capacity and the stability of a regional electric system that must be kept in balance (e.g., voltage, frequency).”

The addition of wind capacity would likely “impair rather than enhance electric system reliability,” says Schleede. The Corps should also take into account the need for backup generation and transmission capacity as part of the full costs of the wind farm.

The Corps should also have a firm grasp of wind energy economics and especially the role of federal subsidies, says Schleede. “In some cases, the value of the subsidies may exceed the revenue wind farm owners receive from the electricity that they sell. Schleede estimates that Winergys proposed wind farm would receive an annual tax credit of more than $46 million. The project would also qualify for accelerated depreciation and would be able to write off the entire $900 million in estimated capital costs in 6 years. Yet the annual revenue from selling electricity would be only a little over $52 million. Schleede also notes that tax sheltering through accelerated depreciation often leads to early sale or abandonment of wind farms.

Finally, Schleede argues that rather than being environmentally benign, wind farms entail significant environmental costs. He notes the opposition to wind farms is growing around the world, “often due to the adverse impact of wind farms on environmental, ecological, scenic, and property values.”

On Nov. 20, Stanford University announced the creation of the Global Climate and Energy Project (G-CEP). The purpose of the project is to “engage in research to develop technologies that foster the development of a global energy system where greenhouse emissions are much lower than today.” It may also be seen as addressing the challenge posed by the article in the November 1 issue of Science, which we reported in the last issue.

Funding commitments from three major corporations totaling $225 million over the next 10 years were also announced, with several other corporations expected to make additional commitments in the near future. ExxonMobil, the worlds largest publicly-traded petroleum company, plans to contribute up to $100 million; General Electric, the world leader in power generation technology and services, $50 million; and Schlumberger, a global technology services company, $25 million. Stanford engineers and scientists will do much of the research, but will be joined by other major institutions in North America, Europe and Asia.

The project was immediately criticized as inadequate, and ExxonMobils role was attacked. “Im somewhat skeptical, given the history of some of the companies involved in this, that it represents a dramatic change in their resistance to aggressive federal and state policy action on the issue,” said Alden M. Meyer, director of government relations for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This could be seen as another effort [by ExxonMobil] to say, Were doing something, but this is a complex problem thats going to take decades to solve and, in the meantime, lets not do anything aggressive with fuel economy standards or anything else that actually reduces oil use today,” he said (Los Angeles Times, November 21, 2002).

Lee Raymond, chairman of ExxonMobil, responded that, “Our investment in G-CEP is a demonstration of our long-held belief that successful development and global deployment of innovative, commercially viable technology is the only path that can address long-term climate-change risks while preserving and promoting prosperity of the world’s economies.”

Following a major referendum last year in which San Francisco residents approved a $100 million bond measure to install as many solar panels in the city as the rest of the nation does all year, Mayor Willie Brown announced a $7.4 million project to install solar panels on the roof to the Moscone Convention Center. “The Moscone Center project itself couldnt be better. It is a gem which should make city leaders across the country salivate,” said Brown. “It would be fiscally irresponsible not to do a project like this” (Associated Press, November 22, 2002).

The economics of the project dont look good, however. The project, which will also include retrofitting for energy efficient fixtures, will save the city a mere $210,000 per year, meaning it will take more than 35 years for the project to “pay for itself (San Francisco Chronicle, November 22, 2002).” Several other cities are considering following San Franciscos example. Brown says that he has heard from 15 other cities that are considering similar programs, including San Diego, Denver and New York (Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2002).

On September 30, Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, gave a presentation “On the Meaning of Global Warming Claims” at a congressional briefing sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition. Lindzen is one of the leading critics of the claim that increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases have “ominous implications” for mankind or the environment.

He began the presentation with a quick climate history of the last one hundred years and what that history means within the context of this debate. The warming during this period, said Lindzen, is concentrated in two periods, 1919-1940 and 1976-1986. The Earth cooled between these warming periods, and since 1986 there has been no significant warming.

A doubling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, according to model predictions, would increase the temperature by about 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. We are already more than halfway towards a doubling of carbon dioxide, which has increased from about 280 parts per million to about 370 ppm. If all the warming in the past century was due to manmade carbon dioxide emissions, said Lindzen, it would mean that the climate is not very sensitive to changes in greenhouse gases and that pronounced warming is unlikely.

Lindzen argued that, “If most current climate models, which predict about 4 degrees C warming for a doubling of CO2, are correct, then man has accounted for 3 - 4 times the observed warming over the past century with some unknown processes of unprecedented magnitude canceling the difference. Predictions for the future assume that these unknown processes will disappear.”

The real problem in the global warming debate, Lindzen said, isnt so much the disagreement between scientists. Indeed, “There really is relatively little disagreement among scientists on a number of basic aspects of this issue.” The problem has to do with how the basic facts are communicated to the public. Scientists who insist on pointing out the “profound disconnect between scientific meaning of common statements and the public interpretation,” are marginalized as “skeptics.”

Rather than trying to solve this communication problem, many scientists, as well as environmental advocacy groups and politicians, have decided it would be easier to exploit it and have become quite adept at doing so. Lindzen argued that probably the best example of how a statement can mean different things to scientists and the public is from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Changes Second Assessment Report. It stated, “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” To a scientist this statement does not imply that there is a problem, yet it was the “smoking gun” for Kyoto.

Lindzen also presented examples of where the scientific consensus is actually the opposite of what is presented in public. It has often been claimed that global warming will lead to increased storminess in the extratropics, but in fact, theory and observational evidence does not support this claim and there is general agreement on this in the scientific community.

Finally, Lindzen noted that although many environmental advocates and politicians claim that Kyoto would “solve” global warming, scientists agree that, “Complete adherence to Kyoto will have no significant impact on climate, regardless of what one believes about climate sensitivity.”

A NASA funded study, appearing in the August 2002 issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, has found that land use changes may be at least as important as greenhouse gas emissions in accounting for climate change. Growing urban areas, deforestation and reforestation, agriculture and irrigation can have strong influences on regional temperatures, precipitation and large-scale atmospheric circulation.

Different land surfaces have different effects on how the Suns energy is distributed back to the atmosphere. Changes in land cover can significantly affect temperature and other climate variables. “Our work suggests that the impacts of human-caused landcover changes on climate are at least as important, and quite possibly more important than those of carbon dioxide,” said Roger Pielke, Sr., an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, and lead author of the study. “Through landcover changes over the last 300 years, we may have already altered the climate more than would occur associated with the radiative effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide” (www.sciencedaily.com, October 2, 2002).