Politics

IPCC, the Mythmaker

In its latest headline grabbing move, the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released yet another Summary for Policymakers of an unfinished report. This summary claims to reflect the Working Group II report, Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Like the summary released earlier of Working Group Is report, it distorts the true state of climate science.

The move to release summaries that are written and approved by government bureaucrats, not scientists, before the reports themselves, guarantees that the reports will be largely ignored when they are finally released in the fall. And it ensures that the conventional wisdom about global warming will be shaped by the outlandish claims of the summaries and not the more-reasoned scientific reports.

That is the idea of course. The goal of the IPCC is not to produce a true picture of climate science, but to influence the political process. “Scientists and environmentalists hope [the report] will prod political leaders to action,” according to the New York Times (February 19, 2001). Moreover, “Mondays report warned that the United States where skepticism about warming is strong in the new administration would not escape a rise in flooding and storms that have caused billions of dollars in damage in recent years.”

Several ludicrous claims are made in the Summary, which purports to show the impacts of global warming. It argues, based on extreme warming scenarios, that every major variable affecting human well-being will worsen, and it ignores any ecological or economic benefits from a warmer climate. It claims, for instance, that there will be “increased energy demand for space cooling due to higher summer temperatures.” This statement ignores the credit side of the equation.

Global climate models predict, for example, that most warming will occur in the winter and at night and that there will be very little warming in the summer. This is what has been observed so far. This would lead to lower heating bills and only slight increases in cooling bills a net benefit that the IPCC ignores.

Indeed, the El Nio of 1997-98, which led to milder winters and hotter summers, bears this out. A study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (September 1999) showed that there was a net benefit of $15 billion dollars, due in large part to the savings from lower heating bills.

The Summary also claims that global warming will increase exposure to vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever. Again, there is no evidence of a linkage between these diseases and global warming. These diseases are endemic to the northern latitudes and were wiped out by public health programs. As Dr. Paul Reiter of the Center for Disease Control has pointed out many times, these diseases flourish where there is poverty and have nothing to do with global warming.

The claims regarding flooding, droughts, heat waves, and so on are equally erroneous. The government functionaries who wrote the Summary ignore all mitigating factors and more importantly the empirical evidence. They rely almost entirely on computer model projections, which have been shown to be significantly at odds with the evidence.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Commerce Committees Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, recently called on President George W. Bush to submit the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for a ratification vote. He believes that the treaty would be rejected, thereby clearing the way for the Bush Administration to propose alternatives, such as regional and bilateral agreements with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (CBS News, February 8, 2001).

According to press accounts immediately following climate negotiations last November at the Hague, Netherlands, the US was the skunk at the party. Its refusal to compromise, said the reports, led to the talks collapsing. European Union negotiators berated the US for its failure to cooperate.

As Cooler Heads (November 29, 2000) has already noted, the reality was quite different. A major player in the Hague negotiations has now confirmed our view. According to Canadas Environment Minister, David Anderson, the EU refused to compromise. According to BBC News Online (February 13, 2001), Anderson claims that, “the European Union had stalemated the talks, and was holding the world to ransom.”

The talks failed because the EU would not budge on the use of sinks and the Clean Development Mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The EU wants to force countries to make most of their reductions domestically. But as Anderson points out, “Theres absolutely no difference whether you pull a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere in Kenya, or in Canada. And it doesnt make the slightest bit of intellectual sense for Europeans to pretend otherwise.”

Ian McAllister, chairman and managing director of Ford Motor Company UK, has agreed to become the first Chairman of the Carbon Trust, a government-created body intended to promote reductions of carbon emissions. The Carbon Trusts work, according to Environment News Service (February 13, 2001), “is aimed at promoting low carbon research and development, and helping business invest in energy efficient, low carbon technologies and practices.”

In other news from Ford, the automaker announced on February 16 that it will donate $5 million to the National Audubon Society. The corporate grant, the largest ever received by Audubon, “will support citizen science, education and conservation programs that protect wildlife and engage children and adults in developing an understanding and appreciation of nature that lasts throughout their lifetimes.”

This grant was not announced soon enough to help Ford escape being listed by Mother Jones magazine as one of the worlds worst corporations in its January 3, 2001 MoJo Wire (It should be noted that green-leaning BP also made the list of the worlds worst corporations.)

The British Parliament has passed a climate levy on energy use by businesses that will come into effect in April. The highly controversial tax, which amounts to only 1 billion per year, has come under heavy fire from business interests on the grounds that it would hurt their international competitiveness.

In an attempt to reduce industry opposition, the Labor government will offset the tax by reducing business employers National Insurance contributions by 0.3 percent and cut taxes for energy-saving investment. The whole scheme, however, would fall more heavily on companies with high energy-to-employment ratios. The Conservatives in their party manifesto have promised to abolish the climate change levy if returned to office at the next election. This would be in addition to 8 billion in tax cuts targeted for businesses, savers, and working families (Financial Times, January 5, 2001).

The climate levy is not the only new tax that the British government has in mind to deal with global warming. Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the governments Sustainable Development Commission, said at the launch of the governments first annual report on quality of life that there would have to be a tax on air travel to pay for damage to the environment and human health (Daily Telegraph, January 26, 2001).

IPCC Releases Political Summary

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on January 20, approved and released the Summary for Policymakers of its Third Assessment Report. As with the Second Assessment Report in 1995, the Summary bears little resemblance to the actual report, which has not yet been approved for final release. The report itself is replete with caveats that give little support for the catastrophic warming scenario touted by anti-energy activists (commonly known as environmentalists).

The summary, on the other hand, is a political document that exists primarily to bolster the claims of the anti-energy zealots, not to summarize the report. As Robert Watson, chairman of the IPCC, said in a press conference releasing the summary, “This adds impetus for governments of the world to find ways to live up to their commitments to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.”

The summary claims that the earths temperature could rise much faster than previously thought and that last century was the warmest in the past thousand years. The Second Assessment Report, which was released in 1995, gave a prediction that the earth could warm by 1 to 3.5 degrees C by the year 2100. The “best estimate” was a 2 degree C warming by 2100, about a third lower than the IPCCs best estimate in 1990. The new report has dramatically increased that estimate to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C, even though no new evidence has come to light to warrant such a dramatic change.

The summary claims that the 20^th century has been the warmest in the last 1000 years. This conclusion is based on a suspect set of data derived from tree rings, which purports to show a stable climate from the years 1000 to 1900. It then crudely attaches the 20^th century surface temperature data to produce a dramatic warming thereafter. When these two different (and incompatible) data sets are combined, the resulting graph resembles a hockey stick lying on its back, blade up.

It is very difficult to extract any information about past temperature variations using tree ring data. What it does tell us is whether the “combined micro-environmental conditions during the growing season [of a particular year] were favorable to [tree] growth or not (The Hockey Stick: A new low in climate science, www.microtech.com.au/daly).”

These conditions include rainfall, temperature, atmospheric carbon concentrations, and so on. Singling out the temperature effect is a highly speculative business. Moreover, the samples used in the tree ring data were limited to the Northern Hemisphere, leaving much of the planet unsampled. The IPCC report, nonetheless, presents the hockey stick graph as representing a global temperature trend.

The hockey stick represents a radical departure from the well-established historical temperature record, which has been derived from several proxies, including the written historical record, ice core samples, and tree ring data, among others. Those records show that the earth was much warmer during the Medieval Warm Period that spanned much of the first half of the millennium. The 20^th century was cooler than the Medieval Warm Period and the warming that occurred could easily be explained by a natural emergence from the Little Ice Age, an episode that also mysteriously disappears in the IPCCs new tree ring data.

The summary states that, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” It turns out, however, that the evidence comes from computer-generated climate models, which, of course, isnt evidence at all.

“There is a longer and more closely scrutinized temperature record and new model estimates of variability,” says the summary. “The warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current models.” Why the internal variability estimated by computers is valid is not explained. A look at real climate variability over the long term clearly shows that the current warming is well within natural variability.

Finally, computer models are still incapable of replicating the present climate using known climate conditions. Moreover, the several models in existence give such widely divergent predictions it is difficult to know what to make of them. A model that cannot predict the present certainly shouldnt be used to predict a hundred years into the future.

IPCC Chairman Robert Watson has a science degree, but he is not a practicing scientist. Indeed, he has been a political operative his whole life, and his pronouncements on the subject of global warming carry about as much weight as those by Greenpeace. The lead authors of the IPCCs Third Assessment Report are practicing scientists, however, and many of their comments seem to contradict Dr. Watsons.

Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria who holds the Canada Research Chair in atmospheric science is a lead author of the UN report. He stated that, “Based on the science you simply cant make the statement that it is going to warm faster.” People who argue otherwise dont understand the IPCC report, said Weaver.

The Toronto Star (January 23, 2001) points out that what was released on the 20^th was an 18-page summary that was “hammered out during four days of horse-trading among officials from 99 governments.” These officials are often erroneously referred to as scientists in the press.

Gordon McBean, a former head of the Meteorological Service in Canada who was heavily involved in the Second Assessment Report said, “It is misleading to say the situation is worse.” Both scientists, however, do believe that man is the cause of the warming that weve seen so far.

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also a lead author of the report. He stated, “The public is led to think that hundreds, even thousands, of scientists formed a consensus about this report. The truth is that were not even asked.”

The Bush Administration has reportedly asked to postpone for two months negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol now scheduled to be held in Bonn, Germany in late May and early June. According to an Associated Press story, the State Department announced on January 24 that it needed the additional two months in order to take, in spokesman Rick Boucher’s words, “a thorough look at the U.S. policy on climate change.” This extra time would presumably be used to bring the U.S. negotiating position into conformity with the Bush campaigns explicit opposition to the Kyoto Protocol.

The continuation in Bonn of the sixth Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed to after COP-6 collapsed in the Hague, Netherlands last November. COP-7 is scheduled for Marrakesh, Morocco in November.

The 1.5 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters has adopted a resolution opposing the Kyoto Protocol. It states, “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters will oppose the Kyoto Protocol and any like treaty, legislative or regulatory action that causes job loss and mandates internationally disproportionate greenhouse gas reductions.” It also called for a “short- and long-term comprehensive energy strategy that will assure that energy is adequate and affordable for American families and that prevents energy shortfalls that destabilize the economy” (Greenwire, January 23, 2001).

EIA Analyzes Multi-Emissions Reduction Proposals

Several bills have been floating around Capitol Hill which propose mandatory coordinated multi-emissions reductions of SO2, NOx and CO2. The Bush campaign also pledged in its energy policy statement to propose legislation to reduce emissions of these three gases as well as mercury through a “multi-pollutant” approach. At the request of former-Rep. David McIntosh, then-chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has issued a study that analyzes “the potential costs of various multi-emission reduction strategies to reduce the air emissions from electric power plants.”

To analyze the potential costs, EIA assumes an emissions trading scheme similar to the one used in Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to reduce SO2 emissions. It also assumes a reduction in SO2 and NOx of 75 percent below 1997 levels and a reduction of CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2005 to 2008 and a further reduction to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012. It also analyzes the difference in costs between separate programs for each of the gases and an integrated reduction approach.

The costs of reducing NOx and SO2 emissions would do little to raise electricity prices above EIA’s business-as-usual projections. The cost of electricity to consumers would rise 5.9 cents per kilowatt-hour as a result with or without the emissions reductions. However, the annual cost of a separate CO2 program would be $90 to $121 billion over the same period, raising consumer electricity prices by 8.3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

An integrated approach where emission targets for the three gases were met simultaneously would lower the cost of emissions reduction by $5 to $11 billion. The loss to GDP under the integrated approach would be $60 to $115 billion in 2005 and $60 to $84 billion in 2010.

According to EIA, “The impact on electricity prices is projected to be much larger in the CO2 cap and integrated cases than in the NOx and SO2 cap cases. Because there are currently no commercially available technologies for removing and storing (sequestering) CO2 and none is expected to be available during the projection period, the only way to make large reductions in CO2 emissions is to reduce the consumption of fuels with relatively high carbon content and improve the efficiency of energy production and use.”

In other words, SO2 and NOx reductions can be met through installation of emission reduction equipment in existing plants, but reductions in CO2 emissions will require retiring coal-fired power plants and constructing natural gas (if gas supplies increase) power plants or perhaps more-efficient coal-fired power plants. The bottom line is that including CO2 emissions reductions in a multi-emission reduction strategy would significantly raise consumer energy prices. The report can be downloaded at http://www.eia.doe.gov.

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (December 29, 2000) discusses the real energy problems that George W. Bush will face as President. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not on the list.

Among those problems are, “fear of heating-oil shortages in the Northeast, record high natural-gas prices, and soaring electric bills and threats of blackouts in California. Bush was facing reality when he told a group of reporters, ‘When we’re undersupplied as a nation and demand increases, prices will go up.'” The solution, said Bush, is to raise supply through higher production.

Most experts agree, however, that there is little the president can do in the short term. “He’s going to have to look down the road on how he can improve the situation and keep it from happening again,” said Robert Ebel, director of energy programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Energy shortages and much higher prices may be one of the main causes of the current economic slowdown. However, the current energy crunch is minor compared to what would be required to meet the Kyoto emissions limits.

Umbrella Group to Hold Secret Meeting in Sunny New Zealand

The Japan Times (December 29, 2000) has reported that the so-called Umbrella Group, which includes Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, will hold “secret” talks in New Zealand to forge a joint strategy for future climate negotiations.

The meeting’s purpose is to try to figure out how to revive the moribund talks that collapsed last November in the Hague at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. One of the major sticking points at COP-6 was over the extent to which carbon sinks can be counted toward meeting emissions reductions. The Umbrella Group wants much more credit for sinks than does the European Union. Another controversial issue is the use of so-called flexible mechanisms. The Umbrella Group wants full use of emissions trading, for example, while the EU wishes to limit the use of such mechanisms.

The talks have been scheduled for February, which means that the new Bush Administration will have very little time to prepare their position or to put a new negotiating team in place. President-elect Bush opposed the Kyoto Protocol in his campaign, but no official position is expected until after he takes office.

Since our last issue, President-elect George W. Bush’s cabinet picks look much less wobbly on global warming than the early nominations of Paul O’Neill to be Treasury Secretary and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to head EPA. Bush nominated former Senator Spence Abraham to be Secretary of Energy on January 2.

In the Senate, Abraham was a solid opponent of the Kyoto Protocol. He sponsored legislation to repeal the federal excise tax on gasoline during last summer’s price spike and supported abolishing the Department of Energy. It’s also no surprise that, as a senator from Michigan, he was one of the leading opponents of raising Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards on automobiles.

Secretary of Energy looks like it will be a key position in the early months of the new administration. Current energy shortages may get worse, and candidate Bush laid out an ambitious long-term plan to increase production and reduce supply bottlenecks.

In addition, Kyoto opponents have a strong ally in Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card, Jr. Card served as secretary of transportation in the George Bush Administration, as president of the Alliance of American Automobile Manufacturers, and most recently as vice president in charge of General Motors’ Washington, D.C. office.

So far President-Elect George W. Bushs nominees for top positions look wobbly on global warming. Bush has chosen Christine Todd Whitman as his administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Whitman, as Governor of New Jersey, rarely stood up against the demands of environmental activists and has been at the forefront of pushing Kyoto-style policies. Indeed, New Jersey was the first state “to commit voluntarily to a specific [greenhouse gas] reduction.”

“New Jersey has set an ambitious goal to not only curb greenhouse gas emissions, but to reduce them,” said Whitman. “Our target for 2005 is a 3.5 percent reduction below the 1990 levels.

“The fact is that climate change associated with greenhouse gases has an effect on every aspect of our daily lives. The environmental and economic benefits that stem from controlling greenhouse gases are enormous.”

Tom Bray in OpinionJournal.com (December 26, 2000) noted a number of environmental issues in which Whitman is out of the conservative mainstream, including strong support for the precautionary principle.

“We must acknowledge,” said Whitman, “that uncertainty is inherent in managing natural resources, recognize it is usually easier to prevent environmental damage than to repair it later, and shift the burden of proof away from those advocating protection toward those proposing an action that may be harmful.”

Bushs nominee for Treasury Secretary, Paul ONeill, CEO of aluminum manufacturer Alcoa, has also taken several dubious positions on energy use.

As noted by the New York Times (December 20, 2000), “Mr. ONeill participated in at least two sessions with President Clinton as part of a corporate advisory body convened to discuss global warming. Participants in one 1997 meeting described Mr. ONeill as more willing to consider steps to tackle global warming than most of his corporate counterparts, but more skeptical about global warming trends than some Clinton administration officials.”

ONeill claims he has criticized the administration for exaggerating the global warming threat. “I said to him [President Clinton], Im just astounded that he and the Vice President keep saying that the Grand Forks flood and El Nio and these severe weather events are somehow related to global warming. Theres not a scintilla of scientific evidence to connect those things. It damages his ability to lead when he exaggerates what no reputable scientist would agree to” (Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2000).

On the other hand, ONeill has long advocated higher energy prices. In 1992 he advised the Bush Administration to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents a gallon. “It certainly has been clear to me, and has been for a long time, that we need a gasoline tax,” he said.

Countdown to COP-6

The Kyoto Protocols loose ends were supposed to be wrapped up at the sixth Conference of Parties to the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which will meet in the Hague, Netherlands, November 13-24. It isnt looking that way now, and senior negotiators have started to play the lowering expectations game.

Whatever the outcome, several members of the Cooler Heads Coalition will be at COP-6 and will be sending back reports. Updates will be posted on the www.globalwarming.org and www.cei.org web sites.

The Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not due to be released until early 2001. But two weeks prior to the U. S. presidential election, a draft of the Summary for Policymakers was leaked to the press.

Major news outlets seized on the dramatic claims. The New York Times (October 28, 2000) reported that the IPCC “has now concluded that mankinds contribution to the problem is greater than originally believed,” and that, “Its worst-case scenario calls for a truly unnerving rise of 11 degrees F over 1990 levels.”

Vice President Al Gore immediately touted the leaked draft in his campaign speeches. “Unless we act, the average temperature is going to go up 10 or 11 degrees. The storms will get stronger. The weather patterns will change. But it does not have to happen, and it wont happen if we put our minds to solving the problem, and that is one of the reasons I am running for president,” said Gore (CNN Morning News, October 27, 2000).

The lack of media attention to the blatantly political motives in leaking the report was revealing, but so too was the uncritical acceptance of the Summary as a straightforward scientific document. Apparently, in their eagerness to support Gore, the TV networks and major newspapers conveniently forgot that the Summary for Policymakers that accompanied the Second Assessment Report was widely discredited as a political document that didnt reflect the scientific report itself.

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the TAR Summary is essentially a political document designed to scare waverers back to the true Kyoto faith. In a briefing paper, Kenneth Green, director of the Reason Public Policy Institutes environment program and a TAR technical reviewer, writes that, “Predictions of future changes rest upon speculative changes that were not reviewed by technical reviewers of the main report.”

Greens paper, Mopping up After the Leak, which is available on the RPPIs web site (www.rppi.org), continues: “The leaked Summary for Policymakers is not peer-reviewed, the author is anonymous, the document is created independently of the actual Assessment Report, and the Summary is so short that issues are overly simplified.”

Vincent Gray, a climate scientist in New Zealand, makes similar criticisms in e-mail comments. He also notes the following statement in the final draft version of the TAR: “The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late nineteenth century and that other trends have been observed does not mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate system has been identified (chapter 1, page 15).” It is doubtful whether that statement will be reported by Dan Rather or appear in Al Gores campaign speeches.

The European Unions parliamentary environment committee on October 16 adopted a resolution providing guidance to the EU Commission on the upcoming COP-6 negotiations in the Hague. In addition to calling on all parties to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and for an agreement to set a “legally binding global emissions ceiling” on greenhouse gases, the EU environment committee aimed harsh language at the U. S. Congress.

The resolution states, “The committee appeals to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives to drop their resistance to the principles agreed in Kyoto and to do justice to their responsibility to combat the greenhouse effect.” (The full text may be found at www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/OM.) No comments from members of Congress have been reported.

On October 25, Ray Evans of Melbourne, Australia spoke to a Cooler Heads Coalition meeting about the Australian political climate regarding the Kyoto Protocol. In 1997 at Kyoto, Australia agreed to a greenhouse gas target of 8 percent above 1990 levels. Business-as-usual scenarios estimate that by 2010 Australias emissions of greenhouse gases would be 45 percent above 1990 levels.

The federal government took the position that, “The Kyoto regime is inevitable, and that Australia should be amongst the very first countries to introduce a comprehensive carbon withdrawal regime, characterized by the sale of government permits at auction at regular intervals, and subsequent trading of those permits through the Sydney Futures Exchange,” according to Evans.

Although energy intensive industries grew concerned over the governments position, there was little overall dissent and the government proceeded to devise a carbon withdrawal system. However, recent events have raised the real possibility that no Australian government is likely to recommend ratification of Kyoto and that no future parliament is likely to ratify it.

Industry Minister Nick Minchin convinced the Howard government over Environment Minister Robert Hills objections to grant exemptions from Australias greenhouse gas obligations to multi-billion-dollar investments to expand natural gas production on the Northwest Shelf. (See page 4 article in the Age, September 23, 2000.)

According to Evans, “Thus for the first time the Government had to decide between carbon withdrawal on the one hand, and jobs and investment on the other. It decided for jobs. This precedent is of very great importance.”

Parliament is beginning to have grave doubts about the wisdom of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) is conducting “a wide-ranging review of Kyoto, including the scientific basis for global warming and carbon withdrawal, and for the first time back-bench parliamentarians are beginning to appreciate the extent of the economic damage which will hit Australia if legislation is passed introducing a carbon tax regime of the kind envisaged by the Australian Greenhouse Office.”

Labor Party parliamentarians who represent workers in energy intensive industries are beginning to balk at the idea of carbon withdrawal. “Once a key group within the opposition Labor Party becomes deeply concerned at the consequences of Kyoto, the prospect of any Australian Government ratifying Kyoto simply vanishes,” said Evans. “Questions now dominating the minds of the ALP [Australian Labor Party] members of JSCOT are about the mechanisms and consequences of withdrawal, in particular the possibility of trade sanctions being imposed on Australian exports.”

The coal industry appears split over whom to support as the next president of the United States. Coal mining companies favor George W. Bush, while the coal miners union favors Al Gore. Ben Greene, chief lobbyist for the West Virginia Mining and Reclamation Association, doesnt believe there is anything Gore could say to convince the industry to support him. “He may come in and say, Im with Senator Byrd on money for clean coal technology, and weve got to protect our miners,” Greene said. “But if you look at Kyoto and you look at the book [Earth in the Balance] and you look at the Environmental Protection Agency in the last eight years, I dont take much comfort in any of that.”

The union has a different take, however. “Someone has suggested that George Bush is for coal miners,” said United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts. “There is a distinction to be made here. I do believe George Bush may be for coal companies, but he isnt for coal miners,” said Roberts. “Most important though to UMWA members, Mr. Gore has said that if he is elected president he will keep the promise to our retirees of health care benefits for life” (Charleston Gazette, October 27, 2000). Sounds like the real distinction is between working and retired coal miners.

Two recent polls, one by Ohio State University and the other by Rasmussen Research, now have Bush ahead of Gore in West Virginia (www.atinews.com). This suggests that Mr. Robertss view doesnt reflect that of many of his unions members.

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) has introduced a bill to create an “International Climate Change Science Commission.” The bill would authorize the president of the United States “to negotiate an international agreement to establish an international commission comprised of scientists whose qualifications and experience qualifies them to conduct scientific, unbiased, politically and economically neutral assessments of global climate change, the factors involved in such change, the consequences of such change, and the potential effect of measures undertaken for the purpose of affecting global climate change.”

What McCain hopes to accomplish by this is unclear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program were both created to accomplish this very goal. The problem is that both have been so thoroughly politicized that they have become harmful to the publics understanding of the scientific debate.