Science fiction about global warming.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: Time magazine, in its own summary of the cover story for April 4, 2006, reported: "Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us." The article, subtitled "The Climate Is Crashing, and Global Warming Is to Blame," asserts among other catastrophes that polar bears "are starting to turn up drowned. 'There will be no polar ice by 2060,' says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. 'Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out.' So much environmental collapse has at least awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions. The Bush administration, however, has shown no willingness to address the warming crisis in a serious way and Congress has not been much more encouraging."

ITEM: NASA scientist James Hansen used the CBS show 60 Minutes to raise the alarm about how humans are causing the climate to change and how the resulting global warming is fast becoming a catastrophe. In its own news coverage of the Hansen appearance, CBS News reported on March 19 that such human changes "are driven by burning fossil fuels that pump out greenhouse gases like [CO.sub.2], carbon dioxide. Hansen says his research shows that man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable. He says the White House is blocking that message."

CORRECTION: Lest there be any misunderstanding, Time magazine's own summary of its alarmist special issue actually is less hysterical than the coverage itself--which would have readers believe that planetary devastation and destruction are just around the bend. Global warming hyperbole has become over the top and amounts strictly to scaremongering.

NASA's James Hansen assuredly knows the value of wildly speculative claims. Indeed, he learned this when his stock began a dramatic rise after he testified in Washington in 1988, telling Congress that there was a "cause and effect relationship" between "the current climate" and "human alteration of the atmosphere." This blast in large part won him the role in some quarters as the "father of global warming."

Value in Pushing "Extreme Scenarios"

Years later, following the spending of tens of billions of public dollars on the alleged problem, Hansen had apparently pulled back from the extremists. Nevertheless, he claimed that exaggeration by scientists had its place when it was necessary to mobilize public opinion. As he put it in Natural Science, "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue." (For more details, see Patrick Michaels' outstanding book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, Cato, 2004.)

Now, it would seem, Hansen has decided to jump back into the doomsday camp. He is hardly alone in believing that there is a need to use distortions. Stephen Schneider, a Stanford professor who has been pushing the man-is-responsible-for-global-warming theory, also has said that attracting public attention necessitates "getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have."