Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will hold a full committee hearing tomorrow on "Climate Change and the Media."
The hearing will look at how the media has presented scientific evidence regarding predictions of human-caused catastrophic global warming, the senator's office said.
"Senator Inhofe believes that poorly conceived policy decisions will result from the media's nonstop hyping of 'extreme scenarios' and dire climate predictions," said committee Communications Director Marc Morano. "This hearing will serve to advance the interests of sound science and encourage rational policy decisions."
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Speechless
From the Washington Times:
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6 comments:
(Gadi's views on the environment would probably be challenged less in the Senate than they were in this class...what does that say??)
that class is one sided. appropriate usage of "believe" to describe global warming though. they say religion always takes one form or another...
Well, but not all "debates" have multiple sides -- the scientific consensus is clear: global warming is occuring, and humans are contributing to it. That's a fact-based empirical claim, not a faith-based "belief". There is no credible debate among intellectually honest observers about this, only about how much warming is happening how fast, what the likely consequences are, what we can/cannot do to halt it, and precisely how much human activity is contributing to it.
Put another way, there is no real policy debate, only a political debate.
The data themselves—that is to say, actual observations of the earth’s climate—are hardly grounds for much excitement. For example, the fact that global temperatures and CO2 levels are correlated in the climatological record is not in itself cause for panic. Consider the “smoking gun” for many global-warming alarmists—the Vostok ice core, an 11,775-foot-long sliver of Antarctic ice that has allowed scientists to extrapolate atmospheric CO2 and temperature anomalies over roughly the past 420,000 years, showing that temperature and CO2 have risen and fallen roughly in tandem over this time frame.
But the key word here is “roughly.” The Vostok data make it clear that at the onset of the last glaciation, temperatures began to decline thousands of years before a corresponding decline in atmospheric CO2. This observation cannot be replicated by current climate models, which require a previous fall in CO2 for glaciation to occur. Moreover, an analysis published in Science in 2003 suggests that the end of one glacial period, called Termination III, preceded a rise in CO2 by 600 to 1,000 years. One explanation for this apparent paradox might be that global warming, whatever its initial trigger, liberates CO2 from oceans and permafrost; this additional CO2 might then contribute in turn to the natural greenhouse effect.
Should we worry that adding even more CO2 to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could contribute to a runaway warming effect? Probably not. In simple physical terms, each extra unit of CO2 added to the atmosphere contributes less to the greenhouse effect than the previous unit, just as extra layers of paint applied to a pane of glass contribute less and less to its opacity. For this reason, we have already experienced 75 percent of the warming that should be attributable to a simple doubling of atmospheric CO2 since the late 19th century, a benchmark we have not yet reached but one that is frequently cited as dangerous by those who fear global warming. Moreover, it seems unlikely that we can do very much about it.
Most models, of course, predict much more warming to come. This has to do with the way they account for the effects of clouds and water vapor, which are assumed to amplify greatly the response to man-made greenhouse gases. The problem with this assumption is that it is probably wrong.
Many scientists who study clouds—including MIT’s Richard Lindzen, a prominent skeptic of climate-change alarmism—argue that the data show the opposite to be true: namely, that clouds act to limit, rather than aggravate, warming trends. In any case, the GCM’s have failed miserably to simulate observed changes in cloud cover. Flannery, to his credit, is cognizant of this criticism, and acknowledges that the role of clouds is poorly understood. By way of a response, he draws attention to a computer simulation showing a high degree of correspondence between observed and predicted cloud cover for one model on a single day—July 1, 1998. Overall, however, GCM simulations of clouds are a source of significant error.
Indeed, the models are subject to so much uncertainty that it is hard to understand why anyone would bother to get worked up about them. Generally speaking, the GCM’s simulate two kinds of effects on climate: natural forcing, which includes the impact of volcanic eruptions and solar radiation, and anthropogenic forcing, which includes greenhouse gases and so-called aerosols, or particulate pollution. But the behavior of most of these factors is unknown.
The major models assume, for example, that aerosols act to cancel warming; this effect is said to “explain” the apparent decline in global temperatures from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, when the popular imagination was briefly obsessed with the possibility of global cooling. Some scientists, however, are now claiming that the opposite is true, and that aerosols actually exacerbate warming.
Whatever the case, the impact of aerosols is so poorly understood that the term essentially refers to a parameter that can be adjusted to make the models’ predictions correspond to actual observations. Making inferences from the models about the “true” state of the earth’s climate is therefore an exercise in circular reasoning. To be sure, the business of fine-tuning GCM’s provides a livelihood for many climatologists, and may one day yield valuable insights into the workings of the earth’s climate. But the output of these models is hardly a harbinger of the end of civilization.
If the empirical basis for alarmism about global warming is so flimsy, it is reasonable to ask what can account for the disproportionately pessimistic response of many segments of society.
Part of the problem is that global warming has ceased to be a scientific question—by which I do not mean that the interesting scientific issues have actually been settled, but that many of those concerned about global warming are no longer really interested in the science. As Richard Lindzen has reminded us, the Kyoto Protocol provides an excellent illustration. Although there is widespread scientific agreement that the protocol will do next to nothing to affect climate change, politicians worldwide continue to insist that it is vital to our efforts to combat the problem of global warming, and scientists largely refrain from contradicting them.
Anonymous ignores my central claim: the scientific consensus is clear, selective counter-arguments notwithstanding. See this previous post, and read the _Science_ review of 926 peer-reviewed journal abstracts:
http://crankydocs.blogspot.com
/2006/09/sometimes-theres-
political-debate.html
In fact, the scientific “consensus” on climate change includes a very large number of disparate observations, only a small number of which are pertinent to understanding the actual determinants of contemporary climate change. The fact, for example, that certain species have become scarce or extinct is frequently presented as a cause for alarm about the climate. But such ecological shifts are often the result of idiosyncratic local conditions, and in any case are largely irrelevant to the broader issue of global warming.
In recent years the issue of climate change has also been used as a tool to embarrass the political Right, and especially the Bush administration—which, after Bill Clinton declined to submit the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification, withdrew the U.S. signature from the pact. Put another way, there is no real policy debate, only a political debate.
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."
The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"
In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, "I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method."
According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, "in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low."
Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain's Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth's recent warming. "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years ... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."
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