Science

NAS Report Confuses Public

The National Academy of Sciences released a rush report reviewing global warming science on June 7. Done at the request of the Bush Administration by a panel of 11 prominent scientists (of whom six are members of the NAS), it was immediately and uniformly hailed by the major print and broadcast outlets as confirming global warming alarmism and therefore a slap in the face to the Bush Administration.

What the report actually says, however, is difficult to determine. The opening summary begins with a fairly strong statement that, “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earths atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact rising. 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 are also a reflection of natural variability.”

The report also states, “Despite the uncertainties, there is general agreement that the observed warming is real and particularly strong within the past 20 years. Whether it is consistent with the change that would be expected in response to human activities is dependent upon what assumptions one makes about the time history of atmospheric concentrations of the various forcing agents, particularly aerosols” (emphasis added).

It goes on: “The predicted warming of 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) by the end of the 21^st century is consistent with the assumptions about how clouds and atmospheric relative humidity will react to global warming” (emphasis added).

On the other hand, once you get beyond the summary, the report itself is full of qualifications and expressions of uncertainty. For example, “Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments upward or downward.”

It also notes, “Because of the large and still uncertain level of natural variability inherent in the climate record and the uncertainties in the time history of the various forcing agents (and particularly aerosols), a causal linkage between the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the observed climate changes during the 20^th century cannot be unequivocally established.” A comprehensive listing of the caveats has been produced by Dr. Ken Green of the Reason Public Policy Institute and can be found at www.rppi.org.

The press downplayed the reports caveats. CNNs Michelle Mitchell stated that the report constituted “a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room.”

In a June 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, one of the scientists who helped prepare the report objected to the way it was treated in the press. Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, said that the report says nothing of the sort. There are three things that scientists can agree upon, said Lindzen: 1) global mean temperatures have risen 0.5 degrees C over the last century; 2) atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased over the last two centuries; and 3) carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

“But,” he said, “we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.”

Etc.

Scientists in Australia have developed a vaccine for sheep and cattle that would reduce the amount of methane a greenhouse gas they emit by about twenty percent. The drug, which inhibits methane-producing organisms in the animals digestive tract, is now ready to undergo testing (BBC News, June 7, 2001).

Global warming and even the next ice age are minor problems compared to higher solar radiation that may make the Earth too hot to support life in about a billions years. Luckily, NASA is working on how to prevent the catastrophe.

Londons Observer reported on June 10 that Dr. Greg Laughlin of NASAs Ames Research Center and two colleagues have proposed using the same methods being discussed to prevent asteroids or comets from hitting the Earth to instead bring an asteroid or comet very close to Earth. If done just right, the procedure would transfer some gravitational energy to Earth and move it to an orbit farther away from the Sun.

Dr. Laughlin is quoted as saying, “It is basic rocket science,” but admits that the slightest miscalculation could result in a life-sterilizing collision. NASA, however, has several hundred million years to work on getting it right.

Climate and Mosquito-Borne Disease

One of the worlds leading experts on mosquito-borne diseases, Dr. Paul Reiter, with the Center for Disease Control, Dengue Branch, has published a study in the March 2001 supplement of Environmental Health Perspectives. It has been claimed that a warming planet could lead to the spread of mosquito-borne diseases (often erroneously referred to as tropical diseases), such as malaria and yellow and dengue fever into the higher latitudes. Reiter looks at past climate history to better understand how these diseases interact with climate.

To understand how climate affects the transmission rates and geographic ranges of mosquito-borne disease, Reiter examines the historical record of these diseases during the different climatic episodes of the Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, which was very similar to the current climate, and the Little Ice Age.

Although Reiter discusses the existence of malaria during the Dark Ages and the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age is of most interest, since it waned only recently (circa 1850) and was “probably the coldest era of any time since the end of the last major ice age,” according to Reiter. “Yet despite this spectacular cooling, malaria persisted throughout Europe.”

Malaria was found in most of England and parts of Scotland during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. It was also endemic as far north as Denmark, the coastal areas of southern Norway, and much of southern Sweden and Finland. It was also found in the Baltic provinces of Russia and at similar latitudes in Siberia.

At the end of the Little Ice Age, malaria declined throughout these areas, with the exception of Russia, as global temperatures increased. This was due to several factors that are attributable to greater wealth that resulted from a warmer and more benign climate. Russias volatile political situation throughout the first half of the 20^th century prevented the decline of malaria experienced throughout Europe. Reiter gives similar accounts of yellow and dengue fever.

He concludes that although the “recent resurgence of many of these diseases is a major cause for concernit is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change.”

Indeed, the histories of these three diseases “reveal that climate has rarely been the principal determinant of their prevalence or range; human activities and their impact on local ecology have generally been much more significant. It is therefore inappropriate to use climate-based models to predict future prevalence.”

To Sink or Not to Sink?

According to the New York Times (May 24, 2001), “two new studies are challenging the idea that planting forests could be a cheap way to absorb emissions of carbon dioxide.” The studies appeared in the May 24 issue of Nature.

Unfortunately, the Times and other newspapers have misrepresented what the studies actually say. Rather than looking at whether trees are effective carbon sinks, the studies investigated “the degree to which extra CO₂ in the air enables trees to produce extra biomass that removes an additional amount of CO₂ from the atmosphere above and beyond the large and visibly-obvious amount trees are currently removing from the air,” according to the CO₂ Science Magazine (www.co2science.org). Nearly half of a trees dry mass is made up of carbon extracted from the air.

There are problems with the studies themselves, however. The study by Oren, et al. found that at nutrient-poor sites higher concentrations of CO₂ had no detectable effect on the stimulation of biomass growth and only transient effects on nutritionally-moderate sites.

One of the problems with this study, as pointed out by CO₂ Science, is that the researchers failed to measure changes in root biomass. Other studies have found similar changes in trunk biomass as the Oren, et al. study, but also found significant increases in root biomass.

The other study by Schlesinger and Lichter looked at carbon storage in soils in forest ecosystems. They found that a 200 parts per million increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations led to a statistically insignificant rise in the soils total carbon content of 15.5 percent in the top 30 cm of the soil.

At the beginning of the three-year study, the percent carbon values in the soil of the control sites was measured at 1.43 percent and 1.54 at the CO₂-enriched sites. At the end of the experiment, the control sites percent carbon value dropped to 1.31 percent while the CO₂-enriched sites increased to 1.59 percent.

“Viewed in this light,” according to CO₂ Science, “the importance of atmospheric CO₂ enrichment to soil carbon sequestration is immediately obvious. Under the site-specific conditions of the study in question, the soils of the forest plots growing in ambient air were actually losing carbon, i.e., they were carbon sources; while the soils of the plots exposed to the extra 200 ppm of CO₂ were gaining carbon, i.e., they were carbon sinks.”

Of Sun and Things

Three new studies looking at how changes in solar radiation affect the climate have recently appeared, further confirming the suggested link between solar and climate dynamics.

A study in Science (May 18, 2001) used lake-sediment cores from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico to reconstruct the regions climate history for the last 2,600 years. The reconstruction revealed a drought cycle of 208 years, which is similar to a 206-year variation in solar activity. The researchers conclude, “that a significant component of century-scale variability in the Yucatan droughts is explained by solar forcing,” which also “correspond with discontinuities in Maya cultural evolution.”

A Nature study (May 17, 2001) used stalagmite samples from northern Oman in Arabia as a proxy for variations in the tropical circulation and monsoon rainfall in the Indian Ocean over a period of 9.6 to 6.1 thousand years to the present. They compared this record to a record of changes in solar activity. “The excellent correlation between the two records suggests that one of the primary controls on centennial- to decadal-scale changes in tropical rainfall and monsoon intensity during this time are variations in solar radiation,” conclude the researchers.

Finally, Geophysical Research Letters (28: 2001) has published a study looking at how changes in the cosmic ray flux, caused by solar variation, affect precipitation. Using data on the cosmic ray flux recorded by ground-based neutron monitors and precipitation data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Climate Prediction Center Merged Analysis of Precipitation, the researchers found “evidence of a statistically strong relationship between cosmic ray flux, precipitation and precipitation efficiency over ocean surfaces at mid to high latitudes.”

Etc.

• In a May 3 speech to the Science and Technology Policy Colloquium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Larry Lindsey, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy said the following about the Kyoto Protocol:

“This financial math is important when considering some of the biggest environmental challenges one faces today. When confronting long-run challenges – and the environment is certainly one of these – investments in the research and development of new technologies, with actual applications decades in the future, are far more cost-effective than trying to act with existing technologies.

“It is for precisely this reason that the Administration opposes the Kyoto protocol. We believe the Kyoto protocol could damage our collective prosperity and, in so doing, actually put our long-term environmental health at risk. Fundamentally, we believe that the protocol both will fail to significantly reduce the long- term risks posed by climate change and, in the short run, will seriously impede our ability to meet our energy needs and economic growth. Further, by imposing high regulatory and economic costs, it may actually reduce our capacity both to find innovative ways out of the environmental consequences of global warming and to achieve the necessary increases in energy production.” The full speech is available at www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/rd/colloqu.htm.

• The Atmospheric Division of Australias Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization (CSIRO) has released a new global warming brochure, Climate Change: Projections for Australia, filled with the usual scare stories about floods, droughts, heat waves, etc. The following appears at the end of the report (see www.john-daly.com):

Disclaimer

The projections are based on results from computer models that involve simplifications of real physical processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted by CSIRO for the accuracy of the projections inferred from this brochure or for any persons interpretations, deductions, conclusions or actions in reliance on this information.

Rainfall Variability Caused by Nature

One of the most widely cited “evidences” of global warming is the increase in “torrential” rainfall in the United States. A paper by Tom Karl of the National Climate Data Center, which appeared in 1995 in Nature magazine, had found a positive trend in heavy precipitation for much of the U.S., Canada and Europe in the last century. Specifically, Karls study found one additional day every two years that experiences rainfall of over 2 inches in a 24-hour period, but no increase in precipitation events of over 3 inches. Not much to get excited about.

A new study, which complicates the ability to link global warming and rainfall, appears in the May issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers discovered a natural 65-80 year cycle in sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. Using sea surface temperatures from 1856 to 1999, they found a temperature fluctuation of 0.4 degrees C, which they dubbed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

The warm phases occurred during 1860 to 1880 and 1940 to 1960 and the cool phases during 1905 to 1925 and 1970 to 1990. During the warm periods, the U.S. sees less than normal rainfall. We are currently in a warm period, which could mean “We may have once again entered a period such as 1930-1960,” said the studys lead author, David B. Enfield when the U.S. climate was much drier (Associated Press, May 14, 2001).

Enfield, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, said that this ocean cycle “could obfuscate our assessment of global warming response.”

Schneider Criticizes IPCC

Global warming projections coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been steadily decreasing with each new iteration of its assessment report, suggesting that the more we learn about climate the less likely global warming will be a problem. The release of the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCCs Third Assessment Report shocked everyone by raising projections from a 1 to 3.5 degree C warming over the next 100 years to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees.

The new projections raised a lot of eyebrows, given that there has been no real change in scientific evidence or in our ability to detect manmade global warming. One of those who have expressed concerns over the presentation of the new scenarios is Stephen Schneider, a major booster of catastrophic global warming theory.

Schneider points out in an article in Nature (May 3, 2001), that “This sweeping revision depends on two factors that were not the handiwork of the modelers: smaller projected emissions of climate-cooling aerosols; and a few predictions containing particularly large CO₂ increases.”

Schneider asks, “How likely is it that the world will get 6 degrees C hotter by 2100?” That “depends on the likelihood of the assumptions underlying the projections.” According to Schneider, “the IPCC decided to prepare a special report on emissions scenarios (SRES) to produce a family of updated projections.” The group that met to make up these scenarios included academic scientists, environmental organizations, industrial scientists, engineers, economists, and systems analysts.

They decided to “create storylines about future worlds from which population, affluence and technology drivers could be inferred.” These storylines “gave rise to radically different families of emission profiles up to 2100 from below current CO₂ emissions to five times current emissions,” wrote Schneider.

Schneider says that he “strongly argued at the time that policy analysts needed probability estimates to assess the seriousness of the implied impacts,” but the group decided to express “no preference” for each scenario. The result has been the assumption that the higher bound is just as likely as the lower. “But this inference would be incorrect,” said Schneider, “because uncertainties compound through a series of modeling steps. Uncertainties in emissions scenarios feed into uncertainties in carbon-cycle modeling, which feed into uncertainties in climate modeling, which drive an even larger range of uncertain climate impacts. This cascade of uncertainties is compounded by the very wide range of emissions offered by the SRES authors.”

To get the final “dramatic revision upward in the IPCCs third assessment,” it combined the climate sensitivities of seven general circulation models (GCMs) with the “six illustrative scenarios from the special report” within a simple model to get 40 climate scenarios.

Schneider attempts to construct a probability distribution of these different temperature scenarios, finding that only 39 percent show a warming of 3.5 degrees or higher. Under a more comprehensive range of 108 scenarios using 18 GCMs, only 23 percent would result in a warming of over 3.5 degrees. Schneider “arbitrarily” assumes that temperature increases of 3.5 degrees C and over would have dangerous climate consequences.

Schneiders calculations broadly agree with an MIT study we reported on in our April 18 issue. It found that there is a “far less” than one percent chance that temperatures would rise to 5.8 degrees C or higher, the upper bound of the IPCCs projections, while there is a 17 percent chance the temperature rise would be lower than 1.4 degrees, the IPCCs lower bound.

CO₂s Positive Effects Confirmed

Thousands of studies have been conducted to determine the effects of rising atmospheric CO₂ on plant growth. The overwhelming weight of evidence is that higher levels of CO₂ increase plant growth. More recently scientists have looked into effects of higher CO₂ concentrations on the quality, not just the quantity, of the food supply.

To get to the bottom of this research, Sherwood Idso of the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory and Keith Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change have reviewed over 250 peer-reviewed studies (Environmental and Experimental Botany, 45, 2001). They find “that the ongoing rise in the airs CO₂ content will continue to increase food production around the world, while maintaining the nutritive quality of that food and enhancing the production of certain disease-inhibiting plant compounds.”

Some research had suggested that CO₂ induced growth lowers nitrogen and protein concentrations in plants, possibly having a deleterious effect on animal and insect herbivores. But, said the Idsos, “Few solid conclusions can be drawn, however, in light of the fact that many CO₂ enrichment studies have not detected significant reductions in foliage nitrogen or protein concentrations.”

Moreover, “Nitrogen concentrations of all plants decline in response to increasing plant biomass, irrespective of the cause of the biomass increase.” This result is “highly dependent on nitrogen supply and virtually disappears when nitrogen is freely available to the roots.”

The paper looks at several other components of plant quality in relation to animal and human health and finds that higher CO₂ concentrations do not have a harmful effect and in many cases has a beneficial effect.

Etc.

• On June 19, 2001 Barrow, Alaska experienced a rare thunderstorm. The National Weather Service noted in a public advisory statement that it was only the third thunderstorm to occur in Barrow since 1978. From that point on, the story took on a life of its own. News stories around the world reported that it was Barrows first ever thunderstorm and that it signaled the arrival of global warming.

On May 2, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on global warming. In his opening remarks, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said that global warming has already revealed itself in Alaska. He said that several communities along Alaskas Arctic coast, including Barrow, would need to be relocated due to rising seas. The May 5 Nando Times story which reported on Stevenss comments again stated, “Last June, Barrow experienced its first-ever thunderstorm.”

John Daly (www.john-daly.com) decided to look into these claims of rising seas and relocations. As it turns out, there is a tide gauge 200 miles from Prudhoe Bay along the same stretch of coastline as Barrow. The tide gauge measurements show no increase in sea levels along Alaskas Arctic coast. The inundation of certain Alaskan villages is due to coastal erosion, not sea level rise. It also turns out that there are no plans to relocate Barrow as Senator Stevens claimed.

Announcements

• The Competitive Enterprise Institute has released a report on several new global warming studies published since the final draft of the IPCCs Third Assessment Report was approved in August 2000. The report, “Latest Global Warming Report Already Obsolete,” by CEI environmental policy analyst Paul Georgia, concludes that these new studies cast serious doubt on some of the IPCCs most basic assumptions, leaving its conclusions in shambles. The report can be obtained at www.cei.org.

Man Blamed for Rising Sea Temperatures

Recently the news was full of stories about new and stronger evidence that man is causing the planet to warm. The stories were based on two new studies appearing in the April 13 issues of Science. According to Sydney Levitus, lead author of one of the studies, “We think this is some of the strongest evidence to date that human-induced effects are changing our climate” (Associated Press, April 13, 2001).

A closer examination of the studies reveals, however, that the claims are overblown. The studies rely on climate models, which arent evidence at all, but merely artificial constructions of what some scientists believe about the climate.

The study by Tim Barnett, et al. attempts to predict the ocean heat content averaged from the surface to 3,000 feet below the surface, from 1955 to 2000, that would result from CO₂ forcing. The study claims that the match between the observed warming in the oceans and that produced by the model is very good, therefore suggesting that human activity is responsible for that warming.

To achieve this apparent match, however, the researchers “smoothed” the data by using the average value of each ten-year period rather than the raw data to fit it to the model results. But even the smoothed data does not fit well. Of the five oceans examined, all but one experienced a cooling from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s not replicated by the models.

The fit between the data and the models is achieved by using ocean temperatures down to 3,000 feet. The model in fact does a terrible job of replicating temperature changes at the oceans surface where greenhouse gases have the most immediate effect, but does a very good job of replicating temperatures at depths of 1,500 feet to 3,000 feet, which are largely unaffected by greenhouse gases. The modelss poor performance is hidden by averaging ocean temperatures over 3,000 feet.

The Levitus, et al. study is also questionable. It looks at historical records of ocean temperatures from the surface to 10,000 feet from 1955 to 1996. This study also smooths the data to achieve a better fit, which washes out an important ocean temperature shift that occurred in 1976-77, known as “the great Pacific climate shift.”

There was no statistically significant ocean warming before or after the 1976-77 temperature shift. Such sudden shifts can hardly be attributed to gradual increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, but by averaging the data, Levitus, et al. were able to construct a gradual temperature rise consistent with global warming theory.

More detailed criticisms of the studies can be found at www.john-daly.com and www.greeningearthsociety.org/climate.

Deforestation Blamed for Cooling

A possible new culprit for global warming has emergedtrees. A study by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has found cooling temperatures can be linked to deforestation, according to an April 24 Associated Press story.

The study looked at the period between 1000 and 1900, when the Earths temperature dropped two degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers found the places that cooled the most also experienced the most deforestation. Thus if deforestation causes cooling, then is it also the case that reforestation, which has been going on at a rapid pace in the U.S. for decades, will cause warming?

Arctic Sea Ice Thickness and Wind

Several studies have been done to determine what changes, if any, have occurred in sea ice cover and sea ice thickness in the Arctic. Interest in Arctic ice is fueled by the belief that the signs of global warming would be observed there first.

A paper by Greg Holloway and Tessa Sou, with the Institute of Ocean Sciences, in Sidney British Columbia, Canada, delivered at the 3^rd annual Arctic Science Summit Week, an initiative of the International Arctic Science Committee, asks the question, “Is Arctic Sea Ice Rapidly Thinning?” The answer is “no.”

Detailed satellite observations from 1979 to 1999 show a decrease in sea ice cover of nearly 3 percent per decade. Observations of sea ice thickness have shown even more dramatic changes, but the data is sparse.

A study by Rothrock et al., which appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters, used U.S. military submarine cruise records from autumns of 1958, 1960, 1962, 1970 and 1976 and compared them to cruises in 1993, 1996, 1997. “Systematically over all the regions sampled by the submarines, thickness had markedly decreased from the earlier to the later period,” according to Holloway and Sou. There was an apparent decrease of thickness of 43 percent at the 29 locations where the records could be compared.

In earlier work, Holloway had constructed a “numerical ocean-ice-snow model to attempt to formulate a mutually consistent budget for freshwater and heat in the Arctic ocean-ice-snow system.” For the current study, the model was run from 1948 to 1999 and replicated the well-measured three percent per year reduction in ice cover consistent with observations. “However, model-estimated thinning was nothing like the rapid thinning reported from submarines,” a thinning of only 12 percent.

Holloway and Sou argue that the mismatch between the submarine measurements and model results suggest either problems with the model or inadequate data. They prefer the latter explanation due to the sparseness of the data.

The researchers suggest that, “The apparent ice loss was only a shifting of location of ice within the Arctic,” which the infrequent submarine sampling missed. How does the ice shift? “Large-scale wind patterns are ever-changing, and the Arctic ice pack is readily rearranged,” said Holloway and Sou. Moreover, the patterns of wind stress in the model resemble the pattern of thinning.

Holloway and Sou conclude “that the positions of submarine observations were exceptionally biased towards regions of thinning.”

“The actual results from the actual submarine surveys appear to be a fluke of timing coupled with the natural mode of Arctic sea ice variability,” said the researchers.

Climate Models: “Unchanging with Time”

Recent media accounts of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change give the distinct impression that climate models, the primary source of global warming concerns, are getting more accurate all the time. A news article in Science (April 13, 2001), however, sets the record straight.

According to the author, Richard A. Kerr, “But while new knowledge gathered since the IPCCs last report in 1995 has increased many researchers confidence in the models, in some vital areas, uncertainties have actually grown.” Gerald North of Texas A&M University in College Station said that, “Its extremely hard to tell whether the models have improved” since the last IPCC report. “The uncertainties are large.”

Peter Stone, an MIT climate modeler, said, “The major [climate prediction] uncertainties have not been reduced at all.” And cloud physicist Robert Charlson, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Seattle, said, “To make it sound like we understand climate is not right.”

The three main areas of uncertainty are detection of global warming, attribution of warming to greenhouse gases, and projecting future warming, Kerr writes. Detection is probably the closest to being resolved of the three. The IPCC puts warming at 0.6 degrees 0.2 degrees centigrade with a 95 percent confidence level.

Attribution of global warming to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases is much more difficult, however. The IPCC claims, “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely [66 percent to 90 percent chance] to have been due to the increase of greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Some modelers, such as Jerry Mahlman with NOAA and John Mitchell at the UKs Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, think the models are getting better. The models are “getting quite a remarkable agreement,” with reality, said Mitchell.

“Thats stretching it a bit,” said John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Stone argues that human attribution “may be right,” but, “I just know of no objective scientific basis for that.” Tim Barnett of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Jeffrey Kiehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research concur.

One of the primary means by which modelers have tweaked the models for better results is the inclusion of aerosols. But according to Kiehl, “The more we learn [about aerosols], the less we know.” Indeed, according to the IPCC report, “The uncertainties are so large that a best estimate with error bars of the indirect cloud effect of aerosols is still impossible.” Possible aerosol cloud effects now range from no effect to a near total masking of the alleged manmade greenhouse effect.

North argues that the “huge range of climate uncertainty among the models” is a serious problem. “There are so many adjustables in the models and there is a limited amount of observational data, so we can always bring the models into agreement with the data.”

According to Science, North explained that, “Models with sensitivities to CO₂ inputs at either extreme of the range can still simulate the warming of the 20^th century.”

Many of these scientists still think something should be done to slow down the emission of greenhouse gases. This, however, seems to be a reaction to change as much as a concern over whether there will be any ensuing harm. “The evidence for chemical change of the atmosphere is so overwhelming, we should do something about it,” said Charlson.

Quantifying the Uncertainties

Although most scientists are willing to admit that there are still large uncertainties in the predictions about rising global temperatures, there has been little effort to quantify those uncertainties. Uncertainties are important, however.

According to a new study by researchers at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT, “Communicating uncertainty in climate projections provides essential information to decision makers, allowing them to evaluate how policies might reduce the risk of climate impacts.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not provide these numbers, however. “The Third Assessment Report of the [IPCC] reports a range for global mean surface temperature rise by 2100 of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade but does not provide likelihood estimates for this key finding although it does for others,” says the study.

The researchers perform this calculation and conclude, “that there is far less than a 1 in 100 chance of a global mean surface temperature increase by 2100 as large as 5.8 degrees centigrade.” They also conclude, “there is a 17 percent chance that the temperature change of 2100 would be less than the IPCC lower estimate” (web.mit.edu/globalchange/www/).

Even though it is much more likely that the amount of warming over the next 100 years will be less than 1.4 degrees centigrade than 5.8 degrees centigrade or more, it is the higher number that is emphasized in news coverage of the issue. This is highly misleading if the MIT calculations are correct.

Ecosystem Effects of Global Warming

The anticipated effects of global warming are supposed to be horrific, according to environmental activists and the science politicos who populated the Clinton Administration. A short news item appearing in Nature (April 5, 2001) begins in the usual way, as a prelude to a horror story. “The first survey for a decade of animals and plants on Australias Heard Island, 4,000 kilometres southwest of Perth, has unearthed dramatic evidence of global warmings ecological impact,” said Nature.

What are these impacts? The usual stuff, such as glaciers that “have retreated by 12 percent since the first measurements were taken in 1947,” and “a rise in sea surface temperature of up to 1 degree C” The story then takes an odd turn. Global warming has also led to “rapid increases in flora and fauna” on the island.

Previously low vegetation areas are now “lush with large expanses of plant,” said Dana Bergstrom, an ecologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. “The number of king penguins has exploded from only three breeding pairs in 1947 to 25,000, while Heard Island cormorant, listed previously as vulnerable, has increased to 1,200 pairs. From near extinction, fur seals now number 28,000 adults and 1,000 pups,” noted Nature.

The changes on Heard Island, especially the retreating glaciers, are not likely due to global warming, according to John Daly, who maintains the Australian-based website, Still Waiting for Greenhouse (www.john-daly.com). The island, says Daly, has two volcanoes and the larger of the two has been very active in the past 120 years, including numerous eruptions and lava flows.

No Change in Arctic Sea Ice

One of the mainstays of the global warming apocalyptics has been that the polar ice caps are melting and the seas are rising. It has even been claimed that the Arctic regions serve as an early warning system that global warming is on its way due to its supposed greater sensitivity to temperature change. In 1999, a paper published in the Geophysical Research Letters by Rothrock et al. suggested that Arctic ice was thinner in the 1990s than it was from 1958 to 1979.

A new study in the March 15 issue of GRL takes a closer look at the evidence. The 1999 study used data collected from submarine cruises from 1993, 96, and 97 and compared it to similar data from 1958 to 1979. The new study by Peter Winsor, with the Department of Oceanography, Earth Science Centre, at Gteborg University in Sweden, “carefully analyzed” the Rothrock results “using the most comprehensive data set presently available to the research community.”

The study concludes, “Draft data from the North Pole, and the Beaufort Sea, and transects between the two areas over a 7-year period from 1991 to 1997 show no evidence of a thinning ice cover.” Winsor goes on to show that by “Combining the mean drafts derived [from another study] from 1986 to 1990 with those from the present study, I conclude that the thickness of sea ice cover has remained on a near-constant level at the North Pole during the 12-year period from 1986 to 1997.”

If the Arctic is an early warning system of global warming as environmentalists claim, then judging by these results greenhouse gas emissions are not having any effect.

No Change in Climate

A new study in the March 29 issue of Nature has cast doubts on claims by environmentalists that the current climate is unprecedented. Indeed, if the results of the study are true, todays climate is typical of past interglacial warm periods.

The study analyzed tree ring data from partially fossilized remains of the conifer Fitzroya cupressoides or Alerce, the worlds second longest living tree. The trees, which can live to be as old as 3,600 years, died about 50,000 years ago. This gives scientists an opportunity to study a long period of the ancient climate system.

“The fine scale of the record reveals climate fluctuations that closely resemble those we are experiencing now, including the 25-year spell of El Nio oscillations,” noted a news story accompanying the study. According to the researchers, “Our study suggests that comparable cycles in tree growth occurred between interstadials of the last glaciation and today, and hence that similar factors have affected the radial growth of Fitzroya since the Late Pleistocene,” and that, “The forcing mechanisms of climate during the interstadials have not changed dramatically.”

Tropical Disease Cannot be Linked to Global Warming

The National Research Council announced a new study on April 2 looking at the impacts of climate change on human health. They found that, “It is not yet possible to determine whether global warming will actually cause diseases to spread,” according to a press release announcing the study. The diseases looked at include mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, malaria and yellow fever, influenza, intestinal disorders, and so on.

“Basic public health protections such as adequate housing and sanitation, as well as the availability of vaccines and drugs, can limit the geographic distribution of diseases regardless of climate,” said the release. “One example of this is along the border between the United States and Mexico, where dengue fever outbreaks are common just south of the Rio Grande in Mexico, but are rarely seen in neighboring regions just north of the river in the United States, mainly because of differences in socio-economic conditions.”

The printed study, Under the Weather: Climate, Ecosystems, and Infectious Disease, wont be released until this summer, but can be read online at http://nationalacademies.org/topnews.

Enhanced Greenhouse Effect Needed

A new study in Astrophysics and Space Science (275: 2001) by internationally renowned scientists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe presents a new theory of climatic change. According to them, the earths natural state is the extreme coldness of the ice ages, and the earth would remain in such a state forever if not for the periodic collision with large comets.

One-kilometer size comets have a probability of hitting the earth about once every 100,000 years, which coincides with the average periodicity of ice ages. When one of these comets hits the earths oceans, it ejects enough water vapor into the atmosphere to “jerk the earth almost discontinuously out of a long drawn-out ice-age into the beginning of an interglacial.” Afterwards, the earth gradually returns to its normal frozen state.

What are the implications for global warming? According to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, “We must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate.” They warn, “The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the worlds major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population.” Indeed, “Without some artificial means of giving positive feedback to the climate, …an eventual drift into ice-age conditions appears inevitable,” they said.

They have harsh words for those who support greenhouse gas regulations. “Manifestly, we need all the greenhouse we can get,” they said. “Those who have engaged in uncritical scaremongering over an enhanced greenhouse effect raising the Earths temperature by a degree or two should be seen as both misguided and dangerous.” The current danger “is of a drift back into an ice-age, not away from an ice-age.” For a longer review of the study see www.co2science.org.

Satellites Spot Greenhouse Effect

In a major non-news story that received major press and broadcast coverage, a paper by a team of scientists at Imperial College, London published in the March 15, 2001 issue of Nature finds data from satellites provides the first “direct observational evidence” that the greenhouse effect is intensifying as a result of manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

“However,” according to a CNN story, “the study did not tackle whether Earths surface temperature is actually increasing. In fact, whether this greenhouse effect will lead to global warming or global cooling is unclear, the study scientists said.”

Climate Data Still Inadequate

If the claims about widespread scientific certainty about global warming are true, then why does Nature bemoan the poor quality of climate data? Nature argues in a March 15 article that, “There is also a small chance that none of the IPCCs scenarios will come close to reality.” Why? Because, “The accuracy of any model depends significantly on the quality of the underlying raw data. The problem is, the quality is patchy.”

The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) was created in 1992 to solve this problem. But there are serious flaws in the system, according to Nature. With only 1,000 stations in operation, coverage is sparse. It is mostly confined to rich industrialized countries, while Africa, South America and Asia, as well as remote polar regions in Russia and Canada go largely unmeasured. “Through misreporting, instrumental drifts and biases, unreliable communication infrastructures or political unrest, about half the worlds climate data potential is lost or corrupted each month,” says Nature. Part of the problem is the high cost of the program. A single GCOS station costs up to $500,000 per year to operate.

Moreover, “Sea-based climate observation and ocean monitoring, which is likely to add significantly to our knowledge of what drives atmospheric processes, is only just beginning.”

Etc.

The efforts of the Cooler Heads Coalition and its member groups to convince the Bush Administration to oppose regulating CO₂ emissions have been recognized by the environmental movement. The Clean Air Trust on March 15 awarded its “Villain of the Month” award to Cooler Heads Coalition chairman Myron Ebell. The Trusts press release (www.cleanairtrust.org) cited the “furious lobbying charge” of the Cooler Heads Coalition and described it as “a motley array of radical anti-clean air groups, mostly funded by business, with ties to the extreme right wing of the Republican party.”

Ebell accepted the award in a letter (www.cei.org) to the Clean Air Trust, but questioned whether the Trust really believed that carbon dioxide was a pollutant since it isnt included on the list of air pollutants on its web site. Past winners of the Villain of the Month award include Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, Sen. George Voinovich, American Electric Power, Exxon Mobil, and Cinergy.

RIP: Global Warming Theory

Three scientific studies that have recently appeared may well spell the beginning of the end of global warming theory:

1) Water Vapor Feedback

The biggest uncertainty in climate science is how feedbacks affect the climate. Global warming theory posits that a rise in atmospheric CO2 will only cause a slight warming of the atmosphere, on the order of about 1 degree centigrade. This small amount of warming, according to standard global warming theory, speeds up evaporation, increasing the amount of water vapor, the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. This positive feedback is where most of the predicted warming comes from.

A new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (March 2000) shows that the reverse is true. The authors find a negative water vapor feedback effect that is powerful enough to offset all other positive feedbacks. Using detailed daily observations of cloud cover from satellites in the tropics and comparing them to sea surface temperatures, the researchers found that there is an “iris effect” in which higher temperatures reduce the warming effect of clouds.

According to a NASA press release about the study, “Clouds play a critical and complicated role in regulating the temperature of the Earth. Thick, bright, watery clouds like cumulus shield the atmosphere from incoming solar radiation by reflecting much of it back into space. Thin, icy cirrus clouds are poor sunshields but very efficient insulators that trap energy rising from the Earths warmed surface. A decrease in cirrus cloud area would have a cooling effect by allowing more heat energy, or infrared radiation, to leave the planet.”

The researchers found that a one degree centigrade rise in ocean surface temperature decreased the ratio of cirrus cloud area to cumulus cloud area by 17 to 27 percent, allowing more heat to escape.

In an interview with Tech Central Station (March 5, 2001, www.techcentralstation.com), Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the lead author, said that the climate models used in the IPCC have the cloud physics wrong. “We found that there were terrible errors about clouds in all the models, and that that will make it impossible to predict the climate sensitivity because the sensitivity of the models depends primarily on water vapor and clouds. Moreover, if clouds are wrong, theres no way you can get water vapor right. Theyre both intimately tied to each other.” Lindzen argues that due to this new finding he doesnt expect “much more than a degree warming and probably a lot less by 2100.”

2) Black Carbon

The IPCC had to explain in its 1995 Second Assessment Report why its previous predictions of global temperature change were nearly 3 times larger than observed. It concluded that emissions of sulfate aerosols from the burning of coal were offsetting the warming that should be caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sulfate aerosols, according to this explanation, reflect incoming solar radiation back to space, cooling the planet.

Its Third Assessment Report takes the sulfate aerosol idea even further. It claims that the earth might warm even faster than previously thought. It comes to this conclusion, in part, by assuming that sulfate aerosol emissions will be eliminated by government regulation, giving carbon dioxide free reign.

Sulfate aerosols, then, are a key component of catastrophic global warming scenarios. Without them, the IPCC cannot explain why the earth is not warming according to their forecasts, nor can they reasonably claim that global warming will lead to catastrophes of biblical proportions.

A study in Nature (February 8, 2001) eliminates sulfate aerosols as an explanation to correct the models. The author, Mark Jacobson, with the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, takes a look at how black carbon aerosols affect the earths climate. Unlike other aerosols that reflect solar radiation, black carbon, or soot, absorbs solar radiation, thereby forcing atmospheric temperatures upward.

Until now the warming influence of black carbon was thought to be minor, leading researchers to ignore it. Jacobson, however, finds, “a higher positive forcing from black carbon than previously thought, suggesting that the warming effect from black carbon may nearly balance the net cooling effect of other anthropogenic aerosol constituents.”

There you have it. Black carbon offsets the cooling effect of other aerosols, meaning we are back at square one. We still dont know why the earth has failed to warm like the climate models say it should have warmed. Indeed, all of the prognostications of the IPCC and the pro-global warming, anti-energy activists are wrong if the Nature study is right.

3) Natural Cycles

The IPCCs hockey stick graph has also come under criticism in Science (February 23, 2001). The graph, a temperature record derived from tree rings dating to 1000 AD, shows that global temperatures have remained steady or decreased during the last millennium. Only the industrial age has experienced an anomalous warming, which constitutes the blade of the hockey stick.

This particular temperature record does not show the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or the Little Ice Age (LIA), two naturally occurring events where the range of global temperature change exceeded that of the 20th century. The hockey stick relegates the MWP to a regional rather than a global phenomenon.

Wallace Broecker, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, argues that the MWP and the LIA were indeed global phenomena and that “The post-1860 natural warming was the most recent in a series of similar warmings spaced at roughly 1500-year intervals throughout the present interglacial, the Holocene.” He reviews several scientific studies that confirm his arguments.

The claim by the IPCC that the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years just doesnt hold up under scrutiny. The MWP was warmer and, according to the seminal work by Hubert H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World, civilization thrived under the warmer climate.

With these three studies, it may be time to bid global warming theory a warm farewell.

“Lindzen Trashes IPCC”

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, delivered a scathing critique of the IPCC process at a briefing sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition on May 1 on Capitol Hill.

What are some of the problems with the IPCC process according to Lindzen? It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say; uses language that means different things to scientists and laymen; exploits public ignorance over quantitative matters; exploits what scientists can agree on while ignoring disagreements to support the global warming agenda; and exaggerates scientific accuracy and certainty and the authority of undistinguished scientists.

The “most egregious” problem with the report, said Lindzen, “is that it is presented as a consensus that involves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scientists and none of them were asked if they agreed with anything in the report except for the one or two pages they worked on.”

Most press accounts characterize the IPCC report as a consensus of 2,000 of the worlds leading climate scientists. The emphasis isnt on getting qualified scientists, said Lindzen, but on getting representatives from 100 countries, only a handful of which do significant research. “It is no small matter,” said Lindzen, “that routine weather service functionaries from New Zealand to Tanzania are referred to as the worlds leading climate scientists. It should come as no surprise that they will be determinedly supportive of the process.”

Perhaps his most devastating critique is of the IPCCs use of statistics. Its infamous hockey stick graph, for instance, shows that global temperatures have been stable or going down in the last 1000 years and that only in the industrial age has there been an anomalous warming of the planet. But if you look at the margin of error in that graph, “You can no longer maintain that statement,” said Lindzen.

Indeed, the margins of error used in the IPCC report are much smaller than traditionally used by scientists. This means that the IPCC is publicizing data that is much less likely to be correct than scientists normally use. The IPCC is playing a statistical shell game that isnt scientifically valid.

In his own Hill briefing a week later, Robert Watson, chairman of the IPCC, admitted that Dr. Lindzen had “trashed the IPCC” at the Cooler Heads briefing.

Christy Scoffs at IPCCs Doomsday Scenario

Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and a lead author of the IPCCs Third Assessment Report, has publicly criticized the IPCCs media campaign to generate public alarm about global warming. “The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints,” he told the London Times (February 20, 2001). “There are 245 different results in that report, and this was the worst-case scenario. Its the one thats not going to happen. It was the extreme case of all the different things that can make the world warm.”

On the computer models that form the foundation of the IPCC report, Christy said, “You should approach climate models with a degree of awe and a sense of humor. They are incredible accomplishments of code-writing, but they are not the real world. They have many shortcomings the sort of tiny shortcomings that can make long-term predictions suspect.” Indeed, said Christy, no model accurately portrays the current climate. How then can we trust future predictions?

Christy also noted that mans impact on the earth is too small to detect. “Hurricanes are not increasing,” he said. “Tornadoes are not increasing. Storms and drought do not show any pattern of increasing or decreasing. The evidence shows we are living in a climate of natural variability. Variations of climate have always occurred, even when humans could not have had any impact!”

The specter of malaria in England from global warming is a red herring, according to Christy. “Malaria is not a warm weather disease and was endemic in Britain in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It is constrained by simple public health measures. In countries wealthy enough to support a good public health infrastructure, there is little or no malaria, such as Singapore and northern Australia.”

Russias Frigid Winter

Russia is experiencing its coldest winter in 50 years, according to official measurements. The average temperature in Siberia was 40 degrees C and fell as low as 70 degrees C (Arizona Republic, February 18, 2001). This is significant because according to greenhouse theory places such as Siberia should see the largest rise in temperatures from increases in atmospheric concentrations in greenhouse gases.

Because the coldest air masses on earth are also the driest, greenhouse gases exert a relatively larger influence on temperatures than in more humid regions, such as the tropics. Indeed, tropical temperatures should remain nearly steady.