Global Warming: The Science and the Politics

Front Cover
The Fraser Institute, 1997 - Science - 180 pages
From the book cover: Most politicians, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and members of the media believe as a proven fact that industrial activity - especially the emission of carbon dioxide - is affecting climate by causing an increase in average global temperatures. They also believe that something must be done immediately to address what is touted as our biggest global environmental threat. But, the scientific evidence is mixed and scientists continue to debate both the existence and the extent of human-induced global warming ... The doomsayers' version of climate change is being put forward as representing a "scientific consensus" while the views of scientists with valid criticisms of the global warming apocalypse are ignored. "Global Warming: The Science and the Politics" attempts to redress this imbalance by focusing attention on the fundamental scientific questions.

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Page 7 - ... negotiations, the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the results of various international meetings on the subject, including the Second World Climate Conference. It is hoped that the negotiations regarding the framework convention and related instruments will be completed before the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, to be held in June 1992, so that the convention may be opened for signature by States at that time. The General Assembly also decided...
Page 8 - ... activist groups and certain political leaders. This so-called Earth Summit is scheduled to convene in Brazil in June 1992 and aims to impose a system of global environmental regulations, including onerous taxes on energy fuels, on the population of the United States and other industrialized nations. "Such policy initiatives derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. They are based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and...
Page 5 - ... at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. These tested strategies remain important, and as Robin Broad points out: "[N]o unified strategy on how to build a sustainable alternative has yet emerged
Page 8 - ... climate should respond to increasing levels of greenhouse gases. And while predicting climate has always been an uncertain business, some scientists...
Page 5 - The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.
Page 8 - Economy found that 89 percent of the scientists they polled agreed that "current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures
Page 7 - February 27, 1992 — As independent scientists, researching atmospheric and climate problems, we are concerned by the agenda for UNCED, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, being developed by environmental activist groups and certain political leaders. This so-called Earth Summit is scheduled to convene in Brazil in June 1992 and aims to impose a system of global environmental regulations...
Page 8 - Science magazine reported that "most modelers now agree that the climate models will not be able to link greenhouse warming unambiguously to human actions for a decade or...
Page 14 - Fossil2" model to project US energy supply, demand, and prices through the year 2030. It applied these projections to the ER model and the DRI model as the starting point for estimating the impact of emissions cutbacks. The DOE study found that to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2000 would require a carbon tax of $500 per metric ton of carbon and impose an economic cost of $95 billion annually by that year (US Department of Energy 1991, vii). Considering that...
Page 8 - States found that by a 44 percent to 1 7 percent margin, climatologists agreed that "recent global warming is a largely natural phenomenon." According to the results of the same survey, 9 of 10 climatologists agreed that "scientific evidence indicates variations in global temperature are likely to be naturally occurring and cyclical over very long periods of time...

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