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June 6, 2002
Modeling global warming is imperfect at best
Two columns today about the problems and politics around long term climate models. It is near impossible for lay people to speak definitively about the science, but what is certain is that there is uncertainty. First Thomas Sowell takes on what he calls "global lying" in this column. Excerpt:
The problem is that all this hysteria was based on a computer model which had been shown to be incompatible with factual data. Patrick Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, had already exposed the inability of that computer model to account for existing temperature changes before its release to the public was allowed to suggest that it was able to predict future temperature changes.This is by no means the first time that a supposedly "scientific" report turned out to be a political report wrapping itself in the mantle of science. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, garnished with the names of numerous eminent scientists, which was widely hailed in the media as proving the dangers of global warming. The problem with that particular report was that the scientists whose names were put on display had not written the report nor even seen it before it was released.
One of those eminent scientists, MIT professor Richard S. Lindzen, publicly repudiated the conclusions of the study on which his name had been displayed. As Professor Lindzen, a meteorologist, pointed out, "the climate is always changing. Innumerable factors go into temperature changes and many of these factors, such as the changing amounts of heat put out by the sun during different eras, are beyond the control of human beings."The same kind of ploy was used by a United Nations report on climate in 1996. After the scientists had reviewed the report, the following sentence was added, without their knowledge -- "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." But that is not what the scientists said.
Sowell goes on to describe the motivations behind the "environmental cult."
Cal Thomas writes a similar piece to Sowell's discussing both the politics and the science. Excerpt:
Carbon dioxide is portrayed as the villain in global warming. Yet, according to the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (www.co2science.org/center.htm), there's no real-world evidence to suggest that whatever global warming might be occurring is due to the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content. In fact, carbon dioxide has helped meet the world's food requirements (CO2 is plant food, in case you missed that in science class) and higher concentrations of the gas in some regions already has lead to increased food production.Center President Sherwood B. Idso, Ph.D., says the surface air temperature record used to support "the warming hysteria" of the past two decades "suffers from a host of maladies," which the Center Web site outlines but the media ignore. These include incomplete coverage of the earth's surface (satellites cover it all, but surface measurements are spotty), ever-changing urban heat island effects, and a number of changes in measurement times and techniques. While these data depict warming over the last quarter century, within the troposphere -- the first few miles above the earth's surface where climate models also predict there should be warming -- satellite data from the late '70s show almost no warming at all. In addition, the United States Historical Climatology Network data set, which Idso calls the best in the world, agrees with the satellite data and shows essentially no warming since 1930.
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