As Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and State department hacks Tim Wirth and Eileen Clausen make final preparations for railroading the U.S. into an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scientists who in the past supported the global warming theory are having second thoughts.
Climate modeler Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who is the lead author of the chapter in the 1996 U.N. report that linked temperature rise with human activity, now says
It's unfortunate that many people read the media hype before they read the [U.N. report's] chapter [on the attribution of greenhouse warming]. I think the caveats are there. We say quite clearly that few scientists would say the attribution issue was a done deal.
Thanks Ben. And what have you been doing about this as the Gore-Albright LOCO-motive steams toward the treaty signing in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997?
A senior climate modeler who wants to remain anonymous said
The more you learn [about climate change] the more you understand that you don't understand very much.
And once the climate change bubble bursts for good, this guy's gonna need more than anonymity — he's gonna need a good witness protection program.
The problem with the global climate change theory is that it depends upon what is currently a house of cards — i.e., computer modeling. As stated in the Science article,
The effort to simulate climate in a computer faces two kinds of obstacles: lack of computer power and a still very incomplete picture of how real-world climate works. The climate forecasters' basic strategy is to build a mathematical model that recreates global climate processes as closely as possible, let the model run, and then test it by comparing the results to the historical climate record. But even with today's powerful supercomputers, that is a daunting challenge, says modeler Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: "In the climate system, there are 14 orders of magnitude of scale, from the planetary scale — which is 40 million meters —down to the scale of one of the little aerosol particles on which water vapor can change phase to a liquid [cloud particle] — which is a fraction of a millionth of a millimeter."
Of these 14 orders of magnitude, note Schlesinger, researchers are able to include in their models only the two largest, the planetary scale and the scale of weather disturbances: "To go to the third scale — which is [that of thunderstorms] down around 50 kilometers resolution — we need a computer a thousand times faster, a teraflops machine that maybe we'll have in 5 years." And including the smallest scales, he says, would require 10 (to the 36th power) to 10 (to the 37th power) more computer power. "So we're kind of stuck."
But despite all this backtracking, the Science report closed with a telling statement:
The last thing [climatologists] want is a rash of headlines saying the threat is over.
DUH!
The day headlines proclaim the climate change controversy over is the day the climatologists' $2 billion in annual funding evaporates and they find themselves out of work. But don't feel too sorry for them, they can always go back to forecasting tomorrow's weather wrong.
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