As if the BEST report were not enough, now comes the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body responsible for much of the climate alarmism. This one is about extreme weather events, and they claim that these will increase over the next 20-30 years due to global warming. Put simply, just like that, the usual media suspects seized upon the document as further proof that the skeptics should shut up and go home.

There are two issues here: What did the BEST study and the IPCC report show, or prove? And what difference does it make? Although Muller was incautious (“You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer,” he wrote) and although he committed the scientific faux pas of submitting his paper to the popular media before its peer review, the BEST report is actually rather cautious. Its data have always been contaminated by improperly sited recording stations, and deal with land temperatures only. At most they show a slight uptick in land temperatures over the past half-century and a curious plateau over the last decade or—curious, because CO2 in the atmosphere, supposedly the main driver of global warming, has been steadily increasing. The oceans go through cycles of warming and cooling, and anyway a third of the BEST land stations report cooling. What warming there has been is modest enough that it easily falls within natural 100-year climate variability. Muller’s co-author, Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, has publically distanced herself from his publicity release, saying that his claim to have proved the skeptics wrong was an unscientific “huge mistake.”

The IPCC report is surprisingly downbeat, considering the group’s track record of scary predictions. It anticipates more heat waves and flooding, but does not make judgments about many natural disasters like ocean storms, and, most tellingly, says that for the next two or three decades there will be little or no discernible human influence on climate. The human imprint, it acknowledges, will not be distinguishable from natural climate variability. There can be no confidence in any predictions for a longer term.

The real issue is not whether the earth is warming at the present time (over longer periods it both warms and cools), but whether humans are causing it, and if so, whether mitigation measures are possible and worth the economic cost. Both of these reports abstain from identifying human action as the principal cause of global warming. “The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated,” says BEST, in a noteworthy retreat from the reigning paradigm. If humans are not the culprits, then the proposals for human action to change nature’s course look a lot less possible. Moreover, they involve some terrible economic sacrifices which are even now creating real hardship wherever they are being tried, in the UK for example, where the cost of heating one’s home has driven many households into “fuel poverty” and “green” taxes of various sorts are seriously hurting the British economy. It is even arguable that the economic shrinkage meant to “save the planet” may actually cost more lives than it saves. Given the real scientific uncertainty the moral course of action is at least open to debate, and attempts to foreclose the debate by demonizing the skeptics are in gross moral error. And if anyone doubts that the alarmists are trying to do exactly that, please look at the second round of “climate gate” e-mails released this week.

Thomas Sieger Derr is professor emeritus of religion and ethics at Smith College and the author of Environmental Ethics and Christian Humanism

As I recall (and forgive my faulty memory) their lead researcher Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, told an Australian climate researcher whom he feared was skeptical, something like “I have 25 years invested in this data base; why should I share it with you who are only trying to find fault with it?” Then a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, showed that Mann’s graph was faulty and could not prove a sharp recent rise in temperature. And the Siberian tree rings turned out to have been cherry-picked (they weren’t cherry trees, though) to fit a premature conclusion, while most of the rest in the area told a different story. So the war was on.

Now an enterprising hacker, unknown as of this moment, has released e-mails to and from the people at East Anglia which show some fairly surprising and dismaying unscientific behavior, dripping contempt for the scientists skeptical of the warming alarm and showing what appear to be attempts to manipulate data to yield a desired result. The unguarded, but now disclosed, ad hominem insults perhaps show the natural nastiness of academics whose theories, representing hard work and deep convictions, are challenged. It becomes personal. Maybe we can chalk that up to original sin. What’s really serious is the perversion of the methods of science to yield a result above all challenge. The CRU repeatedly refused Freedom-of-Information requests from other scientists for its data set. Jones and his colleagues discussed ways to manipulate figures and graphs to make the temperature record prove the anthropogenic-global-warming thesis. He even proposed organizing boycotts of journals that dared to publish anything that would undermine that thesis. And now all this shoddy academic, scientific behavior is on the public record, racing around the internet.

Not surprisingly, important voices in the UK and elsewhere are calling for a formal investigation of the scandal. Of course it will be hard to agree on the make-up of an investigating panel, since the sides do not trust each other to be neutral and objective. (Lord) Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, is prominent among those calling for the investigation, but he is a well-known “climate skeptic.” (Sir) John Houghton, first chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an equally prominent advocate on the other side, says he won’t support any investigation because the people calling for it are all “biased.” The University, deeply embarrassed, says it won’t wait for that but will finally publish the withheld data for all to see. But there’s this problem: the original data have been destroyed, and only the massaged, interpreted set is left – which of course the skeptics don’t trust.

We might shrug this matter off as just scientists behaving badly except for the fact that the IPCC has based its massive program on their work and is calling for policies of emissions reduction which will wreck the world’s economies, all in the name of their elusive goal of stopping the temperature rise (which at the moment has stopped all by itself anyway). Our Congress is among many around the world where these policies are being seriously debated. If this current scandal should create serious doubt about the scientific basis of such advocacy, we may expect the political fate of climate bills to be even more doubtful than it is now.

Of course the setting of allowances is highly subject to special pleading and dealing. Already the vote-seeking compromises in the bill have outraged environmental purists. Expect a continuous mess. If you liked credit default swaps, you’ll really love the emissions trading market—if it should ever come to pass.

Meanwhile on the international scene climate politics is slouching toward Copenhagen in December, where a successor to the ineffective Kyoto treaty is supposed to be enacted. At this point most sage observers expect this project to fail. Endless preliminary negotiations have been unable to resolve the differences. No agreement will pass our Congress without firm emissions control commitments from China and India, which aren’t going to happen. The European Union, once the proud leader in climate policies (by its own estimation) is in internal disarray. Japan, home to Kyoto, has proposed such a small emissions reduction target for itself that they have almost opted out of the debate. Russia has gone them one better: By picking a 1990 baseline, before the collapse of the Soviet Union’s economy, they figure they can actually continue to increase their emissions and still claim a long-term reduction.

The Chinese, brilliantly cynical, and joined by India and a number of African states, have hit upon a perfect non-starter: The climate problem was created by the West, the industrialized nations, so they should fix it, cutting their emissions to forty percent below 1990 levels, until the developing nations have had a chance to catch up. Anyway, Chinese per capita emissions are so far smaller than the West’s that to curb their development would be grossly unfair. Finally, say the Chinese, the West should give them, free of charge, billions of dollars in climate control technology. They know perfectly well that this is a recipe for economic suicide by the West, so their demands seem to be posturing either as a start to bargaining, or more likely to excuse their determination to continue their growth path without restrictions.

All this diplomatic turmoil is proceeding against a backdrop of growing public indifference. So the alarmist community has reacted predictably by issuing ever more apocalyptic statements, like the federal report ”Global Change Impacts in the United States” issued last week which predicts more frequent heat waves, rising water temperatures, more wildfires, rising disease levels, and rising sea levels—headlined, in a paper I read, as “Getting Warmer.” This is mostly nonsense, and it is certainly not “getting warmer.” The earth stopped warming in 1998 and since 2002 has been getting slightly cooler. Sea ice in the arctics is growing. Sea levels are not rising faster than their usual steady tiny pace. The incidence of severe storms is not increasing. And so on. If you want to worry about the climate, worry about colder weather and lower crop yields as the sun remains unusually quiet.

For heaven’s sake, climate people, pay attention to real life, real time data and not your wobbly and unreliable computer models.

One of the most recent examples is from Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, writing in the New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become “a worldwide secular religion,” that it “has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion,” and that “the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.” As “a religion of hope and respect for nature . . . . environmentalism is a religion that we can all share.” But “unfortunately some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.” And it is the religious character of this belief that has made the arguments about global warming so “bitter and passionate.”

Dyson’s article caught the eye of New York Times financial columnist Joe Nocera, who read it en route to Exxon Mobil’s annual meeting in Dallas, where various members of the Rockefeller family were trying to make “their” company adopt more “green” policies. Now tuned in to the metaphor, Nocera, siding with company management, chided the Rockefellers for trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system, their global warming religion.”

It’s clearly a metaphor with legs. What is the import of this identification, or at least this similarity?

For some who embrace the equivalence, environmentalism is the faith that will save the world. It has the power of religion, of ultimate commitment, and that is a very good and necessary quality. Or, if it is not a religion all by itself, it is a vital part of familiar religions. For Christian environmentalists, it is an obligation of faith to care for God’s good earth, to be faithful stewards of the place we have been given to live on—and right now God is calling us to fight global warming.

But on the other side are critics who say making environmentalism into a religion has given it a rigidity, a stifling orthodoxy that regards all dissent, all skepticism, as heresy—as the Dyson quote above suggests. Proper care of the environment depends on good science, and science must always remain open to questioning, skepticism, and dissent. Beware the heresy hunters when you hear, “The science is settled.” For indeed that is how the faithful treat the skeptics—as ignorant, senile, or in the pay of the oil companies, sinners who are not to be tolerated until they confess and repent.

The critics of course see the more prominent environmentalists as the “high priests” of the new religion that worships its own god, Gaia. They have the temper of inquisitors and seek legislation that will enforce their views: carbon taxes, emissions limits, proscriptions on all manner of ecological sins. Permits to be excused from a tax or to raise an emissions limit function effectively as religious dispensations and indulgences.

The religious metaphors are ubiquitous, coming in abundance from both sides. Combating global warming is like standing at Armageddon. It is our last chance to save the human race. If we don’t do everything possible, the wrath of God will descend upon us (as Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals warned in a debate I had with him a while ago, reported here). It’s already happening: Natural catastrophes like the Burmese cyclone (caused, says Gore, by global warming) foreshadow the end of the world. The apocalypse is nigh.

Or, from the contrarian voices, the environmentalists (“enviros” for short) want us to genuflect before Gaia and adopt “carbon chastity” as the ultimate vow. Emitting CO2 is our original sin, ever to be confessed. Gore is the messiah who will lead us to ecological salvation. They want to prescribe our lifestyle in minute detail (our “carbon footprint”) as a matter of catechetical morality. It’s the “dictat of the eco-theologians,” “dogmas [from] the Church of the Environment.”

Whew! Enough already! I’m tempted to mutter the incantation of the young: “Gimme a break!” I would like to be delivered from this language. People who use it to criticize the immovable “enviros” are not doing religion any favors; and some of them—not all, of course, but some of them—are openly hostile to religion. They slyly drop into their critique the note that they themselves are atheists, or agnostics, and that the planet would be better off delivered not only from the “enviros” but from religious believers, too, because both are hostile to the open, skeptical mindset required by good science. Their adversaries, the strongly religious environmentalists, are not much help to the conversation either, indulging in apocalyptic scenarios and threatening us with divine judgment if we don’t follow their orders.

We can do without this distracting way of framing the argument. Let’s untangle environmentalism from the science/religion debate and ask the skeptics (of whom I am one) to discuss the issues on their merits, not on the suspected darker motives of Gore’s followers. And let the religious environmentalists stick to the subject, too, back off their absolute certainty, and show a little more modesty in telling us what God wants us to do about global warming.

It’s a simple request.

On the theory that rising CO2 emissions should lead to increased temperatures, we should have been experiencing steadily increasing warming, as we have certainly had steadily increasing CO2 discharged into the atmosphere. But the contrary has happened. Global average temperatures have been flat for the past decade, since 1998, and actually declined somewhat last year. Skeptics have been pointing out for a long time that there is no correlation in the historical record between CO2 and global temperature.

Just recently, Nature, which has been generally supportive of the warming alarm, published an article from German researchers predicting that the temperature would decline for another few years. That finally got media attention and produced some overdue questioning of the alarmist scenario. The authors were quick to point out that their article predicted that the heat would start rising again after 2015 or so, and that the big worry was still on. Others pointed out that 1998 was an unfairly chosen base year from which to measure that flat temperature, because a significant El Niño event that year made temperatures unusually high.

But, skeptics reply, if we start instead from 2001, we still get that flat or declining graph. And they are asking, Well, what kind of evidence would you accept as falsifying the reigning global-warming thesis? Another ten years of flat or declining temperatures? A comeback of arctic sea ice (which is already happening in both polar regions)? What? And the answer, as for all true believers, is that those who have staked their reputations on global-warming alarm are going to stick by their claims, because true believers cannot admit to being wrong.

Meanwhile, public support for measures meant to curb so-called greenhouse emissions is noticeably waning, especially in Europe, where “green” taxes are beginning to bite. The Labour government in Britain is under particular attack for effectively raising the costs of fuel for driving, heating, and generating electricity, costs that weigh most heavily on families of modest means. Labour is feeling the public’s disapproval at the polls, notably where it lost the race for mayor of London to a Conservative who beat a Labour incumbent running loudly and explicitly on a “green” program. Elsewhere in Europe, business leaders are warning that industries like steel, cement, and other large emitters of greenhouse gasses will leave the continent and take their jobs with them. They warn of Europe’s declining competitiveness in world markets across the board. The United States has yet to feel the full backlash against anti-global-arming schemes, and all three presidential candidates are still proclaiming their fealty to the alarm.

But the rumblings in Congress are increasing; and one can bet that any legislation, if it succeeds at all, will try very hard not to harm the American economy. The corn ethanol subsidy program has already turned sour, and the public and the politicians are on the alert. Stand by.

He treated the story as possibly apocryphal, but it is, in fact, true. Memory fades, but I knew the editor of this magazine at the time, a Jesuit whose name escapes me. The issue featured a story on the Berrigans, headlined on the cover “The Burden of the Berrigans.” The photo in question was of an FBI agent escorting Philip Berrigan away, in handcuffs, with, indeed, their class identities in the caption.

The editor offered to give me extra copies for my students, which I accepted, because of interest at the height of the anti-Vietnam-war movement. The box was too heavy to mail, and he proposed that I meet him at a Holy Cross alumni event in Holyoke (near my home).

So I went, to find a room full of men (Holy Cross wasn’t yet coed) well on their way to inebriation. I retreated to the corridor and was relieved to find a Jesuit collar with a familiar face above it headed my way. He told me how much he hated these events, then led me out to the parking lot. We moved our cars to a dark corner and transferred the box of magazines, like contraband, and I took the magazines back and gave them out to any students who wanted one. Everyone found that photo wryly funny, of course.

What’s RSA? The online exchange gives no clue, nor do the links to RSA itself. It seems mysterious. But some internet sleuthing gives the answer: it’s the Royal Society of Arts, whose motto is “Working to remove the barriers to social progress.” Its reach is pretty wide. Its website even advertises that its facilities in central London are available for fancy weddings, not only the party, but the ceremony, too, including “civil partnership” or “civil commitment ceremony.” Apparently that’s an example of removing barriers to social progress.

In any case, since anything that helps “social progress” (as they define it) is eligible for their concern, I guess they can talk about global warming, too. The little dialogue raises some points worth considering, not about the science, though Taylor can’t resist the usual demeaning smear of dissenting scientists as “the small vociferous minority.” Apparently both he and Rosenthal believe the demonstrably false mantra of the alarmists that “the science is settled.” So they talk instead about climate and human rights, justice for the poor, and stewardship of the earth, all, obviously, laudable goals. But the way they apply these worthy ends to “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming”) is perverse.

They argue that justice for the poor is best served if everyone in the developed nations reduces his “carbon footprint” and thus his consumption of energy, which is mostly created from fossil fuels. In fact the drastic cuts in energy called for by the alarmists would impoverish civilization across the globe and doom the poor to perpetual poverty. Only a vibrant economy will permit us all to adapt to climate changes that nature brings and about which we can do very little, since solar variations, ocean currents, and volcanic eruptions are quite beyond our control. The poverty of our ancestors left them at the mercy of climate changes, and the results were awful. We can do better, but not if we decimate our economies by chasing the illusion that we can affect the climate.

Their argument about stewardship of the earth is similarly misplaced. They think our obligation to be sparing in our use of resources and to avoid making the environment unhealthy, for the sake of future generations, requires us to combat global warming. But they are conflating quite different issues. There are good reasons to take care of our environment, but stopping global warming is not one of them. There are public policies, mostly sensible, addressing environmental health, but the policies meant to control warming are different and would be disastrous.
Taylor also claims that human-induced warming has caused rising sea levels and desertification, hence “climate change refugees” which is an issue of human rights. This is simply wrong. Sea level has been rising slowly and inexorably since the end of the last ice age, and the rate has not accelerated in a warming climate. More CO2 in the atmosphere should increase plant growth, and there is evidence that this is happening.

He also invokes the famous “precautionary principle,” that even if we don’t know for certain that global warming will produce epic disaster, we had better do all we can think of to stop it “just in case.” The risk may be slight, he says, but the potential danger is so great there are no limits to what we must do. But there are. Insurance premiums are always adjusted for the risk. We are being asked to reverse economic growth and all the benefits it has brought us in better health and longevity and cessation from grinding toil, all in the name of a possibility so remote that it may never happen.

And behind the debate is the stubborn fact that climate swings are natural and cannot be stopped. Flailing away at natural forces will get us nothing but wasted money and inattention to real human need.

Given my rather public skepticism of the thesis that humans are causing any significant climate change, my friend Bob Benne, who is the director of the ethics center at Roanoke College, invited me down to Roanoke to debate Mr. Cizik on these matters. Bob has an eye for irony, noting that I come from a “liberal” church which tends to support Gore’s views rather enthusiastically, while Mr. Cizik’s religious constituency has been cool to the warmers. So we each crossed the tracks, and the cross currents intrigued Bob.

Mr. Cizik, having studied his opponent’s published remarks, opened the debate with a direct attack on my position. I’m a coward when it comes to public confrontation, and I squirmed. But then he shifted gears and delivered a passionate sermon, urging us to mend our ecologically harmful ways lest we sell out our children’s future.

When my turn came I began by saying that I had studied up on him, too, and noted that he had previously threatened us with the wrath of God if we didn’t shape up; and he interjected that he still stood by that warning. I then ran through my litany of objections to the reigning paradigm that human activity is causing dangerous global warming: the earth’s long history of natural climate swings; the probability that solar cycles are the principle driver of warming and cooling periods; the fact that climate swings do not correspond to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere; the fact that glaciers grow and recede all the time and their melting will not cause serious sea level rise; that rising temperatures will not cause more severe storms; the fact that warming will save more lives than a cooling planet and be otherwise beneficial.

Mr. Cizik did not rise to this challenge, choosing not to argue about my facts. He did challenge me directly on a couple of points. I attacked the insistent claim of the alarmists that there is a scientific consensus on the thesis that human activity is the root of the trouble, saying that anyone with an internet connection can show that is false, that there are thousands of scientists who dissent (and next week’s conference of the skeptics in New York will make this perfectly clear). Consensus is not how science proceeds, I said, and we have only to remember the “consensus” of the 1970′s that earth was cooling dangerously. To this Mr. Cizik replied that he had asked a couple of scientists he knows about that false cooling consensus, and they denied that they ever believed that. I hope I may be pardoned for thinking that two people do not constitute a refutation of that well-documented embarrassingly false “consensus” of 35 years ago.

His other challenge came out of my major moral claim, that any serious effort to reduce emissions by any significant amount, let alone the 60-80% called for by the European Union and some of our presidential candidates, would destroy economies all over the world and condemn the poor to perpetual poverty – which is why China and India will have nothing to do with emissions caps. Mr. Cizik in reply noted that the city of Portland, Oregon, has extensive “green” regulations but was still prospering. Again, I could not find this local example convincing refutation of what every sane economist knows: Economic growth, which requires energy, and is not possible if greenhouse emissions are severely curtailed, is what will permit us to adapt to the climate changes which nature has always produced naturally and which we cannot stop.

If there was a place where the discussion went awry, at least from my point of view, it was in his conflating combating global warming with other kinds of environmentalism, like being sparing in our use of resources and restraining pollution. When I protested this conflation, he replied that these points were “a seamless whole.” “No they aren’t,” I said bluntly, as the audience stirred. Indeed they are not. They are different issues and there are very different policies attached to them. Conservation and environmental cleanliness are worthy goals which I fully support; and they can be, and are, addressed by mostly sensible public policies. But cutting “greenhouse gas” emissions drastically would be an epic disaster. Fortunately it can’t and won’t be done.

Frankly, if I wanted to worry about climate change, I would worry about global cooling again, since the sun is behaving very weakly just now, and sun-watching scientists have even dared to suggest that a reprise of the Little Ice Age is in the offing. Maybe earth is already cooling. We’ve had ten years without a temperature rise, and this past winter, in both hemispheres, has marked a substantial downturn. And the sea ice is back, both in the Arctic and Antarctic. It’s too soon to tell if this is the begining of a long trend, and we’d better hope it isn’t. But we have no more control over that than we do over warming.

The debate was a pleasant and spirited exchange, marked by good humor and good will; and after the first few minutes I rather enjoyed it. Clearly I failed to persuade Mr. Cizik that’s he’s been the victim of scaremongering, and he, of course, found me as obdurate as ever. My final word, then as now, is this: Global warming is slight, is natural, cannot be stopped, and is on the whole beneficial. Trying seriously to stop it would waste billions of dollars that ought to be spent addressing real human needs.

But the realists and the environmentalists (including Al Gore, who flew in to denounce the U.S., to wild applause) were bitterly disappointed, saying that nothing really had changed. Why? Because their hope was for agreement on specific targets, a 25-40 percent cut. They fought and nearly bled for that to get into the final text, but the United States held out against naming specific targets and won. Its delegate was roundly booed until she agreed to sign a consensus statement and theoretically join “the process”— but without targets.

The U.S. carried the burden of the villain but was actually backed by Canada and Japan, as I reported in my Daily Article on this website a few days ago. Australia, trying to find its identity under its new government, also apparently does not want targets. And there’s a report, unconfirmed, that Russia worked behind the scenes to scuttle any agreement on targets, apparently enjoying its role keeping Europe dependent on Russian energy supplies and thus politically weakened.

Furthermore, the really “inconvenient truth” is that the U.S. is doing better at controlling its own emissions than are the Europeans, and that no country is really willing to take on the economic damage that an emissions-restriction regime would cause. A whiff of hypocrisy is in the verbal wind. It is convenient for them to blame the U.S. for their own failings.

So what next? The Bush government has called a conference of the major emitting nations for Hawaii next month to work on flexible and voluntary targets, tailored to different nations’ needs. The E.U. at Bali threatened to boycott the Hawaii meeting unless the U.S. agreed at Bali to targets. That blackmail failed, and now we’ll see whether the E.U. people will show up in Hawaii or risk being left out of this process, parallel to the U.N. track, which may produce some important agreements.

As for the “main track” U.N. process, it goes on, of course: next stop Copenhagen 2009.

P.S. to my blog post on the Pope’s World Day of Peace address: Papal statements are known for careful nuance and balance, and this one was no exception. The Daily Mail report stressed only one side. Benedict did acknowledge the climate problem and call for addressing it. But he also made, more importantlin my judgment, the points I stressed: that hyperbolic alarmism is dangerous, that ideology should not override science, and that environmental decisions should not override real human need.

P.S. #2, on reading statistics with a viewpoint: The World Meteorological Organization reports that 2007 was one of the ten hottest years on record, most of those ten years being in the last decade. But it also seems that 2007 is on track to be the coldest year since 1998, the year of the large El Niño surge. And those who watch the sun’s behavior report a quiescent period with no sun spots, possibly presaging the return of a cooler earth – even, heaven forbid, a period like the “little ice age” of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Naturally, no mention of this happened at Bali.

Now comes support for these worries from a surprising source, Pope Benedict XVI, in a message prepared for World Peace Day on January 1, but released today, warning us against the climate change prophets of doom. He does not take sides in the scientific debate: “Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow.” But he does believe the case against global warming is over-hyped, that solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology, and that care for the environment must not mean that the welfare of plants and animals takes priority over human need.

This message will greatly annoy the global warming crowd, who will point out that the pope is not a scientist (and neither is Al Gore). But at least they won’t be able to claim he’s in the pay of the oil industry.