Full of hot air: a climate alarmist takes on "criminals against humanity".

• Author: Baliunas, Sallie
• Position: Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis - And What We Can Do to Avert the Disaster - Book Review

Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis--And What We Can Do to Avert the Disaster, by Ross Gelbspan, New York: Basic Books, 254 pages, $22

Ross Gelbspan and I agree about one thing: The Kyoto Treaty, the international greenhouse gas agreement that took effect in February, will not accomplish much. Even if the U.S. ratified the treaty, the resulting cuts in carbon dioxide emissions--about percent below 1990 levels in developed countries during the next seven years--would be far too modest to keep the air's C[O.sub.2] content from rising.

Gelbspan and I disagree about the likely consequences of that failure. In Boiling Point, the former Boston Globe reporter predicts "disaster"--including mega-droughts, monsoons, refugees, a "Northern hemisphere deep freeze," malaria and dengue epidemics, "not even enough [water] to drink," and "far more allergies"--due to "escalating instability of the climate system."

Gelbspan, who wrote the similar 1997 book The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription, says it's "excruciating" to watch "the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of pathological denial," and he calls his book "a last-gasp attempt to break through the monstrous indifference of Americans to the fact that the planet is caving in around us." Skeptics who consider this scenario implausible are "Criminals Against Humanity"--the heading of a chapter that briefly (and inaccurately) describes my own work, which deals with local ecosystem change during past centuries. He calls for "rewiring the planet" to achieve "optimal calibration of competition and cooperation that would maximize our energy and creativity" while extending "the baseline conditions for peace--peace among people, and peace between people and nature."

Gelbspan thus exemplifies the M.O. of climate alarmists who portray the most extreme predictions as mainstream science without noting the uncertainties surrounding them, dismiss objections as financially or politically motivated, and insist there is no choice but to re-engineer the world according to their plan. These strident voices help shape the popular conception of what human-produced greenhouse gases are doing to the planet and what is required to prevent a Day After Tomorrow catastrophe. Their approach, which closes off investigation and shuts down debate through scaremongering and ad hominem attacks, is anti-scientific.

Despite his overwrought warnings, Gelbspan is keen to claim the mantle of science. He threads Boiling Point with supposedly science-based chapters (printed entirely in readerunfriendly italics) called "Snapshots of the Warming." Among other things, these chapters depict glacier and ice sheet changes as harbingers of catastrophe. Yet Antarctica, by far the most massive ice sheet on the planet, has on balance gained mass during the period of recent measurements, 1992 to 2003; instrument records show a net cooling trend between 1966 and 2000. (The Antarctic Peninsula has experienced a warming trend during the last several decades, but it represents just 2 percent of the continent's land mass.) Measurements of the mass of the Greenland ice sheet, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, are uncertain and may indicate slight shrinkage or growth. Thermometer measurements at the summit of the ice sheet show a recent cooling trend in summer, the season of ice melt. Mountain glaciers also tell a complex stow; many retreated rapidly in the 19th century, well before the emission of most of the carbon dioxide from energy use. A few maritime glaciers have recently expanded.

Gelbspan notes that "the vast majority of the scientific papers on climate change are quite accessible if one is willing to take the time to read them." That implies a standard of scholarship unmet by the book's army of secondary sources, which include newspapers, magazines, wire services, and activist reports.

Gelbspan is also careless in his description of those who disagree with him. He fails to explain that the "greenhouse skeptics" he cites--those "criminals against humanity" accept that the industrial emission of C[O.sub.2] and other greenhouse gases has contributed to a warming trend during the last century. What remains at issue is the extent of this contribution and the magnitude of warming that can be expected during the next century. Computer simulations of...