GLOBAL WARMING SCARE DEAD EXCUSE FOR SILLY ACTION.

Byline: JOSEPH J. JACOBS Local View

SOMETHING has happened that should deal a death blow to environmental radicals' attempts to destroy us.

Jim Hansen of NASA, writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, says, ``The forces that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate changes.''

Who is Jim Hansen, and why are his words important? He is the climate modeler of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who started the global warming scare.

The guru has retreated. If Hansen is no longer confident about predicting global warming, where does that leave the activists like Philip E. Clapp and others? Up the creek without a scientific paddle.

In 1988, a particularly warm year, Hansen made a public announcement that gases generated by human activity can cause global temperatures to rise. On the basis of his computer model, he made predictions of significant temperature rises in the future with what he called 99 percent certainty.

The panic button was pressed. After all, who wants to be drowned by rising seas or burned to a crisp? The activists, looking for a cause of certain virtue, took up the hue and cry. But serious scientists wanted to see if the model was any good as a predictor of future temperatures. They tested the model retrospectively - i.e., went backward 50 years. They found there was little correlation, but the scare was on, so for the next 10 years Hansen and others kept modifying and tinkering with the model to improve it.

Dire announcements always accompanied each new try. Unnoticed was that, with each announcement, global warming kept getting further in the future, and the expected temperature rise kept getting smaller and smaller. In the early days, four to eight degrees were commonly used, but these days, the range seems to be one to three degrees. Besides, nobody can even define ``global temperature'' and how to measure it.

So now that the pied piper and guru of global warming has admitted that global temperature computer models are not reliable in predicting future temperature changes, what will happen? I am certain that it will not stop the activists because global warming, fact or fiction, is only of peripheral interest. They have another agenda. But I hope the mass of people will no longer accept it when these radicals try to scare us into a drastic policy to solve a nonproblem.

What drives people who lead The Friends of the Earth, The Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Earth Institute, The Sierra Club and a host of other front groups? I am not one who easily succumbs to conspiracy theories, but there is a commonality of style and purpose that derives from a combination of guilt and envy. It is tempting to liken it to the socialist viewpoint, yet the similarities of motive and emotion is striking.

The socialists are driven by their view that the free market system, which rewards people unevenly, is unfair. Yet no political system they have devised yet has been able to raise the standard of living of all the people as high as our free market economy or to obviate a natural disparity in ability.

The radical environmentalists, similarly, view the success of the Western economies - usually as a result of political and economic systems that work better than those of the poor nations - as evidence of unfairness among nations. So the forces of envy take hold. We must, they say, force these developed nations to lower their standard of living drastically - the Kyoto agreement - because it is unfair of them to enjoy so much prosperity.

So these ideologues support any cause that appears virtuous, no matter on what flimsy evidence. The fact that their program will transfer wealth in vast amounts from the haves to the have-nots is all right with them. Examine the Kyoto accords and strip away the rhetoric and moralizing. What remains is clear-cut: Stop the industrial activity of successful nations, but allow the poorer nations to pollute. Even the labor unions recognize this. The pied piper's siren song has turned into nothing but a whimpering discord.