Sir, — Greg Terrill’s piece on the highly controversial subject of global warming (February 20), while reasonably balanced, does require some corrections. My public-policy institute, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, has a minuscule budget and is staffed by volunteer scientists; but it is lumped together with industry organizations like the Global Climate Coalition and the American Petroleum Institute. There are no financial connections here, in spite of the false claims in Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat is On. These groups simply share our view that climate science does not support the elaborate control structure of the Kyoto Accord.

Thus, I do not share John Houghton’s confident view that human activities are already causing a detectable global warming. The most accurate global data, from weather satellites, have shown a slight cooling trend in the past twenty years—which is contrary to the results of climate models. Yet it is these same models, and their predictions of a substantial future warming, that are used by the United Nations and by politicians who support the Kyoto Accord. My recent book, Hot Talk, Cold Science (Oakland, California, 1997) amply documents the inadequacy of the models and the general skepticism about them within the scientific community.

Your reviewer is surprised that the lively scientific debate about the reality of man-made global warming in the United States has not reached the same level in Europe. As a matter of fact, Europeans constitute a good fraction of the more than 100 climate scientists who have signed the (skeptical) Leipzig Declaration, following a conference in that city in November 1995. Perhaps they find it more difficult to gain access to the media.