Global Warming or Scientific Flatulence?
T-Minus Seven Years and Counting.

     On June 6, 2001 the National Research Council's* "Committee on the Science of Climate Change"* issued a Press Release* and Report* on behalf of the National Academy of Sciences in  response to a May 11, 2001 White House request* asking the National Academy of Sciences* to identify "the areas in the science of climate change where there are the greatest certainties and uncertainties" and soliciting the Academy's "views on whether there are any substantive differences between the IPCC Reports* and the IPCC Summaries*."  The IPCC* is an "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" created by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization in 1988 to prepare and disseminate scientific reports and summaries on "climate change" to the UN and agencies of national governments.  Upon its formation in 1988, its name implied an answer to the question its organizers ostensibly created it to answer-- i.e., whether "climate change" was in progress.  The IPCC's "reports and summaries have been influential in international negotiations related to the Kyoto protocol."^ 

Misleading Media Coverage.

      Almost all media coverage conveyed the impression that the Report unequivocally refuted the Bush Administration's (correct) assertion that the global-warming theory rests on computer-models analyzing data that are incomplete, uncertain and subject to a number of unknown, untested and un-testable variables.  Although the Press Release and Report employed considerable syntactical skills to minimize contradictions, deficiencies and shortcomings in the data touted by the IPCC to avoid overtly undermining the politically-correct view being promoted by Kyoto proponents, objective analysis of data described by the Committee does not support the impression conveyed by the media.

Uncertainties portrayed as probabilities.

     The Press Release said the Committee* "summed up science's current understanding of global climate change by characterizing the global warming trend over the last 100 years, and examining what may be in store for the 21st century and the extent to which warming may be attributable to human activity."^  It also said the Committee "emphasized that much more systematic research is needed to reduce current uncertainties in climate-change science."^  The Committee also "cautioned that uncertainties about this conclusion remain because of the level of natural variability inherent in the climate on time scales from decades to centuries, the questionable ability of models to simulate natural variability on such long time scales, and the degree of confidence that can be placed on estimates of temperatures going back thousands of years based on evidence from tree rings or ice cores."^ 

The scientific naïveté of the Media.

     However, most media reports conveyed the false impression that no scientifically reasonable bases exist for doubting either that a long-term global warming is in progress or that even if such trend were to be in progress, human activity is causing, accelerating, or significantly contributing to it.  Indeed, the media are apparently unaware that in preparing the Report, which relies overwhelmingly on the IPCC Reports and IPCC Summaries, the Committee apparently failed to consider recent data^ published in March, 2001, by a member of the Committee, Richard S. Lindzen, casting significant doubt on the predictions described in IPCC Reports and IPCC Summaries pre-dating such recent data.  The gist of such recent data is that even if it were to be assumed that human-generated emissions of "greehouse" gases are causing, contributing to, or accelerating "global warming," components of the global atmosphere are likely to render such effects short-term by countering them in a way similar to the way the human eye reacts to intensification of light by reducing the opening in its iris.  Click here to view the March, 2001 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society containing Lindzen's explanation of such data in his article titled, "Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?"  

Contradictions ignored by political "science."

     The Press Release stated that "[average] temperatures at the Earth's surface rose by about 1 degree Fahrenheit ... during the 20th Century"^  and that the process "intensified in the past 20 years."^   However, it fails to mention that the Committee's own Report concedes that satellite measurements of average atmospheric temperatures during that same 20-year period show "relatively little warming."^  

Paradoxes Lost.

     Paradoxically, although the Report says that "[m]ost of [the warming during the 20th Century] occurred prior to 1940 and during the past few decades," the Press Release describes "the last 50 years" as a global-warming period attributable to "increases in greenhouse gases" according to "the current thinking^ of the scientific community."  Unless "50 years" was a typographical error, the Press-Release description of "the last 50 years" as a period of global warming misrepresented the Report-- i.e., if "most" 20th Century warming occurred before 1940 and "during the past few decades" (ostensibly, the "past 20 years" or arguably the past 30 years), and if the cumulative warming for the entire 20th Century was only 1 degree Fahrenheit, then there was little or no warming from 1940 until the 1970's-- thus, how could one accurately describe "the last 50 years" as a period of "global warming"?  

Is the evidence "on the ground" or "up in the air"?

     Furthermore, satellite measurements of atmospheric^ temperatures during the last 20 years cast serious doubt on whether there was any significant warming during "the last 20 years" because the data alleged to show "intensified warming" during that period are average temperatures at the surface, and many of the surface stations are in areas that experienced localized warming during that period due to intensification of urbanization near such stations.  Thus, if one were to draw the scientifically reasonable inference that satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures is more accurate than the ground-station measurements, then the total "warming" for the entire 20th Century would be only a fraction of a degree, and the period of greatest warming would have been before 1940--long before the period of the greatest increases in greenhouse-gas emissions (i.e., in the second half of the 20th Century)-- and the period of the least warming would have been in the second half of the 20th Century during the period of greatest increases in greenhouse-gas emissions.  

Paleontological SUV's?  Mammoth Flatulence?

     Although the Committee asserts that ice-core samples providing indicia of atmospheric conditions (in the polar regions) during "the past 400,000 years" show that "carbon dioxide and methane are more abundant in the atmosphere now than at any time during the 400,000-year ice core record," it grudgingly admits that those same records "reveal that temperatures changed substantially over the past 400,000 years ... [and that] ... [a]lthough most of these changes occurred over thousands of years, some rapid warmings took place over a period of decades."  These observations raise at least three questions:  First, could anyone rationally contend it would be scientifically unreasonable to doubt whether levels of carbon dioxide and methane present in polar atmospheres at any given point during such 400,000 years accurately represent the levels of those same gases throughout the global atmosphere?  Second, could there not have been thus-far undetected events or conditions^ that would have distorted the extent to which one could reliably extrapolate a world-wide condition from a local one?  Third, what undetected, non-human,^ natural forces then (and now) could cause short-term warmings (i.e., within mere decades)? 

Scientific Obfuscation.

     The White House Request* also asked the National Academy of Sciences to "examine whether there were any substantive differences between the IPCC Reports and their abridged technical and policy-maker summaries [i.e., IPCC Summaries]."   With a syntactical coup de grace pandering to the politically-correct, pantheopianistic* faith among those in the media and government that humans are causing global warming, the Committee responded that "The full IPCC Working Group 1 report does an admirable job of reflecting research activities in climate science, and is adequately summarized in the technical summary" and that "[t]he corresponding summary for policy-makers ... placed less emphasis on the scientific uncertainties and caveats."^   Then, as a scientific fig-leaf, the Committee "suggested that improvements to the IPCC process may need to be made to ensure the best scientific representation possible, and to keep the process from being seen as too heavily influenced by governments, 'which have specific postures with regard to treaties, emissions controls, and other policy instruments.' "^   To enlarge the fig-leaf, the Committee also stated that "[t]o reduce some of the uncertainties inherent in current climate change predictions, a strong commitment must be made to basic research as well as to improving climate models and building a global climate observing system ... [and m]ore comprehensive measurements of greenhouse gases and increased computational power also will be needed."^   

Who, Media?

     If most of the media were really interested in objectively reporting these matters rather than promoting a pantheopian* agenda with which they apparently agree, not only would they report that there are scientifically reasonable doubts about the global-warming theory, but they would also report that it would be scientifically unreasonable to characterize such doubts as unreasonable or unscientific.

It's not only bad generals who prepare to win the "last" war.

     If this global-warming theory were merely a debate among politically posturing "experts" in academia, it wouldn't matter.  Instead, the "generals" in this politicization of science are imposing massive economic burdens to wage social-engineering war in a theoretical environmental skirmish while ignoring the need for governments and societies to devote massive resources to prepare for what otherwise will be the certainty of an environmental Armageddon-- i.e., the next large asteroid or comet to strike Earth.  Given what science now knows about the Siberian impact in 1908, about the Schumaker/Levy cometary impacts on Jupiter in the 1990's, about several "near misses" of the Earth as recent as the 1990's, and about the strong evidence that impacts the size of the Siberian impact in 1908 (or larger ones) occur approximately every 100 years, scientists ought to be mobilizing all governments to devote massive resources to the tasks of detecting and deflecting or destroying such such objects headed for Earth.  Unlike unproven theories that "greenhouse gases" may slowly warm the planet, it's a certainty that a catastrophic impact (if not an extinction-level impact) is likely to occur within the next few decades (if not the next few years) since it's already been nearly a hundred years since the 1908 Siberian impact, which would have destroyed New York City and the surrounding area had it occurred a mere 12 hours earlier.

T-Minus Seven Years and Counting.

     Instead of sloganeering with the pantheopians, scientists should be emphasizing a much more important countdown:  It's now T-minus 7 years to the next Siberian-level impact.