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 t's
always easy to know when a big international meeting on global warming
is on the horizon, as gloom-and-doom stories mushroom onto the dailies
and the airwaves. So, after reading last week's papers, it should
be no surprise that this week there is a big U.N. meeting in Bonn
to decide how to adopt the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
By now everyone knows that this miscarriage of science policy won't
do a thing about global warming, while costing the United States
about three percent of its GDP per year. This stark reality serves
as the basis for the Bush administration's rejection of it, and,
without us, Kyoto almost certainly dies.
So, the climate terror machine is in hyper drive. Lets see what
news stories (we mean that precisely) have appeared in the last
few days, and what they conveniently forgot to report.
On July 9, the Washington Post reported that global warming
is destroying the glaciers of Andean Peru, and therefore the lives
of Andean Peruvians. Scott Wilson's story featured Benjamin Morales,
whom he described as the dean of Peru's glaciologists. Calling Peru's
glaciers the world's most sensitive thermometers, he said, "The
temperature was rising very slowly until 1980 and then — as
described by Wilson — he sweeps his arm up at a steep angle."
You (or the Post's reporter, for that matter) can download
the temperature history of Andean Peru from the United Nations database.
Temperatures were in fact constant (not rising) from the beginning
of the record, in 1900 to 1975. There's a sharp jump in 1975 (that's
25 years ago), and, since then, your eyes will see that temperatures
have actually declined a bit. The jump in 1975 is ubiquitous and
mysterious to climatologists, and is known in the profession as
The Great Pacific Climate Shift. None of our climate models for
greenhouse warming predict that human changes should have occurred
in such a brief period, and so long ago. For that matter, none of
them predict cooling in Peru in the last two decades, either.
Wilson went on to cite a claim that these glaciers will disappear
in 15 years, but did allow that other scientists say this is implausibly
fast. He didn't say how implausible. This would require the surface
temperature of Peru to rise 15 degrees in the next 15 years. No
climate model predicts more than about a half of a degree in this
period for Peru, or about 1/30th of the warming required to melt
the current glaciers.
On July 11, the Los Angeles Times reported that a "Warmer
World Will Starve Many." As the world warmed in the 20th century,
corn yields in the world's largest exporter, the United States,
quintupled. Soybean yields doubled. Wheat tripled. And warming and
industrial emissions directly had something to do with this. Greenhouse
warming affects the coldest temperatures more than anything else,
slightly lengthening the growing season. Carbon dioxide itself directly
stimulates plant growth and yield. Carbon dioxide alone is now responsible
for the feeding of 600 million additional people.
It is true that some nations produce insufficient food for domestic
consumption, as the Times bemoans. This has been true since
the dawn of history and is why we have things like commerce and
markets. I confidently predict that these will continue to exist
for the foreseeable future.
On July 12, things went into the stratosphere. The BBC reported
that the United Nations has given their unqualified backing to the
argument that global warming is happening, and at a much faster
rate than expected. Their prediction--based upon computer models--is
that temperatures could rise by as much as 5.8C (10.4F) by the end
of the century.
Fact: In its new report on climate change, the U.N. makes 245 separate
forecasts. One of them predicts that amount of warming. They make
no statement on the relative probability of any individual forecast,
which means that they have produced a meaningless product. In reality,
three-quarters of those 245 forecasts predict warming in the lower
half of the total range of projections.
On the same day, Nature, in a remarkably ad hominem editorial,
opined that those who disagree with the U.N. bring to mind the AIDS
dissidents and that others resemble the tobacco-industry dissidents.
Had they the courage to mention names, they would have been sued.
The major scientific dissenters, including myself, Arizona State's
Robert Balling, MIT's Richard Lindzen, Harvard's Sallie Baliunas,
and University of Alabama's John Christy have together published
hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on climate change in the finest
journals, including Nature.
Hopefully, this Bonn-fire of inanities is going to be the last salvo
of concentrated climate tommyrot. I have to agree with Jan Pronk,
who is chairing the meeting. He says that if Kyoto is delayed any
longer, it really will become nothing more than a dead letter. Those
who are interested in maintaining the credibility of science in
the face of all this climate-change hype can only hope.
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