Making the world safe.

MORE than a thousand people have died and millions have had to flee their homes, the wires have reported, during recent flooding of the Yangtze River. By historic standards this is a modest flood. Tens of thousands drown every few years in Yangtze floods, and there have been cases when millions died from the uncontrolled waters of China's largest river spilling its banks.

Lord knows the Communist dynasty ruling in Peking has many crimes to account for, but attempting to tame the waters of the Yangtze to save its citizens from those deadly floods surely does not rank among them. Yet the Clinton Administration has given extraordinarily high priority to sabotaging the financing of the Three Gorges Dam, China's $12-billion effort to control the floods. To save fresh-water dolphins, Siberian cranes, and picturesque rugged scenery, the Administration has worked assiduously to stop the project. Samuel Berger, deputy National Security Advisor, intervened with the supposedly independent Ex-Im Bank to stop commercial credits for it. As a result, Caterpillar and other U.S. companies seeking to sell equipment in competition with Japanese and European manufacturers have been handicapped, and the cost of building the dam increased. Behind the scenes the Administration also threatened to use its veto power at the World Bank and other international agencies to prevent them from lending money for the Three Gorges project.

Now, there may be legitimate criticisms of the design of the Three Gorges dam. It may be Stalinist gargantuism. Maybe a design with several smaller dams would have been better? Maybe the scenery and endangered species could have been accommodated to a greater degree, while still providing flood control and electricity? Such questioning of detail would be one thing. But the U.S. position under the Clinton Administration has been one of outright hostility to the aims of the Yangtze project, reflecting a humanity-hating environmentalism that dwells on possible dangers to birds and fish while cavalierly disregarding the needs of tens of millions of people. This extreme brand of environmentalism pervades the Clinton Administration.

Indeed, its "integrating" this environmentalism into all aspects of government has been a major internal goal of the Clinton Administration. In foreign policy, for example, this has meant creating a new under-secretary position for environmental affairs at the Department of State, a position given to Green ex-Senator Timothy Wirth; designating a senior officer at each embassy as "environmental point person"; and identifying environmentalist doctrine as part of the United States vital interests. A memorandum from Secretary of State Warren Christopher dated February 14 to all embassies and bureaus of the State Department said that "environmental concerns" will henceforth be a key component of U.S. foreign policy. Environmental issues are to be "integrated" into "bureau and mission program plans," into "trip plans," and into "talking points for bilateral meetings involving the President and other senior officials." In short, every U.S. official is under orders to become an environmentalist scold.

One hopes that the vast majority of U.S. officials will just go through the motions, generating the usual statements about recycling, energy conservation, ozone-layer protection, dolphin protection, and suchlike, and inserting them into their memoranda. But there has been a steady entrenchment of this stuff even as the bits and pieces of science underpinning it are demonstrated to be junk.

TAKE that mother of all scares, global warming. Simply put, there isn't any global warming. It isn't happening, according to the most sophisticated temperature measurement by balloon and satellite. There's a lot of theory and many fancy computer modelings about why it should be happening. But it just isn't there on the thermometers.

So now we have parts of the Clinton Administration engaging in Statistical Fraud 101 (see graph). Any time series of a phenomenon like average temperature by year will bump up and down, and elementary junk science yields a handy means of "proving" an upward trend. Search a series for a couple of low years and start off with those; then cut off your trend line when you've got a couple of high years. The global-warming junkmeisters at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just last month did that in an article in Nature magazine using temperature data from 1963 to 1987. Given that 1964 was extraordinarily cold and 1987 very hot, these cheerleaders for Al Gore produced a good-looking uptrend (see blacked-in circles).

Of course when you include the data from a few years before 1963 and the years since 1987 -- as Patrick Michaels, a University of Virginia climatologist, quickly did -- you get what every reputable calculation of the thermometer data shows, which is that there is no up-trend (see years with open circles).

More recently, the Administration made a major shift leftward to embrace a canon of environmentalist fundamentalism that it had previously found too hot politically -- mandatory limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Green Czar Timothy Wirth announced a new U.S. policy of mandatory limits on carbon-dioxide emissions at a press conference in Geneva July 16 saying the United States was proposing a "radical" international accord: "What we want is a binding target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that is agreed on internationally." This radical approach has never been the subject of any reasoned Administration statement or testimony, let alone the subject of major study by a serious scientific panel. Indeed, a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study a couple of years ago said that if global warming does occur humanity can adapt, since the computer-forecast changes in climate are similar in magnitude to natural changes. But the Administration is going by green-faith, and science is useful to it only insofar as it supports that faith.

By pushing an international accord on suppressing greenhouse gases, evangelists of environmentalism such as Mr. Wirth are able to take the huge issues of constraining our power stations and industries out of domestic policy forums. If the accord is agreed to in Geneva, then it gains international legitimacy and opponents at home are disparaged as "flying in the face of world opinion and advocating that we flout international law."

At the same time that users of the carbon fuels of coal, oil, and gas are under pressure from the threatened mandatory international controls driven by the warming scare, the nuclear-power industry is not being allowed to dispose of its wastes. The Clinton Department of Energy, under environmentalist influence, is stalling on the opening of the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear-waste repository in Nevada with years' more studies of possible seismic and other dangers. What was supposed to open in 1998 now cannot open before 2010, the Administration says.

Nuclear power plants have such a good safety record in operation that their opponents rely on hypothetical problems of waste disposal to stop new plants and to get existing ones closed. And so high-level wastes are accumulating onsite year by year at a hundred nuclear plants around the country because the Administration won't open the long-term repository that has been built in Nevada.

Meanwhile the green assault on synthetic chemicals is being pushed within the Environmental Protection Agency in a bold move to dispense with a hitherto unchallenged part of science -- the EPA proposes to simply omit from it as cancer-test guidelines the test of statistical significance -- the classic scientific tool for measuring the possibility that study results reflect chance rather than a regular association. As the newsletter EPA WATCH reported: "Reducing the role of statistical significance or eliminating it altogether, could open the door for EPA to drastically expand the number of substances subject to environmental regulation." The newsletter might have added: and allow the EPA to regulate in an even more arbitrary fashion than now -- at home and abroad.