"How could any American believe that a few parts per trillion of the herbicide alar on a barrel of granny smiths could harm them?" So starts a review of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's 'Betrayal of Science and Reason' by Gary Lee, identified as "a travel writer for the Washington Post [who] has written frequently on environmental issues." (Washington Post Book World, Oct. 27, 1996)

Lee simply gushes about the book, calling it well-argued, thoroughly- researched, compelling, timely, readable, fresh, and necessary. Lee is wrong about everything else too: Alar is not a herbicide, and nobody worries much about the Granny Smith apples.

Getting back to his rhetorical question, however, there is a ready answer. If you want to scare the American public and make them believe in anything, no matter how far-fetched, you just get money from a foundation and hire a public relations firm like Fenton Communications to spread the word that Alar will cause cancer in children. And to make the matter binding, you get the eminent cancer specialist Meryl Streep to testify to that effect.

What really bugs the Ehrlichs and Gary Lee is the rise of "increasingly prominent critics of environmental science" and the fact that journalists are paying attention to them. "With strong and appealing messages [the scientific critics] have successfully sown seeds of doubt among journalists, policy-makers, and the public at large about the reality of ...global climate change..."

But how do the Ehrlichs, who are biologists, know whose climate science is correct? As Lee explains, "the Ehrlichs rest their case on the conclusions reached by a consensus of scientists." But there is no consensus. The UN-supported science advisory group, IPCC, claims hundreds of "consenters" (who have never been polled), while the Leipzig Declaration, which questions the UN-IPCC conclusions, was signed by nearly a hundred--including some who contributed to the IPCC report. But scienific debates cannot be settled simply by majority voting.

Lee has me dismissing the global warming scare as "hogwash." I would never use such a word, but have often pointed out that climate fluctuates: sometimes the Earth gets hotter and sometimes it gets colder, depending on the choice of time interval. (For example, early in the century the Earth warmed, but during the past 20 years, according to precise weather satellite data, it cooled slightly.) I really much prefer Vice President Al Gore’s picturesque description of scientific skeptics as those who regard global warming as the "empirical equivalent of the Easter Bunny."

S. Fred Singer, Ph.D.
President, Science & Environmental Policy Project
Fairfax, VA
October 29, 1996