Hot air in Berlin.

THE just-ended United Nations Climate Conference in Berlin saw governments of 130 countries discussing how to share the pain of internationally agreed and legally enforced reductions in carbon- dioxide emissions. In case you're feeling hazy, CO2 is the poisonous stuff we all breathe out -- and that we also generate by the combustion of oil, gas, or coal in motor vehicles, heating, power plants, and various industrial processes. The host, German chancellor Helmut Kohl, set the apocalyptic tone by saying that drastically reducing CO2 output was vital to ``guarantee a life worth living in the twenty-first century and beyond.''

Though the Berlin conference reached an impasse on how to distribute the pain, it did agree to establish a UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn. The two simple questions no one was impolite enough to raise were: Are these CO2 ``greenhouse'' gases really a dread menace? Is global warming for real? The George C. Marshall Institute of Washington, D.C., recently surveyed the latest scientific literature on global warming and the latest temperature data. Its report is quite measured. It tries at every stage to give the benefit of the doubt to those who fear that global warming is a real threat. And after an exhaustive examination of all the permutations of the alarmists' logic, the Institute concludes that ``the temperature increase produced in the twenty-first century by greenhouse gases of manmade origin will be relatively minor -- almost certainly less than 1(degree) Celsius -- and indistinguishable from natural fluctuations of climate. . . . . Sufficient evidence has accumulated on the small size of the manmade greenhouse effect to make it plain that no scientific justification now exists for economically punishing policies aimed at global reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide.'' How so? Through erroneous assumptions about feedbacks and other climate phenomena, the computer modeling used to generate scare scenarios of global warming overestimates the greenhouse effect by about a factor of three. Mankind has been increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for a while, in effect carrying out an experiment, as the Institute puts it, which indicates roughly how the earth's climate responds to an increase in greenhouse gases. ``The results of this experiment are now in: satellites have taken the earth's temperature [and it is rising at] 0.1(degree) for the 1980s and 1990s. This is three times smaller than the global rise predicted by the computer simulations. . . . Which are more trustworthy -- the measured temperatures or the computer predictions?''

The report of this think tank deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. The Institute is led by some of America's most distinguished scientists -- Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences; Robert Jastrow, founder and retired director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and William Nierenberg, a former director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, among others. So much for the ``scientific consensus'' that Al Gore says exists on the menace of greenhouse gases.

Why then do we rely so heavily on such fallible models? The idea of ``global warming'' has spawned an entire international industry of agitation, business-bashing, guilt-mongering, and bureaucracy- building. It won't easily be affected by facts and logic. The mother of all scares is seen by the Left as the last best hope for salvaging economic planning from the rubble of the Berlin Wall. The truly dangerous gas in the atmosphere is socialism. The U.S. Congress should continue to finance research into climate changes (perhaps at reduced levels), and it should hold more hearings on the results. Many good scientists have risked their own funding to publish findings at variance with the scare-mongers. The only way to make further progress is by continuing to shine the light of science on the subject, as the Marshall Institute has done. So the Congress should insist that any future conferences funded by taxpayers address the central issue: Is there a real problem? Meanwhile, ``not one cent'' to the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn.