How many times have we heard from Al Gore
and assorted European politicians that "the science is settled" on
global warming? In other words, it's "time for action." Climate
change is, as recently stated by Hans Blix, former U.N. Chief for
weapons detection in Iraq, the most important issue of our
time, far more dangerous than people flying fuel-laden aircraft into
skyscrapers or threatening to detonate backpack nukes in Baltimore
Harbor.
Well, the science may now be settled, but
not in the way Gore and Blix would have us believe. Three bombshell
papers have just hit the refereed literature that knock the stuffing
out of Blix's position and that the United Nations and its
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).
The IPCC states repeatedly that 1) we
have reliable temperature records showing how much the planet has
warmed in the last century; and 2) computer projections of future
climate, while not perfect, simulate the observed behavior of the
past so well that they serve as a reliable guide for the future.
Therefore, they say, we need to limit carbon dioxide emissions
(i.e., energy use) right now, despite the expense and despite the
fact that the cost of these restrictions will fall almost all on the
United
States, gravely harming the world's
economic engine while exerting no detectable change on climate in
the foreseeable future.
The IPCC claims to have carefully
corrected the temperature records for the well-known problem of
local ("urban," as opposed to global) warming. But this has always
troubled serious scientists, because the way the U.N. checks for
artificial warming makes it virtually impossible to detect in recent
decades -- the same period in which our cities have undergone the
most growth and sprawl.
The surface temperature record shows a
warming rate of about 0.17°C (0.31°F) per decade since 1979.
However, there are two other records, one from satellites, and one
from weather balloons that tell a different story. Neither annual
satellite nor balloon trends differ significantly from zero since
the start of the satellite record in 1979. These records reflect
temperatures in what is called the lower atmosphere, or the region
between roughly 5,000 and 30,000 feet.
Four years ago, a distinguished panel of
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that a real
disparity exists between the reported surface warming and the
temperature trends measured in the atmosphere above. Since then,
many investigators have tried to explain the cause of the disparity
while others have denied its existence.
So, which record is right, the U.N.
surface record showing the larger warming or the other two? There's
another record, from seven feet above the ground, derived from
balloon data that has recently been released by the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration. In two research papers in the July 9
issue of Geophysical Research Letters, two of us (Douglass and
Singer) compared it for correspondence with the surface record and
the lower atmosphere histories. The odd-record-out turns out to be
the U.N.'s hot surface history.
This is a double kill, both on the U.N.'s
temperature records and its vaunted climate models. That's because
the models generally predict an increased warming rate with height
(outside of local polar regions). Neither the satellite nor the
balloon records can find it. When this was noted in the first
satellite paper published in 1990, some scientists objected that the
record, which began in 1979, was too short. Now we have a
quarter-century of concurrent balloon and satellite data, both
screaming that the UN's climate models have failed, as well as
indicating that its surface record is simply too
hot.
If the models are wrong as one goes up in
the atmosphere, then any correspondence between them and surface
temperatures is either pretty lucky or the product of some
unspecified "adjustment." Getting the vertical distribution of
temperature wrong means that everything dependent upon that --
precipitation and cloudiness, as examples -- must be wrong.
Obviously, the amount of cloud in the air determines the day's high
temperature as well as whether or not it
rains.
As bad as things have gone for the IPCC
and its ideologues, it gets worse, much, much
worse.
After four years of one of the most
rigorous peer reviews ever, Canadian Ross McKitrick and another of
us (Michaels) published a paper searching for "economic" signals in
the temperature record. McKitrick, an economist, was initially
piqued by what several climatologists had noted as a curiosity in
both the U.N. and satellite records: statistically speaking, the
greater the GDP of a nation, the more it warms. The research showed
that somewhere around one-half of the warming in the U.N. surface
record was explained by economic factors, which can be changes in
land use, quality of instrumentation, or upkeep of records. This
worldwide study added fuel to a fire started a year earlier by the
University of
Maryland's Eugenia Kalnay,
who calculated a similar 50 percent bias due to economic
factors in the U.S. records.
So, to all who worry about global
warming, to all who think that people threatening to blow up
millions to get their political way is no big deal by comparison,
chill out. The science is settled. The "skeptics" -- the strange
name applied to those whose work shows the planet isn't coming to an
end -- have won.
Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in
environmental studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of the
forthcoming book, "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global
Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media." Fred Singer is
emeritus professor of environmental sciences at the University of
Virginia. David
Douglass is professor of physics at the University of
Rochester.
