Holly Fretwell, an economist by training, has done her best to bring some needed critical thinking to the global-warming debate by writing “The Sky’s Not Falling! -- Why It’s OK to Chill About Global Warming.” Aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds and their parents, it is a good, reasoned, 115-page antidote to the Chicken Little hysteria and propaganda found in the mainstream media and in places like Laurie David’s kids book “The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.” Fretwell is a research fellow who focuses on natural-resource issues and public-lands management at the free-market Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Mont. I talked to her by telephone on Wednesday, Jan. 16:
Q: The sound-bite synopsis of your position on climate change or global warming is what?
A: Really it's that I am tired of seeing propaganda and I want people to understand the truth and to know what some of the best possible alternatives are to solving all the different issues throughout the world -- not just global warming. I want people to become critical thinkers.
Q: What do you say is going on with climate change?
A: We do see the Earth is warming. We are coming out of an ice age and we’d expect to see some warming. The Earth has warmed and cooled and warmed and cooled and warmed and cooled many, many times over its history -- long before humans were on Earth and also since humans have been on Earth. We do see a correlation between CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature change in present times and even if we go back into history.
But as any scientist can tell you, correlation is not causation. We need to be very careful about that. We have a lot of people out there trying to tell us that because one thing is happening, it’s causing another thing, when, in fact, we really don’t know that. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there.
If you actually go back and look at the data that shows CO2 levels and temperature changes over the last 650,000 years, what we find is that temperature actually changes first and CO2 in the atmosphere follows that temperature change. Maybe I should say that again: Temperature changes first. CO2 lags the temperature change. We know that humans are emitting CO2; the point being, however, there is no reason to believe that CO2 is causing temperature change when it is following temperature rises over the history of the data we have.
Bill Steigerwald
Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a columnist Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Bill Steigerwald recently retired from daily newspaper journalism..
TOWNHALL DAILY:
Sign up today and receive Townhall.com daily lineup delivered each morning to your inbox.