Cloudy predictions
Editorial
Copyright 1998 Richmond Times
December 22, 1998
It has been a year since the United States attended the Kyoto summit on
global warming. The intervening months - filled with devastating storms and record highs -
have been a dream come true for Al Gore. Yet while Gore hotly proclaims
tropical storms prove pollution is
warming up the planet, cooler heads are taking a look at issues that cast
serious doubt on greenhouse theory.
The awkward nomenclature is necessary to maintain a distinction between
global warming itself - the 1.5 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature during the past 150
years - and speculation that mankind bears much of the blame for the increase
because fossil fuels emit heat-trapping gases, which might create a greenhouse
effect. The former has been well established. The latter has not.
Don't take our word for it. Listen to James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies. In 1988 Hansen testified at the Gore-sponsored
Senate hearing that made
global warming a household term.
"The greenhouse effect has been detected," Hansen said then,
"and
it is changing our climate now."
Yet late this summer - in a reversal that has received much less publicity -
Hansen wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
"The forces that drive long-term
climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future
climate
change." The interactions of atmospheric components remain
"major areas of uncertainty."
Nor has Hansen been the only one to temper his views. In 1990, the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that the average global temperature would rise 3.3 degrees
Celsius over the next century. Two years
later the IPPC revised that figure downward to 2.8 degrees. In 1995 it revised
downward again, to 2.0 degrees - and after factoring out natural climate
factors the IPCC said human-caused warming would amount to 1 degree in the next
century.
Actual measurements also have taken the
air out of the greenhouse balloon. According to John Christy, professor of
atmospheric sciences at the University of Alabama,
"All
global-warming models show that [the troposphere] will warm as fast or even faster than the
surface of the Earth. The fact that it has not suggests that the typical
climate model is not accounting
for what is happening in the real world."
What is happening in the real world? The truth - something Gore will not admit
- is nobody knows. The Earth is about 4 billion years old, and science has
reliable temperature recordings for maybe a couple of centuries. Science can
infer
climate conditions for a few thousand years - or approximately one-millionth of
the Earth's life-span to date. To say that there is a
"right" average global temperature, and it happens to be the average temperature
around the turn of the 20th Century, makes as much sense as saying a person's
pulse should
never rise or fall below what it was at 1:57:08 on May 3, 1976. There's such a
thing as a natural cycle.
Indeed, science knows temperatures between 1650 and 1850 were lower than before
or after those dates, which is why that period is called the Little Ice Age.
The IPCC itself says the
"Little Ice Age came to an end only in the 19th Century. Thus, some of the
global warming since 1850 could be a recovery from the Little Ice Age rather than a direct
result of human activities." Laying a graph of sunspot activity over a temperature graph
shows interesting correlations as well.
None of which means greenhouse theory is wrong. Most critics merely say its
proponents have not yet provided conclusive proof. It would be nice if more of
the proponents had the grace to say the same.
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