President Clinton told a group of about 110 invited television weather forecasters, "You, just in the way you comment on the events you cover, may have a real effect on the American people." White House communications director Ann Lewis said that TV meteorologists "have great local credibility—they can give the public more information and help us communicate the issue in an unexpected and likely-to-be-heard way." Lewis also wondered that since meteorologists routinely offered five-day forecasts, why not predict rising temperatures over the next decade or two? TV Weatherman Barry Finn of WYOU in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post that he had been "somewhat skeptical that human beings were really doing anything to affect the weather, but hearing the President and Vice President state emphatically that the scientific debate is over, well, that went a long way toward convincing me."
John Holdren, head of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, predicted that unconstrained global warming will cause numerous heatstroke deaths. Diana Liverman, head of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Arizona, predicted "increases in diseases such as dengue fever, cholera, and malaria." (To buttress this last point, Al Gore noted that one case of malaria had recently been reported in Detroit, of all places, and Clinton claimed to have met someone fleeing mosquitoes while summering on Martha's Vineyard.) Liverman added sadly that "There are many people in the southern states who can't afford increased air conditioning."
Holdren predicted that coastlines and much of Florida would become
deluged with glacial runoff. Thomas Karl, a scientist at the
National Climatic Data Center,
said that global warming has been responsible
for an unusually high number of "catastrophic floods" over the past
five years. Donald Wilhite of the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
then took the microphone to blame global warming for widespread
drought conditions, as well as the forest fires they cause.
Perhaps sensing the growing bewilderment about the last two statements, President Clinton stepped up to explain this "apparent contradiction." "When the temperatures warm," said the president, "they dry the soil and create the conditions for the floods simultaneously."
Meanwhile, an article in Science predicts that it would take at least another decade to be able to accurately model any link between observed climate variation and global warming. So far, the data show that land temperatures have risen slightly (far less than anticipated and well within natural variation) but, in defiance of current models, temperatures in the lower atmosphere have fallen. Overall temperatures have remained static. On top of that, the New York Times has reported on research that suggests that variation in the intensity of the sun could "account for virtually all of the global warming measured to date."
Vice President Gore has been notoriously intolerant of skeptics, repeatedly insisting that there is no longer a legitimate scientific debate over the existence and effects of global warming. This, despite a Gallup poll that found that only 17 percent of the members of the Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society believed that greenhouse-gas emissions had caused any warming. Skeptics are not only wrong in Gore's view, they are equivalent to tobacco executives who once "said with a straight face and seemingly no embarrassment, there is no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer."
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt likewise reacted to an advertising campaign skeptical of the Kyoto protocol, commenting, "I think that the energy companies need to be called to account because what they are doing is un-American in the most basic sense." Stanford scientist and former global cooling theory proponent Stephen Schneider, a participant at the administration's roundtable, has also said that it is "journalistically irresponsible" to present both sides of the global warming debate.
Incidentally, Gore asserted at the same White House briefing that climate change was a symptom of population growth, suggesting that people in poor nations could reduce their emissions by having fewer children. Gore proposed that through "the empowerment of women to participate in decisions about childbearing," population growth could be cut by 2 to 5 billion people over the next two decades. Gore is not alone in his concerns. Democratic Senator Timothy Wirth reportedly believes that overpopulation is also the root cause of the ethnic atrocities in Bosnia.
Gore has also long advocated increasing the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standard for new passenger cars from 27.5 miles per gallon to 45 mpg. Yet the current standard increases the price of automobiles, and by reducing their size has also increased annual highway fatalities by 2,000 to 4,000, according to a joint study by Harvard and the Brookings Institute.
