Jeff Jacoby |  | ||||
Whatever happened to global warming?by Jeff Jacoby http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4706/whatever-happened-to-global-warming
SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this: Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were entirely ice-free. Last December 25th, not a single Canadian province had woken to a white Christmas. There was a new scientific study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures -- a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists were admitting that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice. If all that were happening on the climate-change front right about now, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the nightly news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it? Without a doubt. But it isn't such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice to the tune of 193,000 square miles -- an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade -- average global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere. None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends. But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to? There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming doomsaying rests "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in," says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. "The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand." But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as compelling as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we're going to need. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) Related Topics: Global Warming
Latest Featured Articles from the Pundicity Network | |||||
| To subscribe to the Jeff Jacoby mailing list, go to http://www.pundicity.com/list_subscribe.php | |||||
Send
RSS
Less Fire, More IceBy INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320285810930407
Environment: The claim that man's activities are heating the planet was weakened when it was learned that a glitch caused satellites to undermeasure the volume of Arctic ice. Doom has been overdone.
The global warming speculation has more holes in it than Al Gore's oversized carbon footprint has square miles. Deeply infected with statistical and common sense problems, the climate change argument is beginning to crumble. Suddenly what many considered irrefutable evidence has more in common with fables than scientific work:
• The famed hockey stick chart that supposedly shows Earth's temperature rising sharply in response to the industrial age is not an accurate measure of what has actually occurred. This stick, used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to scare the public into believing that human activity is causing the Earth to warm, has been revealed to be in error.
The unmasking happened five years ago when Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick crunched the numbers and uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann used to create the chart.
Mann and his co-researchers also conveniently left the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age out of the temperature chart, a deception, whether intended or not, that renders their entire work unreliable.
• Global temperatures peaked in 1998, a fact that contradicts the assertion that man's continued pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is making the planet hotter. This was not predicted by the climate models that say we're headed for a warm period.
Nor can anthropogenic global warming be explained when introduced into the argument is the fact that 1934, when far fewer carbon-spewing machines existed than we have today, is the hottest year on record.
Global warming alarmists invested heavily in convincing everyone that 1998 was the hottest year and 2006 the third warmest. After correcting for faulty data, NASA had to backtrack.
At the same time NASA made the correction, it also reported that six of the top 10 hottest years are from a period before 90% of the 20th century growth in carbon emissions occurred.
• In 2007, it was learned that the placement of temperature stations across the U.S. had skewed readings. Equipment at a site in Oregon was found to be just 10 feet from an air conditioning exhaust vent. The sensor at another Oregon station is located on a rooftop near an air conditioning unit. A Tahoe, Calif., station is located next to a drum where trash is burned.
A volunteer group has found that 69% of the 807 stations it has rated (of the 1,221 U.S. Historical Climatological Network stations) are located less than 12 yards from an artificial heating source; 11% are located "next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot or concrete surface."
Most interesting is a comparison between two California stations located within 40 miles of each other. The station in Orland is isolated from man-made influences and has recorded falling temperatures since the late 19th century. Meanwhile, the Marysville station, once in a remote area but now surrounded by artificial heat sources, has shown increases in temperatures over a similar period.
• Last week, researchers at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center admitted that from early January to the middle of this month, "sensor drift" in the satellite monitors used to measure sea ice caused them to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles. That's a significant area roughly the size of California.
Will the alarmists and media apologize for spreading fear about shrinking sea ice that was not really shrinking? Not likely. They'll move on to something else to hype. But it won't change the facts on the ground — or in the sea.
Posts
