Our View - Tuesday

Time for change?

Climate conference should find new song

Another U.N. conference began Monday in Bali to contrive another worldwide governmental “solution” for global warming. Beware when government wants to help. Be frightened when it’s a bunch of governments. Most will assume as true the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scare story that human-induced global warming is a certainty and poses catastrophic consequences — unless governments do something.

Never mind that the IPCC watered down its even scarier previous report from 2001. Instead of computer predictions of 35-inch sea-level rises, the latest report says only 17 inches. Rather than 2.5 to 10.4-degree temperature increases, computers now say 3.2 to 7.2 degrees.

Never mind the report is compiled by government-appointed editors. And governments never have an agenda, right? Never mind as IPCC predictions have gotten less scary, rhetoric has gotten more so. And never mind that Draconian Kyoto Protocol Treaty mandates to drastically reduce greenhouse gases have failed. In fact, expect more stringent, economy-retarding mandates from Bali.

There are opposing views, and solid evidence. Consider that the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, 41 civil and public policy organizations from 33 nations “independent of political parties and governments,” says: “the economic and social consequences of a Kyoto 2 Treaty could be devastating.”

The group says government subsidies, taxes and regulations undermining economic growth should be eliminated instead, or else billions of poor people will be harmed by making energy and clean water more expensive, perpetuating poverty.

Consider IPCC contributor Dr. Bejamin Santer, who has said: “it’s unfortunate that many people read the media hype before they read the (IPCC) chapter” on detecting greenhouse gases. “I think the caveats are there. We say quite clearly that few scientists would say the attribution (of global warming to human industrial activity) was a done deal.”

Consider soaring temperatures exist only in computer predictions. The 1-degree Centigrade increase in the last century is entirely within the normal range. Satellite measurements, the most accurate, show no southern hemisphere warming since 1979 and a decline in the north since 2001, despite rising greenhouse gas levels.

Despite IPCC assumptions, increasing atmospheric CO2 doesn’t appear to increase temperatures, which historically increase before CO2 increases. Temperatures were no warmer than today when CO2 concentrations were 18 times higher in the Cambrian Period and 12 times higher in the Late Ordovician Period, an ice age yet.

“The scientific evidence on global warming is not yet settled sufficiently to provide a basis for potentially very costly and major policy initiatives,” says Wolfgang Kasper, emeritus professor of economics at the University of New South Wales.

It’s pretty much a done deal, though, that this week’s conference will ignore all that and issue even more stringent caps on gasses rather than look at other, less economy-killing measures to address any changes to the global climate.

Let’s not go down the road to a draft

The United States Army is proud that it has met its goals in the first month of its five-year recruiting plan, but the remaining 59-month effort to find 65,000 new soldiers might not be going as well as Army officials would like the public to believe.

The Boston Globe reported last week that “Pentagon statistics show the Army met that goal by accepting a higher percentage of enlistees with criminal records, drug or alcohol problems or health conditions that would have ordinarily disqualified them from service. . . . The October statistics show that at least one of every five recruits required a waiver to join the service, leading military analysts to conclude that the Army is lowering standards more than it has in decades.”

That situation shouldn’t surprise anyone given that the nation is involved in a war in Iraq. It’s naturally harder to find recruits during such a situation. There are a lot of patriotic young men and women out there, but not all of them see military service as the best way for them to serve their country. Of those who do, many likely don’t like the idea of being maimed or killed in a war they don’t necessarily link to national security.

Often, waivers are granted for minor drug and other offenses or for recruits who are overweight. This isn’t necessarily a huge problem, but the Army’s inability to meet its recruiting goals without lowering standards is a reminder that there are limits to the number of Americans who will volunteer to serve in the military.

It’s not just the Army that has trouble fielding recruits. It’s nearly impossible these days to watch television or listen to the radio without being bombarded with stories of how service in the National Guard or Reserve is giving young people training and money for college. They wouldn’t be shelling out for advertising if people were beating down the doors of local armories to enlist.

Unfortunately, some people are learning the wrong lesson from the shortages. The Congressional Budget Office, in a report completed last summer, noted an increasing call for a military draft. We can think of few things more destructive of liberty than forcing Americans to serve in the military. That idea should be a nonstarter. It’s difficult for draft proponents to argue that young people must be forced into the service to defend our liberty.

The better lesson is that the United States should be more careful about waging war and more cognizant of the limits of its foreign policy.