Environmentalists Try to Whip Up Hysteria to Advance Global Warming Treaty; No Evidence To Support Apocalyptic Claims that Major Cities will be Flooded

A recent study released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) alleging that rising sea levels caused by man-made global warming may flood New York and other U.S. cities over the next century is unsupported by scientific research, according to The National Center For Public Policy Research. By making such baseless claims, the environmental movement hopes to pressure the U.S. into endorsing major reductions in greenhouse emissions at the Fifth Session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that is currently meeting in Bonn, Germany.

The WWF study maintains that, unless steps are immediately taken to enforce economically-drastic reductions in the amount of human greenhouse gas emissions, global warming will continue to melt the polar glaciers over the next 100 years and "threaten low-lying U.S. coastal cities such as New York, Boston, Baltimore and Miami with flooding."

But the WWF’s dire predictions do not appear to be consistent with recent scientific findings. Surveys of key polar glaciers, which would be the primary source of any significant sea level increase, show no evidence of being affected by man-made warming. On October 8, 1999 a team of scientists led by Dr. Howard Conway of the University of Washington reported in the journal Science that the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), considered to be especially vulnerable to alleged global warming, is not melting due to human influences. According to Dr. Conway, the gradual melting of the WAIS "appears to be part of an ongoing natural cycle" of melting that began when the ice age ended 10,000 years ago. At the current rate of melting, it will take several thousand years before this melting ice sheet would even begin to affect seaboard cities – assuming the Earth doesn’t enter a new ice age before then. Likewise, in October 1998, the British Antarctic Survey concluded that the "dramatic vision of a rapid collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet" due to human-induced global warming is "becoming less acceptable."

"There is simply no evidence to support environmentalists’ shrill claims that man-made greenhouse gases are going to melt the glaciers and dangerously raise sea levels, " says John Carlisle, director of the Environmental Policy Task Force. "With the prospects that the U.S. Senate will ratify the Kyoto treaty diminishing, they apparently feel they have to scare the American people into supporting it through outlandish, unfounded claims."

The Environmental Policy Task Force is a project of The National Center For Public Policy Research, a non-partisan, non-profit education foundation. For more information, contact John Carlisle at The National Center For Public Policy Research at 202-507-6398 or [email protected] or download the paper, "Behavior of World’s Glaciers Fails to Prove Global Warming Theory" at https://nationalcenter.org.NPA235.html.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.