When Al Gore received a share of the Nobel Peace Prize, he cautioned: “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all humanity.” That claim annoyed professor Tibor Machan of Chapman University so much that in his October 17 column in the Journal Courier, he angrily accused Gore of “lying.”
The former vice president had frequently stressed that the climate crisis was primarily a threat to mankind’s physical environment and should not be turned into a partisan controversy. Machan not only finds no merits in Gore’s arguments about climate change, he also fails to recognize that global warming is above all a challenge to the millions of people affected by it and only secondarily a challenge to governments. Whether politicians are conservative or liberal, socialist or libertarian, if global warming does threaten the stability of our physical environment, they will have to deal with it.
As Professor Machan sees it, Al Gore was merely looking for another issue “to dictate to us to behave as he judges fit.” Then he decided that climate change would give him a golden opportunity to gain more “power over our lives.” Machan conveniently ignores the fact that Gore did not invent the rapidly amassing data that support the predictions of increasing environmental damage due to global warming.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, just reported that climate change is “unmistakably” due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (i.e., man-made) carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions ever since the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid-eighteenth century. Warmer temperatures and rising sea levels "would continue for centuries," predicts the IPCC, even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized.
The panel estimates at less than five percent the probability that current climate change is caused by natural processes alone. Temperatures worldwide could rise between 2 and 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levals between 7 and 23 inches. These changes would in turn lead to more heat waves, droughts, rainfalls, high tides, and hurricanes.
The U.S.’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recognizes the IPCC as “the most senior and authoritative body providing scientific advice to global policy makers.” Scholars from over 130 countries contributed to the IPCC’s Assessment Report over the past 6 years, including some 2500 scientific expert reviewers, 850 contributing authors, and 450 lead authors. Criticism of the Report ranges from charges that it overstated the dangers posed by climate change to charges that it stated only the "lowest common denominator" findings and understated the emerging risks.
NOAA in particular is charged with helping Americans understand climate variability and change. This is achieved through a global observation system. The agency found, for example, that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have climbed from pre-industrial levels of about 280 parts per million by volume to current levels of about 370, and are expected to rise anywhere from 490 to 1260 by the end of the 21st century.
NASA is using remote-sensing data from satellites to help detect changes on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere. It has been recording how greenhouse gases increase the melting rate of sea ice and how the ice cap around the North Pole and Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier are shrinking. As the Arctic’s average temperature has increased, the glaciers along Greenland’s edge have begun to slump and melt, thus adding billions of gallons of freshwater to the ocean.
In the meantime, flustered climate change debunkers occasionally find allies in the Bush administration whenever it chooses to stifle, delay, or dampen the release of climate change research data developed by American scientists in both public and private institutions.