by James Lewis

The Inuit of the Arctic used to sacrifice their old people to save food for the rest of the clan during the long winters. The elders were expected to commit suicide. As they ran low on food and fuel, as sled dogs were slaughtered and eaten, the old ones walked into the long night and died. It made sense because there was a limited amount of food and warmth, and so many months of cold and darkness to go before the sun came back. If the elders resisted they might be publicly shamed. They would rather die. And so they walked into the snow.

It’s astonishing, but that’s the reasoning Barack Obama is using for the United States today. Obama’s command seizure of one-sixth of the American economy is based on the assumption that medicine is a zero-sum game. The trouble is that Obama’s assumption is false — and destructive. It has been falsified by every single advance in human health since the Industrial Revolution. It’s simply not true that there is a fixed supply of medical care, one that cannot grow, become more effective, cost less, and make our lives better and longer. It is not true that my gain must be your loss.

Obama thinks the way Thomas Malthus did in 1798. But Malthus was wrong then, just like Obama is now.

So here’s the question for every American. Under ObamaCare, when we really will have to divide up a Malthusian lockbox of federal money, how much will your life be worth? Your spouse’s? Your child’s? Your parents’? If you are an aging boomer, is your life worth as much as Sarah Palin’s baby, born with Down Syndrome? And whom do you trust with the God-like power to make those decisions?

If we have a limited budget for all medical care — no more and no less — who is entitled to that extra dollar of care? Is it Michelle Obama or you? Your grandchildren? Ted Kennedy? Or some family in Somalia? For socialists, all the people of the world deserve the same medical care that you get. There is a fixed amount of medical dollars in the world. Your gain is their loss.

Older people spend a lot more on doctors than younger people. Should they be stopped from spending their money on staying healthy? If you spend your money on health care, does that subtract from the medical care of a young Mexican immigrant?

The Obama belief is that it does. But that’s not the reality of medical science since the 1860s.

Take as an example clean water. It has saved more lives than any other advance in history. It was public sanitation that triggered the first great leap in life expectancy, starting in 1869, when Louis Pasteur figured out how typhoid fever spread.

Public sanitation has doubled the human life span since then. All it took was separating the food and water supply from our bodily wastes. Now, if you’re Obama, you believe all those miles of plumbing are a cost — everybody in the country has to pay for it. But if you’re in touch with economic reality you see it as a net benefit. Sure it takes money to lay all those pipes for fresh water and to dispose of sewage. But life expectancy has doubled. That’s not a net cost; it’s an unimaginable benefit for all those lucky people. (That would be us, our parents, and children.)

If you’re Obama you think, “Uh-Oh, more money to spend on bodies that live twice as long!” That’s Obama’s Malthusian lockbox thinking. What we find in reality is that those longer-living people are healthier, more vigorous, think more clearly, have more fun, are better educated, generate more wealth and productivity, and create a gigantic demand for goods and services that keep industrialized economies humming. (If you allow markets to work, that is.)

Spending money on public sanitation is a wealth-generator. If you don’t believe Western history, look at India and China since the end of communism. Or take a look at South Korea versus North Korea. Which one is the Malthusian society, with hundreds of thousands of people dying from starvation? Which is the wealth-generating society? Which one has healthier people? Yes, you guessed right.

I’ve been reading one of Obama’s central planners, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel — the Rahm-Bro — whose writings are all over the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Emanuel is a “bioethicist” who runs studies of medical care for the National Institutes of Health. Somehow all his “studies” come to exactly the same conclusions: American medicine stinks. It’s too expensive. And we’re not getting value for all that money.

Dr. E doesn’t hide his outraged feelings in JAMA, in a commentary called “The Perfect Storm of Overutilization“:

The United States spends substantially more per person on health care than any other country, and yet U.S. health outcomes are the same as or worse than those in other countries. … It is more costly care … that accounts for higher expenditures in the United States.

Dr. E blames these factors.

• U.S. doctors are “too thorough” in examining patients. (No kidding!)
• Fee-for-service creates the wrong incentives — although “most physicians are not income maximizers.”
• Physicians are targeted by medical advertisers — and don’t have comparative studies of effectiveness.

(But a Google Scholar search for “medical effectiveness” brings up no less than three million nine hundred and ninety thousand scholarly articles on that topic.)

• Defensive medicine costs more.
• U.S. patients “prefer high technology over high touch.”
• Patients find out about new drugs from medical ads and news stories, and keep bugging their docs for the latest.

Well, I must say I’m not shocked — and not appalled. I’m willing to risk an extra three thousand dollars per year for medical care, on the chance that a doctor will diagnose breast cancer in a woman I love, quickly enough to save her life. Does Dr. E have different values? I pity his loved ones. But I certainly do not want him in charge of my medical choices — or yours.

Real scientists know science is unpredictable. Every issue of Science magazine brings more surprises. But Dr. E’s assumption is that he can judge medical advances — and therefore economic costs and benefits — for decades into the future. That is patently false and foolish.

For example, recent discoveries in biomedical science point to new ways to extend human life. Google Scholar cites 122,000 scientific articles on “extended lifespan.” Those discoveries will take time to become practical, but the scientific frontier is moving amazingly fast. Or take another example: simple aspirin, which was first synthesized in 1899, is now known to be an excellent anti-inflammatory drug — and systemic inflammation is now known to make us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and some cancers. And guess what? If you’re taking statins for cholesterol, you’re getting all kinds of unanticipated health benefits. All that was discovered in the last ten years. Nobody could have anticipated those findings.

The thing is, to Obama’s Malthusian mind-set it would be bad for us to live longer. The older you are, the more you’ll cost the feds. Well, then, what’s the Malthusian answer? Don’t let people get older. Make sure they take end-of-life counseling. It’s mandatory every five years under the House bill, and more often than that if you get a bad cough. Don’t kill older people, but just keep asking them how they are willing to die. The real purpose of all that counseling is to make you sign that do-not-resuscitate order. Gotta move ‘em out, ya know.

How’s that for cheering up your golden years?

If you think all that’s wild speculation, consider Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the man who has run Britain’s National Health Service for the last dozen years (as chancellor of the exchequer and PM). Brown is obsessed by the Malthusian trade-offs required by socialized health care. So here is Gordon Brown’s solution to the Malthusian lockbox dilemma: mandatory organ donations by all citizens as soon as they die.

It makes perfectly good sense in a mad kind of way. You see, the government has invested public money in your body. So the taxpayers are entitled to use whatever mileage is left in your heart or lungs when you’re done with them. And rather than let your body go bad, the docs need to get at those organs while they’re nice and fresh, as soon as you flatline. So they can’t afford to wait to ask your nearest and dearest, right? And what if you didn’t sign that little organ donation card, as Gordon Brown told the world he did, like a good citizen?

I’m not kidding. In the British newspapers nobody even seemed to be surprised. It’s the brave new world of socialist cannibalism.

So we’re back to the Inuit elders in the long Arctic winter. Except that unlike the Inuit of old we are not living in a zero-sum world. We are not on the edge of starvation. We are not forced to choose between saving babies or driving old people into the Arctic night.

No — we are only dealing with a malignant fantasy land by the obsessional control freaks of this administration.

And yet — Obama’s Malthusian lockbox will become the law of the land if you don’t do anything about it.

by Charles Krauthammer

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), “travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.” In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton’s incredulity at America’s abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.

Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we’d landed on the moon. Then five more landings, ten more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We’ve done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated — and ultimately, hopelessly impractical — machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the international space station, itself created in a fit of post–Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing “Kumbaya” while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile, and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going — like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde — into the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive.

America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one’s asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington — “stimulus” monies that, unlike Eisenhower’s interstate highway system or Kennedy’s Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness — to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Why do it? It’s not for practicality. We didn’t go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And when you do such magnificently hard things — send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong — you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to — and symbol of — environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints — untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.

How could we?

For a decade now, the question of federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research has made for a heated political debate. Scientists believe the research may hold the promise of advancing medical research, but it also involves the destruction of living human embryos, and therefore raises the explosive question of the protection and regard we owe to human beings in their earliest stages.

Since 1995, Congress has prohibited taxpayer funds from paying for research in which embryos are destroyed. The Clinton administration, in its final months, explored the possibility of walking through a loophole in that law by funding everything that followed the destruction of embryos but not paying for the fatal act itself. They never actually went through with such funding. When George W. Bush came into office, he decided that such an approach, by providing a direct incentive for the destruction of embryos, violated the important ethical principle behind the spirit of the law. He proposed instead a narrower loophole of his own: The government would pay for research using lines of cells that already existed at the time of his decision, but not for those created after. That way, the potential of embryonic stem-cell science could be further explored, but federal money would not provide an incentive for the further destruction of embryos.

Bush’s policy was hotly debated throughout his time in office. Congress twice passed, and Bush twice vetoed, a measure that would have replaced it with the more permissive Clinton approach. On Monday, Pres. Barack Obama followed through on his campaign promise to rescind the Bush rules.

Unlike the bills Bush vetoed, however, Obama’s action did not replace the existing policy with another set of boundaries grounded in a different ethical calculus. Instead, Obama eliminated the Bush policy and then took the unusual and provocative step of also rescinding Bush’s 2007 executive order providing support for alternative sources of stem cells — an order that in no way limited embryonic stem-cell research and need not have been retracted. Having lifted these restrictions, Obama put no rules or boundaries of any kind in their place, instructing the scientists at the National Institutes of Health to do so on his behalf over the next few months. Obama’s executive order makes no mention of any moral qualm about the destruction of human embryos — whether left over from fertility treatments or created especially for experimentation, including human embryos created by cloning.

The last time NIH scientists were tasked with developing rules for embryo research, in 1994, they returned with proposals so permissive that Bill Clinton felt compelled to reject them. There is no reason to think the NIH will be any more circumspect this time, but President Obama unfortunately has given us considerable reason to think he will not reject even the broadest possible mandate for the exploitation of nascent human lives. With this week’s executive order, Obama has not so much staked out a position in the embryo debate as dismissed the debate itself as unnecessary.

The embryo debate is among the first real tests of our commitment to the equal protection of every human life in the age of biotechnology. The quandaries of this age will only grow more vexing and complicated. But scientific advances in recent years — especially the development of alternative sources of embryonic-like cells that do not necessitate the destruction of human organisms — appear to offer us a way around the test.

President Obama has turned his back on those advances. He has needlessly and clumsily forced a choice between the promise of progress and the respect for life, and has gone out of his way to ensure that we fail the moral test put before us. Let us hope this failure proves reversible in time and does not set the tone for science policy in the years to come.

Highly informed sources (don’t you love that phrase) tell us that Senate majority leader Harry “Hands-Off-Yucca-Mountain” Reid will be pushing for the Senate to adopt a national renewable energy portfolio within the next two weeks.

Reid has reportedly told Senator Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, he wants a bill on the Senate floor within two weeks. Bingaman is balking at the timetable but is not opposed to the bill.

And so the Senate may soon be leading us down the path trodden by California (the state with the $40 billion budget deficit) on its way to the California Electrical Shortage of 2000. Democrats have been historically feckless on energy, but apparently you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

What is a renewable portfolio? Well, it’s what we used to call an “unfunded mandate.” The premise is that the government has perfect foresight on where our energy future is going and as good legislators it’s their responsibility to hasten its arrival. Corporations and utilities, you see, are generally too greedy and stupid to perceive the future so they have to be prodded on their way. In their wisdom, the legislators will mandate that by 2000-whatever the state or nation shall derive XX percent of its electricity from “renewable sources.” It’s up to the utilities to do the job. California pioneered this strategy in the 1990s but 26 states have now followed suit, although four make it only voluntary.

All this is likely to make electricity more expensive, which is what is holding the utilities back. Solar electricity now costs about 24 cents per kilowatt-hour and wind 14 cents, as opposed to 5 cents for coal or natural gas. Utilities will pay the bills but then will inevitably pass them along to consumers. California now pays the highest electrical rates in the country, precisely because it will not allow coal or nuclear plants but has pursued a 30-year strategy to develop renewable energy.

The best criticism of renewable portfolio standards (“RPS” for short) comes from Fred Krupp, executive director of Environmental Defense, who is (please don’t tell anyone) a closet conservative. In his book, Earth: The Sequel, Krupp writes: “Mandates presume that the government already knows the best way to proceed on energy. But the government doesn’t know any better than anyone else. The best thing to do is to level the playing field, through something like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, and then let the market sort things out.” Krupp is talking here of course about reducing carbon emissions and I happen to agree with him. Democratic politicians, however, don’t like leaving decisions in the hands of ordinary people and so we are likely to get an RPS instead.

So just what is a “renewable” source of energy? Well, it depends on whom you ask. Wind is definitely renewable (although some people are pointing out that if we put up too many windmills we may start changing wind patterns, which will affect the climate). Solar heat and electricity are renewable because the sun shines every day. Geothermal energy is renewable because the heat of the earth will always be with us. It is generated by the breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms in the earth’s crust. (That’s why I titled my book on nuclear power Terrestrial Energy.) If we take those same uranium and thorium atoms and put them in something called a “nuclear reactor,” however, that is not renewable because — well, because it isn’t, that’s why.

Things get a little fuzzier when we get to hydroelectricity and biofuels. Hydroelectric dams have been with us since the 19th century and provided 40 percent of our electricity in 1940. They also provided the environmental movement with its first cause for objection. The Sierra Club opposed construction of the Hetch-Hetchy Dam in 1911 and is still campaigning to tear it down even though it provides water and electricity to 2.5 million people in the San Francisco area. The Club also opposed the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, proposing a nuclear plant in its place. Now someone has come along forty years later, however, and said hydroelectricity is renewable energy! That can’t be true. So environmental groups have decided only small dams — “low-head hydro” — are authentically renewable. Big dams don’t count. Whether large hydro should be included in a renewable mandate is always a matter of fierce debate.

Biofuel, on the other hand, has to be one of the most irrational pursuits ever undertaken by a mature industrial nation. The idea is that burning a portion of our crops for fuel each year is somehow “sustainable.” All this ignores that humanity has spent most of its history trying to build a sustainable agriculture, but that’s another story. We’re past that now. So each year we now burn one-quarter of the corn crop to feed our gas tanks and are headed for more. All this has created havoc and food riots in that other portion of the world that still practices agriculture. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization is calling biofuels a “crime against humanity,” but what do they know? They just don’t share our vision of a clean and sustainable energy future.

Thus, in one of the more bizarre developments, Midwestern utilities have now started substituting wood chips for coal on the basis that it is “more sustainable.” Wood has only half the energy density of coal and creates just as much carbon dioxide and air pollution. Lung disease is the leading cause of death around the world because people in underdeveloped countries spend their whole lives breathing wood smoke. Moreover, it would take a 1000-acre forest to feed one 1000-MW power plant on a sustainable basis. Yet we are reverting from coal to wood in order to protect the environment.

California began pursing a renewable strategy in 1980 when Governor Jerry Brown decided to pursue Amory Lovins’ “soft path.” From 1980 to 2000 the state built no new major power plants. (Diablo Canyon Nuclear Units 1 and 2, started in the 1960s, were finally brought on line in 1984 and 1985.) The Golden State pursued the most aggressive conservation-and-renewables program in the nation. It turned every garbage dump in the state into a 1-MW methane plant. Businesses as small as nursing homes and golf clubs were encouraged to generate their own electricity, capturing the steam for heat. The state developed its remarkable geothermal resources. (Geothermal vents are common along earthquake fault lines.) It built what was the largest windmill farm in the country at Altamont Pass. By 2000 it had the lowest per-capita electrical consumption in the country, the highest percentage of non-hydro renewables (10 percent as opposed to 1 percent nationwide) — and not enough electricity to run its traffic lights.

Urban legend now has it that Enron actually caused the California Electrical Shortage. The company did play games in order to dodge state price controls, but the state’s electrical shortage was caused by a shortage of electricity. California only recovered by tossing aside environmental review and throwing up 12,000 MW of natural gas generators over the next three years. Except for renewables, however, natural gas is the most expensive way to generate electricity. So Google has moved its server farms to Oregon and North Carolina, Cisco is expanding into Texas, and manufacturers are generally fleeing the state as fast as they can. As a result, the California economy is in a shambles.

And this is what Harry Reid now wants to do for the rest of the country. Hang on, it’s going to be a heck of a ride.

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:

1. First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots — and even revolutions, including the French Revolution — were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished).

So, no one needs to say the words “climate” and “change” in the same breath — it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the “Mann Hockey Stick,” created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did. One last thought on the expression “climate change”: It is a retreat from the earlier expression used by alarmists, “manmade global warming,” which was more easily debunked. There are people in Mr. Gore’s camp who now use instances of cold temperatures to prove the existence of “climate change,” which is absurd, obscene, even.

2. Mr. Gore has gone so far to discourage debate on climate as to refer to those who question his simplistic view of the atmosphere as “flat-Earthers.” This, too, is right on target, except for one tiny detail. It is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Indeed, it is Mr. Gore and his brethren who are flat-Earthers. Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. “Their relationship is actually very complicated,” he says, “but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.” The word “complicated” here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore’s graph. You are probably wondering by now — and if you are not, you should be — which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not “complicated.” When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998.

3. What the alarmists now state is that past episodes of warming were not caused by C02 but amplified by it, which is debatable, for many reasons, but, more important, is a far cry from the version of events sold to the public by Mr. Gore.

Meanwhile, the theory that carbon dioxide “drives” climate in any meaningful way is simply wrong and, again, evidence of a “flat-Earth” mentality. Carbon dioxide cannot absorb an unlimited amount of infrared radiation. Why not? Because it only absorbs heat along limited bandwidths, and is already absorbing just about everything it can. That is why plotted on a graph, C02′s ability to capture heat follows a logarithmic curve. We are already very near the maximum absorption level. Further, the IPCC Fourth Assessment, like all the ones before it, is based on computer models that presume a positive feedback of atmospheric warming via increased water vapor.

4. This mechanism has never been shown to exist. Indeed, increased temperature leads to increased evaporation of the oceans, which leads to increased cloud cover (one cooling effect) and increased precipitation (a bigger cooling effect). Within certain bounds, in other words, the ocean-atmosphere system has a very effective self-regulating tendency. By the way, water vapor is far more prevalent, and relevant, in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide — a trace gas. Water vapor’s absorption spectrum also overlays that of carbon dioxide. They cannot both absorb the same energy! The relative might of water vapor and relative weakness of carbon dioxide is exemplified by the extraordinary cooling experienced each night in desert regions, where water in the atmosphere is nearly non-existent.

If not carbon dioxide, what does “drive” climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the “super cycle” of which cooling La Niñas and warming El Niños are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Niños predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Niñas predominate.
Since that time, already, a number of interesting things have taken place. One La Niña lowered temperatures around the globe for about half of the year just ended, and another La Niña shows evidence of beginning in the equatorial Pacific waters. During the last twelve months, many interesting cold-weather events happened to occur: record snow in the European Alps, China, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Rockies, the upper Midwest, Las Vegas, Houston, and New Orleans. There was also, for the first time in at least 100 years, snow in Baghdad.

Concurrent with the switchover of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its cool phase the Sun has entered a period of deep slumber. The number of sunspots for 2008 was the second lowest of any year since 1901. That matters less because of fluctuations in the amount of heat generated by the massive star in our near proximity (although there are some fluctuations that may have some measurable effect on global temperatures) and more because of a process best described by the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark in his complex, but elegant, work The Chilling Stars. In the book, the modern Galileo, for he is nothing less, establishes that cosmic rays from deep space seed clouds over Earth’s oceans. Regulating the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth’s atmosphere is the solar wind; when it is strong, we get fewer cosmic rays. When it is weak, we get more. As NASA has corroborated, the number of cosmic rays passing through our atmosphere is at the maximum level since measurements have been taken, and show no signs of diminishing. The result: the seeding of what some have taken to calling “Svensmark clouds,” low dense clouds, principally over the oceans, that reflect sunlight back to space before it can have its warming effect on whatever is below.

Svensmark has proven, in the minds of most who have given his work a full hearing, that it is this very process that produced the episodes of cooling (and, inversely, warming) of our own era and past eras. The clearest instance of the process, by far, is that of the Maunder Minimum, which refers to a period from 1650 to 1700, during which the Sun had not a single spot on its face. Temperatures around the globe plummeted, with quite adverse effects: crop failures (remember the witch burnings in Europe and Massachusetts?), famine, and societal stress.

Many solar physicists anticipate that the slumbering Sun of early 2009 is likely to continue for at least two solar cycles, or about the next 25 years. Whether the Grand Solar Minimum, if it comes to pass, is as serious as the Maunder Minimum is not knowable, at present. Major solar minima (and maxima, such as the one during the second half of the 20th century) have also been shown to correlate with significant volcanic eruptions. These are likely the result of solar magnetic flux affecting geomagnetic flux, which affects the distribution of magma in Earth’s molten iron core and under its thin mantle. So, let us say, just for the sake of argument, that such an eruption takes place over the course of the next two decades. Like all major eruptions, this one will have a temporary cooling effect on global temperatures, perhaps a large one. The larger the eruption, the greater the effect. History shows that periods of cold are far more stressful to humanity than periods of warm. Would the eruption and consequent cooling be a climate-modifier that exists outside of nature, somehow? Who is the “flat-Earther” now?

What about heat escaping from volcanic vents in the ocean floor? What about the destruction of warming, upper-atmosphere ozone by cosmic rays? I could go on, but space is short. Again, who is the “flat-Earther” here?

The ocean-atmosphere system is not a simple one that can be “ruled” by a trace atmospheric gas. It is a complex, chaotic system, largely modulated by solar effects (both direct and indirect), as shown by the Little Ice Age.

To be told, as I have been, by Mr. Gore, again and again, that carbon dioxide is a grave threat to humankind is not just annoying, by the way, although it is that! To re-tool our economies in an effort to suppress carbon dioxide and its imaginary effect on climate, when other, graver problems exist is, simply put, wrong. Particulate pollution, such as that causing the Asian brown cloud, is a real problem. Two billion people on Earth living without electricity, in darkened huts and hovels polluted by charcoal smoke, is a real problem.

So, let us indeed start a Manhattan Project-like mission to create alternative sources of energy. And, in the meantime, let us neither cripple our own economy by mislabeling carbon dioxide a pollutant nor discourage development in the Third World, where suffering continues unabated, day after day.

Again, Mr. Gore, I accept your apology.

And, Mr. Obama, though I voted for you for a thousand times a thousand reasons, I hope never to need one from you.

P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the “terrible,” “unprecedented” melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007, they say. Well, the ice in the Arctic basin has always melted and refrozen, and always will. Any researcher who wants to find a single molecule of ice that has been there longer than 30 years is going to have a hard job, because the ice has always been melted from above (by the midnight Sun of summer) and below (by relatively warm ocean currents, possibly amplified by volcanic venting) — and on the sides, again by warm currents. Scientists in the alarmist camp have taken to referring to “old ice,” but, again, this is a misrepresentation of what takes place in the Arctic.

More to the point, 2007 happened also to be the time of maximum historic sea ice in Antarctica. (There are many credible sources of this information, such as the following website maintained by the University of Illinois-Urbana: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg). Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.

For failing to mention the 2007 Antarctic maximum sea ice record a single time, I also accept your apology, Mr. Gore. By the way, your contention that the Arctic basin will be “ice free” in summer within five years (which you said last month in Germany), is one of the most demonstrably false comments you have dared to make. Thank you for that!