Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

SENATOR Albert Gore's new book artfully fuses New Age psychobabble with radical environmentalism into the quintessence of political correctness. Humanity, he warns, is treating swamps, jungles, and seas as though they were the "weakest and most vulnerable members of [a] dysfunctional family." Our "dysfunctional civilization" is "addicted to the consumption of the earth itself" and is "in denial" over the harm its "addiction" is causing. Businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians are "enablers" who abet our "addictive behavior." Like recovering addicts who turn to Naranon, Gore apparently thinks humanity ought to seek its own collective 12-step recovery program. We could call it "Terranon."

While Gore's angle is new, the idea is not. H. L. Mencken observed that "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Here, Gore peddles every doomsday prediction made by apocalyptic environmentalism--overpopulation, topsoil erosion, scarcity of fresh water, deforestation, thinning ozone, and, of course, global warming.

Set aside global warming for the moment and look at the other hobgoblins. Overpopulation and famine? The billions of deaths from famine predicted for the 1970s and 1980s by Gore's heroes, Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown, never happened. Food production easily outpaced population growth since the 1950s. Soil scientist Pierre Crosson from Resources for the Future calculates that even without technological improvements, U.S. crop yields would drop at most 2 per cent over the next century because of soil erosion. Of course, improvements will be made, and used by farmers worldwide. Fresh water? The chief problem is misallocation because of enormous government subsidies and a lack of clear property rights. Forests? U.S. forests expanded from 600 million acres in 1920 to 728 million acres today.

Worries about the ozone layer, which screens out harmful ultraviolet radiation (UV) are also overdone. The Antarctic "ozone hole" occurs where no one lives, has not significantly harmed the Antarctic ecosystem, and will not engulf the planet. In the 1960s the ozone layer "thickened" by 5 per cent over the United States. The "thinning" in the 1980s just about brings ozone down to earlier levels. How dangerous is a thinner layer? We put ourselves at greater risk of developing non-melanoma skin cancer simply by moving from New York to Washington, D.C., sine UV increases as one travels south. Finally, the chemicals thought to be eroding the ozone layer have been banned and will no longer be produced after 1995.

Senator Gore flatly declares that global warming "is the most serious threat we have ever faced." Computer models predict the globe's average temperature will increase by 2[degrees] to 9[degrees] F. because of higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide liberated by burning fossil fuels. Earth's surface is warmed by the "greenhouse effect," in which carbon dioxide traps heat before it is reflected back into space.

But what is the evidence? Climate records, though spotty, do indicate that Earth has warmed by less than 1[degrees] F. over the last century. In his book, Gore implies that 98 per cent of atmospheric scientists agree that catastrophic greenhouse warming has begun. However, a recent Gallup poll conducted for the Institute for Science, Technology, and Media found that of those scientists actively involved in global climate research, 53 per cent do not believe human0induced global warming has occurred and 30 per cent don't know, leaving only 17 per cent who think human-induced global warming occurred--far short of 98 per cent.

How does the senator answer skeptics? In Time's "Planet of the Year" issue, he complained that "those who, for the purpose of maintaining balance in the debate [over global warming], adopt the contrarian view that there is significant uncertainty about whether it's real are hurting our ability to respond." Extending the chicken Little logic, Gore now takes the press to task for its coverage of greenhouse skeptics because it "undermines the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take." Simply put: shut up and get with the program.

And what a program: He advocates creating a UN "Stewardship Council," modeled on the Security Council. He calls for a "global Marshall Plan" to halt the impending holocaust, redistributing wealth and technology from the industrialized world to the developing world. For example, Gore would slow economic and population growth and reduce [CO.sub.2] emissions by levying a worldwide "carbon tax" on fossil fuels. Now, it would take a 60 per cent cut in [CO.sub.2] emissions to stabilize greenhouse gases at 1990 levels. Yale University economist William Nordhaus calculates that lowering [CO.sub.2] emissions by 50 per cent would cost $200 billion annually.

Gore's extremism, culminating in a demand that we "change the very foundation of our civilization," brings to mind what Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style." Gore too "traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. . . . Time is forever just running out."

But is time running out?

University of Illinois climate modeler Michael Schlesinger and his colleague Xingjian Jiang recently calculated that "the penalty is small for a ten-year delay in initiating the transition to a regime in which greenhouse-gas emissions are reduced." In other words, we have at least a decade to study the problem without making it substantially worse.

The rush is a matter of politics, not science. Gore credits Roger Revelle, the former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who rekindled interest in the greenhouse theory in the 1950s, as his mentor on the subject. Revelle co-authored a recent article that concluded: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time [emphasis in original]."

Even if the climate did warm significantly, it would not spell disaster for humanity. We can easily adapt to any climate changes likely to occur over the next century, according to the Climate Change Adaptation Panel of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Human beings thrive in climates ranging from the Sahara to Sarawak, from the Amazon to Alaska. The NAS points out that the change in temperatures predicted by the disaster theorists is "much smaller than that from day to night, from summer to winter, or between airports that one might leave and reach in an hour." The NAS also rejected predictions that climate change is apt to cause the catastrophic collapse of natural ecosystems or agriculture.

In other words, while environmental problems do exist, the end of the world is not at hand. With Earth in the Balance, Gore has joined the ranks of the end-of-the-second-millennium low-budget prophets. The real cause for concern is that such a demagogue writes legislation, influences our government's policy, and is widely discussed as a moderate and therefore one of the Democrats most likely to become President someday.

Mr. Bailey, currently at the Cato Institute, is writing a book on apocalyptic environmentalism for St. Martin's Press.