There Is No 'Consensus' On Global Warming
le Corbeau
By RICHARD S. LINDZEN - Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of
Atmospheric Science at MIT.
June 26, 2006; Page A14
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for
"a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea
levels, more and stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease,
among other cataclysms -- unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel,
proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were
right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences
of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore
assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George
Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What
exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a
scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow
agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been
clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming
in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed.
Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been
lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even
Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he
made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos
confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea
levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore
defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models
that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and
went on to claim -- in his defense -- that scientists "don't know...
They just don't know."
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet
their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into
Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template -- namely, shrill
alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient
facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the
Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known
since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the
Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of
all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of
that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In
the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or
alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since
the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before
that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating
and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.
* * *
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated
on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was
once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia --
mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on
multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an
important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time
scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant
sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane
intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't
attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there
is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming
because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these,
based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments,
such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science,
are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously
ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are
always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change
as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that
fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over
which debate is ended -- at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the
environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the
scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring,
and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate
system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has
never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed
since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of
one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly
from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s,
increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since
1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere have risen from about 280 ppmv (parts per million by volume)
in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no
question whatsoever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e.,
a greenhouse gas -- albeit a minor one), and its increase should
theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept
equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more
warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed
increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a
natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm
rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the
theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has
actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of
climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there
has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising
impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was
accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), the infamous "summary for policy makers"
reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a
discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the
smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has
become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what
mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some
deployed the lassitude argument -- e.g., we can't think of an
alternative -- to support human attribution. But the "summary for
policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text
of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into
account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over
the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in
greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief
(15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again
enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was
preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes
observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human
activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these
changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was
sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the
report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real,
is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist
Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge
Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate
change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what
she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist,
Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928
articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913
explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually
opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush
administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research,
declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the
climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What
exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming
should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures,
and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979.
The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data
could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between
observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should
look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
* * *
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest
at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding
the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental
advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve
to intimidate the public and even scientists -- especially those
outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question
of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting
visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch
scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not
a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific
methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was
accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may
have farce -- if we're lucky.
TC
le Corbeau a écrit :
> WSJ COMMENTARY
>
>
>
>
> By RICHARD S. LINDZEN - Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of
> Atmospheric Science at MIT.
> June 26, 2006; Page A14
******
Richard S. Lindzen
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology,
Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a global warming skeptic.
His academic research involves studies of the role of the tropics in
mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and
its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in
atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational
determination of climate sensitivity. [1] He has published numerous
papers regarding meteorologic and atmospheric topics. [2]
Ross Gelbspan, journalist and author, wrote a 1995 article in Harper's
Magazine which was very critical of Lindzen and other global warming
skeptics. In the article, Gelbspan reports Lindzen charged "oil and
coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; [and] his 1991
trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels
and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature
of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC." [3]
In November 2004, climate change skeptic Richard Lindzen was quoted
saying he'd be willing to bet that the earth's climate will be cooler
in 20 years than it is today. When British climate researcher James
Annan contacted him, however, Lindzen would only agree to take the bet
if Annan offered a 50-to-1 payout. Subsequent offers of a wager were
also refused by Pat Michaels, Chip Knappenberger, Piers Corbyn, Myron
Ebell, Zbigniew Jaworowski, Sherwood Idso and William Kininmonth. At
long last, however, Annan has persuaded Russian solar physicists Galina
Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev to take a $10,000 bet. "There isn't
much money in climate science and I'm still looking for that gold watch
at retirement," Annan says. "A pay-off would be a nice top-up to my
pension." [4]
[edit]
le Corbeau
so 11 Years ago the author took fees from the oil and gas industry.
Which proves what? The author is a Sloan professor at MIT. algore
is.......what? a washed up politician?
Fred Ghadry
> 9. Speaking of the Kyoto accords, they would severely impact the U.S.
> economy, but would leave China absolutely alone! China has one of the
> fastest growing economies in the world. Since a huge number of Kyoto
> proponents can also be called anti-American, could this cause you to
> wonder what the true goal of Kyoto is?
> Inquiring minds want to know......
And India, and many other rapidly growing and industrializing "third
world" economies. If the environmentalists are serious about this then
the presciption should be applied equally world-wide; the current
protocol is so blatantly anti-West that the mind fairly reels.
Imno1
of your own. Look,listen to what Al Gore is saying, pointing to, and then
tell use what YOU think, not what the WSJ tells you to think.
"le Corbeau" <cochon-ca...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1151335279....@b68g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...