That must sound like lunacy. What about all the predicted doom? Won't global warming melt the polar icecaps and cause flooding? What about excessive heat and drought?

The media have neglected to mention the fact that such cataclysms would only occur if, in the next hundred years, the earth warmed an average of 4 degrees Celsius or greater.

If it warms 1 degree Celsius, as predicted by Patrick Michaels, a University of Virginia environmental sciences professor, then global warming isn't a real problem.

This truth isn’t only lost on reporters, but also on the current EPA director Christine Whitman, as it was on the Clinton administration.

But let's assume, for argument’s sake, that the earth will have a 4-degree warming over this century. What would the solution be? All of the socialist policies in the Kyoto Accord, drafted by the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cut fossil fuel emissions like CO2?

No, it would be to free the market globally.

If dangerous warming were caused by fossil fuels, the first logical step wouldn’t be to draft new laws to stop them, but to simply the repeal the laws already on the books that have artificially created incentives to utilize more fossil fuels than would be necessary in a free market.

That would mean repealing the corporate subsidies that make the price appear lower than it really is, such as tax dollars covering the cost of armed defense of petroleum holdings in unstable Middle Eastern states, which the oil companies ought to pay for themselves.

(To be fair, many domestic regulations do drive up the cost rather needlessly.)

A natural rise in price would be the market's signal that using oil as the chief supplier of energy is losing feasibility. When it becomes cheaper to use alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, companies will switch to those to save money.

The free market is the most humane way of getting people to switch to alternative fuels; not environmentalists or politicians waving their fingers in everyone's faces.

But have groups like the Sierra Club or the Worldwatch Institute advocated such common-sense policies? No. They don't want a reasonable use of petroleum in a free market; they want to unreasonably stifle it through government regulations.

I don't know the exact reasons why they take this route, but I do know that their advocating a free-market solution to energy problems would decrease the lobbying power of everyone (politicians, businesses, environmentalists), while simply demanding more regulations will mean greater political power and greater publicity for the Sierra Club and its "fellow travelers."

Why is there a widespread assumption that the earth will warm 4 degrees Celsius? This figure was extracted from ground measurements, particularly in metropolitan areas, since the 1980s. But land only accounts for 1/3 of the earth's surface, so the temperatures from above the ocean aren’t factored in.

Also, civil engineer David Holcberg notes that the reason why the cities have rising temperatures has more to do with their abundance of pavement, which absorbs heat. "[T]his is not global warming,” he says, “-- it is merely urban warming.”

In contrast, the evidence that earth is experiencing only a 1-degree warming comes from the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and NASA.

According to their satellites, which orbit above the ocean, the planet has only warmed a half-degree Celsius and will likely heat by only 1 degree in the next hundred years. You can see this here: http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd5feb97_1.htm

Furthermore, according to Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, the planet has actually experienced a cooling trend from 1940 to the late 1970s, even though CO2 emissions tripled early in that duration.

People may remember a New York Times story saying that scientists have found catastrophic melting of the polar icecaps in the year 2000. But they also forget that the Times printed a retraction of that story a few days later.

And London's Daily Telegraph reports that the Antarctic icecaps are actually thickening.

Despite the concerted effort to incite panic in people to the point that they would willingly submit to an increase in the power of governments worldwide, citizens may have little to fear from global warming.

What they should really find frightening is that the mainstream media haven’t given them the whole story.

To read Part 2, click here http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?c402a9ab-6e35-42d4-a3db-8530f4d93183

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

Here are some other NASA sites you can visit on the subject: http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd12mar97_1.htm http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/atmos_layers.html http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast20oct_1.htm

Interview with Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas: http://reason.com/9810/fe.baliunas.shtml

Article by MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen on climate change: http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html

The home page of geophysicist S. Fred Singer, emeritus professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service: http://www.sepp.org

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