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many years now, December has been a month of climate hectoring,
and for good reason. Every January, Congress returns, and that means
debate on some energy legislation designed to impose an onerous
tax burden like the Kyoto Protocol on global warming will commence.
This year is no different.
In December,
we always see reports about "this year" having been the
warmest, or nearly the warmest one we have measured. That's because
the earth is warmer than it was 100 years ago, and it is currently
on a smooth (but slight) warming trend. As a result, each succeeding
year tends to approach the warmest values observed for the last
century. To put that in perspective: The earth has been much warmer
than it is now for about 95 percent of the last 100 million years.
It's always
worth noting that in the last 100 years U.S. crop yields quintupled
and life expectancy doubled (so much for the terrors of warming).
But there's even more hot air this December, with the release of
a new report from the National Academy of Sciences, "Abrupt
Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises."
Most of the
newspapers dutifully equated climate change with global warming,
which is what many on the Academy's panel wanted. It's guilt by
association. It's warmer than it was 100 years ago. The National
Academy is talking about sudden climate changes. Therefore, global
warming must cause 'em.
Most reporters
haven't taken Climatology 101, in which they would have learned
that socially significant abrupt regional climate changes take place
when the planet is cooling (the "little ice age," which
drove the Vikings from Greenland), when it is warming (the Dust
Bowl of the 1930s, which drove a lot of farmers bankrupt) and when
global temperature is relatively constant (the sudden shut-off of
sub-Saharan rainfall which began in the 1960s, and the resulting
famines).
So why is the
National Academy wasting its time (and our money) pointing out something
that is so absolutely elementary in climate science? As one member
of the panel told me, the intent of the report was "to draw
attention to a common field of interest [abrupt climate changes]
so that they could raise awareness and generate some funding support."
"The agencies were looking for something they could wave at
congressional [budget] hearings," he added.
Before shrieking
in horror, remember that every scientific endeavor competes for
public funding. The way to get attention these days is with media
theatrics, such as threatening climate gloom and doom. It's not
just climatologists, either. Just read the Washington papers for
a few days to get the drift.
In reality, abrupt climate changes, like the ones noted above, have
been with us since before we came out of the trees. But research
funds don't grow there. When the climate shifts abruptly, ecosystems
are impacted — some for better and some for worse. Things change,
humans adapt, life goes on. But it requires lots of money to study
the phenomena.
Speaking of
gloom and doom, soon after the Academy report finishes its news
cycle, we will read that 2001 is the second warmest year in "history,"
at least as history is measured in the 140-year-old record of global
surface temperature.
But is it?
It's not likely that any of the associated stories will analyze
the temperature history in any depth. What it reveals about global
warming is more reassuring than alarming. The history shows that
surface temperatures continue to rise at a constant, slow rate.
This is important because most of our projections for human-induced
warming also warm at a constant, rather than an increasing rate.
Therefore, if the warming we see is indeed largely caused by humans
in recent decades, the rate has already been established and it
obviously something that we clearly can live with and prosper under.
The highly
respected economist Robert Mendelsohn just wrote a book about this.
In "Global Warming and the American Economy" Mendelsohn
demonstrates that even assuming warming rates higher than the one
already established and entrenched, climate change is a net economic
benefit.
If you want
to see an area where oodles of research money have gotten us not
very far, just look at the temperature history. While 2001 indeed
is the second warmest in the surface record, our satellites, which
are more accurate (but only have 23 years of record), show it was
an average year. Satellites are especially adept at measuring the
temperature in the layer from about 5,000 feet on up. Is there a
climate model in existence that says the surface should warm while
the rest of the lower atmosphere does not? The answer is no.
We've been
throwing increasing amounts of money at this problem for years now
and the fact of the matter is that we still can't tell, literally,
which way is up when it comes to climate change. But that won't
stop the scare stories of December.
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