2000

The National Assessment on Climate Change, recently released for public comment, has come under fire for its alarmist tone and political bent. Much of that criticism, we now learn, comes from the technical reviewers of the report. A new report by David Wojick, himself a technical reviewer of the National Assessment, compiles comments from the technical reviews.

Two well known scientists, who support the global warming theory, are very critical of the report. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research argues that “There are major problems with the report, in terms of structure and the content.” He also notes that, “The two models used are quite different and give different results, so how can they both verify against the observed data?” Finally, “The article I referred to (elsewhere) on the use and abuse of climate models describes appropriate use of models. Here is a classic example of misuse and abuse of them.”

James Hansen of the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction points out that, “The projected 1% per year or 2- to 3-fold 21st century increase in CO2 assumed in this study may be pessimistic. From what I understand, it over predicts recent trends, and may not account for observed slowing of the rate of global population growth. I didn’t find supporting evidence in the accompanying technical paper. Therefore, I think that it is overstated. Either cite empirical evidence or acknowledge uncertainties in this and other projections.”

Some of the comments were appropriately flippant. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville said the report seemed to be “written by a committee of Greenpeace, Ted Turner, Al Gore and Stephen King (for the horror lines). I saw no attempt at scientific objectivity.” Jae Edwards of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory commented that, “The current version of the report reads more like an advertising supplement to Time Magazine than a national assessment.” And later, “The example of flooding in New York is needlessly hyperbolic. If you want to go that route, and I dont recommend it, why dont you get out the old picture from the cover of Parade Magazine of the Statue of Liberty covered with water up to her arm pits.”

James Shuttleworth of University of Arizona said that, “Because the document retains the conventional looming gloom perspective throughout, it will likely be rejected by the majority of the population as just another tree huggers lobby piece. If its purpose is just to provide a further prop to the Kyoto agreement, so be it.”

The report, “Not a Pretty Picture,” can be downloaded at www.greeningearthsociety.org.

CBS Hot Air Watch

Remember when polls showed that CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite was “the most-trusted man in America”? After his retirement, the avuncular Walter revealed that he believed in one-world government and lots of other leftist claptrap.

Cronkites successor, Dan Rather, is more impatient to share his political wisdom with the world. Not content with CBS News’s stream of ridiculous stories connecting storms, floods, and droughts to global warming, Dan has now taken his fascination with natural disasters to the op-ed page of the Houston Chronicle.

Surprisingly, it turns out that Dan is actually opposed to more storms and other extreme weather events. In a June 18 column, he opines that although the National Assessment is “not alarmist” (we think thats a joke), it nonetheless is “a sobering document, giving us a glimpse into a future where higher temperatures, drought and flooding will reshape the American landscape.”

He cites the National Assessment as giving compelling reasons why the United States should ratify the Kyoto Protocol. He blames the Republican-controlled Senate for not ratifying the treaty, apparently not aware that according the Constitution the president must submit treaties to the Senate before the Senate can ratify them.

An Independent Review of the IPCCs Third Assessment Report

A dozen climate experts briefed a large audience in the U. S. Capitol on May 30 on flaws and problems in the IPCCs Third Assessment Report. The briefing, “Whats Wrong with UN Climate Science?” was sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP).

The speakers, many of whom are technical reviewers of the IPCC report, challenged key areas of the 1000-page draft report and the main conclusions of the seven-page Summary for Policy Makers.

Vincent Gray, an atmospheric scientist from New Zealand, criticized the IPCC’s reliance on the surface temperature record, which Gray has concluded is unreliable. Large urban areas consistently show warming over the last 100 years, whereas rural areas show no temperature increases, which suggests that cars, heated buildings, air traffic and other human factors have skewed the ground data upward. Moreover, Gray argued, even rural areas are not free of increased human activity that can corrupt temperature readings.

Hugh Ellsaesser, a climatologist now retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said that the water vapor feedback effect, which the IPCC claims is magnifying global warming, is actually causing cooler temperatures over the tropics and subtropics.

S. Fred Singer, president of SEPP and organizer of the briefing, contradicted the often-repeated claim that the past century was the warmest in 1000 years. Singer summarized the findings of Wibjorn Karlen, a paleoclimatologist from the University of Stockholm, who had been scheduled to speak. The “warmest in a thousand years” claim is based on a highly selective use of tree ring data, which is contradicted by much other data, including recent bore holes in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.

Norwegian Paal Brekke of the European Space Agency showed how the IPCC report underestimates the effects of solar fluctuations on temperature variability.

Peter Dietze, a consulting engineer from Germany, argued that “The IPCC assumes carbon dioxide concentrations that are at least 50 percent too high, and effects for CO2 that are at least three times too high.” He asked, “If the actual CO2 increase is just 0.4 percent annually, why does the IPCC assume a 1 percent increase and then expect us to accept its computer model conclusions as valid?”

Gerd-Rainer Weber, a climatologist from Germany, concluded that relying on the predictive capability of computer models was a “wild gamble.”

Tom Segalstad, a geochemist at the University of Oslo, showed that the preindustrial level of carbon dioxide of 280 parts per million was not the natural level, but was very low compared to most past eras. And plant and animal life has prospered at much higher CO2 levels.

Keith Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona argued that hundreds of agricultural and biological experiments have confirmed that increased levels of carbon dioxide lead to much higher levels of plant growth and food production and increasing biodiversity.

Finally, Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Canada, pointed out that the Kyoto Protocol would not reduce global warming measurably, yet would impose tremendous costs on society. This makes no sense because it wastes money on relatively benign global warming concerns that could be spent on real environmental problems. His solution would be to create a global warming fund of $1 billion. Assuming average earnings from investments, by 2050 the amount would increase to about $30 billion and by 2100 to nearly $900 billion. Anyone who could prove damages from global warming could then seek compensation from the fund.

National Assessment Under Fire

The U.S. National Assessment on the Impacts of Climate Change, to be released this summer, is coming under increasing criticism. An article in the Detroit News (May 28, 2000) gives a good overview of the reports fundamental weakness the attempt to predict regional and local impacts of global warming.

According to the article, the report attempts to show “the effects of global warming in the United States, predicting droughts, floods and extreme weather region by region.” Critics argue that we dont know enough to make such predictions, however.

A draft of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that, “Despite recent improvements and developments, regionalization research is still a maturing process and the related uncertainties are poorly known. Therefore, a coherent picture of regional climate change via available regionalization techniques cannot yet be drawn.”

“We simply cant forecast well enough on a continental or smaller scale to say that we know what will happen,” said William Gutowski, a meteorologist at Iowa State University and a contributing author of the UN report. “Policy should not be made based on predictions that Iowa will have heat waves or floods.”

Linda Mearns, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a participant in the National Assessment process, defended the report: “Sure, uncertainties increase as you go to a finer scale, but I don’t think the report is on any shakier ground than any other analysis.” Good point.

Sinks: A Short-term Fix?

The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) has recently released a report that claims that the United States, Canada, and Russia could meet 90 percent of the total developed country Kyoto targets through unlimited use of plant and soil sequestration. “A total of 260 million tons of CO₂ would be absorbed per year by the use of sinks in the three countries, thereby achieving about 90 percent of the targets imposed on the worlds industrialized countries,” notes the Japan Weekly Monitor (May 22, 2000).

WWF spokesmen have reservations about the use of sinks, however. “While preventing the emission of carbon dioxide is permanent, sequestering carbon pollution is a cheap, short-term fix that fails to address a long-term problem,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of WWFs Climate Change Program. “The scientific uncertainty of sequestration makes sinks unreliable and dependence on them for meeting Kyoto targets unsound.”

According to three new studies in Nature (April 20, 2000), carbon sequestration may not just be a short-term fix after all. Trees, for example, both absorb and release CO₂. The absorbed CO₂ is stored in the trees tissues. Expiration mainly occurs with the bacterial decomposition of organic matter in soil, notes the World Climate Report (May 22, 2000).

Currently, forests are net sinks of CO₂. But it is thought that increasing temperatures would accelerate respiration to the point where forests actually become net contributors to the greenhouse effect, a positive feedback that would accelerate global warming.

One of the Nature studies found that, “Decomposition rates were remarkably constant across a global-scale gradient in mean annual temperature, [that] decomposition rates for forest soils are not controlled by temperature limitations to microbial activity, and that increased temperature alone will not stimulate the decomposition of forest-derived carbon in mineral soil.”

Another study found, “For single sites our datashow a significant relationship between temperature and ecosystem respiration for both short and annual time series. However, when a plot of [respiration] versus temperature is drawn across all sites the relationship is not significant, indicating that mean annual air temperature may not be an important contributing factor to forest ecosystem respiration on a broader scale.”

The third study uses an ecosystem model for coniferous forests to conclude that under a scenario where there is no long-term effect of temperature on respiration, forests may become more effective CO₂ sinks in the future. The study asks, “Does this [new research] mean that the doomsday view of runaway global warming now seems unlikely? We hope so.”

CBS Hot Air Watch

 

CBS EVENING NEWS

May 31, 200

Dan Rather, anchor: Tonights Eye on America is a hard-news look at a global corporate giant in fossil fuels. Protesters including some stockholders are accusing ExxonMobil of a corporate dinosaur attitude about the dangers of global warming that may be linked to fuel emissions. CBS Jim Axelrod has been sorting the facts from the smoke on this.

Protesters: (In unison) No planet, no dividends!

Jim Axelrod reporting: In Dallas this morning, a couple of dozen protesters tried to get the ear of one of the biggest and most powerful corporations on earth.

Unidentified Man: When should ExxonMobil stop global warming?

Protesters: (In unison) Now!

Axelrod: If theres a growing consensus that greenhouse gases are raising global temperatures, these people say executives at ExxonMobil are not about to embrace it. Is ExxonMobil any different on the issue of global warming than any other of the big oil companies?

Sister Pat Daly (ExxonMobil Shareholder and Activist): Theyre incredibly different. They have absolutely isolated themselves on this.

Axelrod: Pat Dalys not a tree-hugger. Shes a shareholder and a nun who represents clergy-based pension funds with a $ 15 million stake in ExxonMobil.

Sister Daly: Global warming is happening.

Axelrod: Today, she and a small chorus of critics asked ExxonMobil to join the growing number of companies saying global warming is here, its real and we need to act now.

Sister Daly: Theyre saying that theres not enough science. They will tell you, “Were concerned about global warming,” but theyre not going to admit that its actually happening.

Mr. Lee Raymond (CEO, ExxonMobil): Were going to follow the science. Were not going to follow what is politically correct.

Axelrod: Other oil giants like Shell and BP Amoco have pledged to operate more efficiently and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below their 1990 levels. Dupont Chemicals has gone even further, promising a 65 percent reduction. ExxonMobil, on the other hand, has no such targets.

Professor Michael McElroy (Harvard University): They simply leave the public with the view that, “Gee, we don’t know enough to do anything.”

Axelrod: Mike McElroy isnt an activist. Hes an academic and a Harvard professor of environmental studies.

Prof. McElroy: In terms of honest assessment of the science, yeah, this is a serious problem, time to act. Exxon is leaning to the side of inaction.

Mr. Frank Sprow (Vice President, ExxonMobil): This is complicated. Dont believe statements that say its clear that things are warming. Its not clear.

Axelrod: The company is taking this idea to the public in a series of ads, saying views on warming are, quote, “just as changeable as your local weather forecast.”

Your assessment of the threat, the credibility of the threat, has that evolved?

Mr. Sprow: Id say thats unchanged over the last several years.

Axelrod: Todays attempts to change the companys views on global warming were turned back, leaving a small band of critics with little to do but shout. In Dallas, Im Jim Axelrod for Eye on America.

Drought Cycles and Hurricane Cycles

University of New Mexico scientist Louis Scuderi, studying tree ring data in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, has identified a 72 year drought cycle in the region according to an AP article of April 29th. The last such drought occurred in the 1950s, leading Scuderi to believe that another is imminent in the 2020s.

Although the cause of the drought cycle is still unknown, a good bet would be climactic oscillators, similar to the El Nio and La Nia effects, only operating over this longer timespan. Scientists believe that many of these oscillators may exist, effecting temperature and climate significantly. Naturally, the longer the period of an oscillator, the more difficult it is to detect.

According to hurricane expert Dr. William Gray at Colorado State University, we should see an increase in storm activity over the next 20 years. The storms are expected to cause 5 to 10 times the amount of damage on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts than previously experienced, due to the massive increase in population and development along these coastlines.

The hurricane activity of the next 20 years should resemble the period that began in the late 1920s and lasted through the 1940s. The increase is due to higher salinity content in the Atlantic Ocean, which alters its currents and increases average ocean temperatures, fueling more storms. Gray emphasizes that this is a cyclical trend and has nothing to do with global warming (CNN, April 22, 2000).

CBS Hot Air Watch

On April 18, the CBS Evening News broadcast a segment, reported by John Blackstone, entitled “Global Warming Generating Short- and Long-Term Drastic and Dangerous Weather Changes.” Bravo to the scientists at CBS for proving the outcomes of warming that have eluded the entire camp of doomsayers since day one.

Blackstone begins by acknowledging the warmth of the “noonday sun in New Orleans… unusually warm for this date,” conclusive evidence in itself, no doubt. His interviewee is James Baker, administrator of NOAA and reknowned global warming enthusiast. According to Baker, “The January, February, March temperatures in the United States are the warmest ever in our 106 years of record keeping” which “is a very significant fact. It’s a wake-up call, really.”

And what will we be waking up to? “Severe weather damage” and “more floods, more droughts and…hurricanes with more destructive power.” Sounds ominous until, of course, one considers recent insurance industry reports, by Swiss Re and others, discrediting the idea of increased weather extremes while blaming more-costly development for rising storm damages.

Baker, though, prepares himself for the worst: “If you had a Category 4 hurricane that hit New Orleans…youd have 20 feet of water in New Orleans. Thats frightening.” Indeed, Mr. Baker, it is, which is why all should be reassured that it’s extremely unlikely.

Of course, some scientists have to justify their federal agency’s funding on a regular basis by such means as strutting about with the global warming cranks at CBS. This might explain why Baker has been trotted out by CBS no less than five times in the past month.

For example, Baker commanded a lead role in the CBS News web article titled “Global Warmings Impact Is Clear,” again highlighting the amazing research being performed by the most weather-conscious of the Big Three networks. It’s been reported, in fact, that CBS scientists, always cutting edge, are on the verge of linking climate change to Nielsen rating reports. Stay tuned…

Announcements

• Dr. Richard Lindzen, Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, will speak at a Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy sponsored by the George C. Marshall Institute at noon, May 17, at the University Club, 1135 16^th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. Dr. Lindzen, will speak in, “Climate Forecasting: When the Models are Qualitatively Wrong.” For further information, please call (202) 296-9655.
• Also market your calendar for Tuesday, May 30 when an international team of top climate scientists will present their review of the draft Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. The symposium, tentatively scheduled for 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., is sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Science and Environmental Policy Project.