GOP panel agrees: Warnings of global warming overdone
Group discusses Al Gore's film; few have seen it
Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News
Published April 28, 2007 at midnight
The 12 or so people, lawmakers included, who showed up to hear the Republican Study Committee of Colorado discuss global warming Friday found politics to be just as hot.
The gathering in a Capitol hearing room opened with Rep. Kevin Lundberg, R-Loveland, telling the group that, when it comes to climate change, the public has heard "much less hard sciences . . . (than) political science."
Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, described efforts to slow global warming as "an attack on the free-market system, an attack on capitalism and an attack on countries that have progressed to the point where their economies are excelling far beyond other countries'."
"I believe there is a concerted effort by many environmentalists in the world to do us harm because they don't want to have the greatest country in the world be the United States," he said.
Harvey was followed by William Gray, the respected hurricane forecaster, Colorado State University professor and global warming skeptic. Gray has become a favorite among those who believe environmentalists, Democrats, Al Gore and John McCain & Co. are overdoing it on global warming.
Gray criticized what he views as a stacked system in which scientists study climate change because it's an easy way to get government grants.
"This is driven by the scientists getting money to study it," Gray said. "They skew these facts in a certain way and write reports to scare people."
Gray seemed taken aback at all the attention former vice president Gore has received with his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
"I've been 50 some years working at (forecasting)," Gray said. "How does he know more than I do?"
And he bemoaned the use of computer models to predict what future climate will look like.
One can't possibly put all the right variables into a computer program, he said.
Gray called modeling a "religion" and accused modelers of living in a "virtual world" free from the chaotic complexity of reality.
"I came around before the satellite ruined everything," he said.
The final speaker, Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gave a crisp overview of his book-length critique of Gore's movie, arguing that Gore overemphasizes doomsday scenarios.
Lewis says global warming is real and humans play a role, but he said the temperature rise will be at the low end of scientists' predictions.
Trying to do too much to stop warming would be a waste of money better used on new technologies and solving other world problems, he said.
At one point during his critique, he asked who in the room hadn't seen Gore's movie.
Almost everyone raised a hand.
hartmant@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5048
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