A couple of stories got to this tracker over the weekend:
1) The Wall Street Journal‘s Op-Ed page on Friday provided it’s opinion (again) that rising CO2 is probably good for us and won’t change the climate much and that those scientists who say so are doing it for the grant money while shutting out contrary voices within science. I don’t ordinarily read the Journal’s editorial pages, but a brother-in-law to whom I am very close even though we reside at opposite poles in politics asked me to read it and tell him what I think.
It’s a letter, signed by 16 scientists and engineers. It has several points: More and more scientists and engineers doubt GW’s magnitude is great enough to spur significant action, global warming has stopped for at least the last ten years and was already rising more slowly than various groups expected, CO2 is not a pollutant because it is already in the air and not toxic at levels now or foreseeable, young scientists who don’t worry about global warming are being told the shut up by their academic bosses, noted economist William Nordhaus says we can wait 50 years to put any costly CO2 controls in place, and so on.
So I looked at the 16 signatories. I found five, which I put in bold in the following otherwise unchanged signature block from the journal, with clearly apparent expertise in climatology or pertinent aspects of meteorology, atmospheric physics, or other such fields. Anybody can do it:
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
Also on the list are men (all are men) who are authorities on atherosclerosis, aircraft engineering, nanotechnology, economic forecasting, plastics and other polymers, and geology. Two are physicists whose jobs have included senior positions at Exxon Mobil.
My take: A recent flattening of the temperature trend in the last decade may be real, but I put that graph up there to show that such episodes have occurred earlier in this century, including the mid-70s and early 80s and early 90s. The trend didn’t stop after such earlier episodes. No reason to think it will now. It might be statistically weirder to have an end to such wriggles against the trend. And with 2010 perhaps the hottest year yet, the pause now does not look like much of one. Moving on – Yale economist Nordhaus, while perhaps unpersuaded by need for some explicit policies against CO2 emissions, has no doubt that they are bad news already and will do more serious harm if not curbed. He promotes a global carbon tax, for crying out loud, so citing him to build a case against global warming seems inappropriate. (Wm. Nordhaus, incidentally, is uncle to Ted Nordhaus, co-author of the consequential book “The Death of Environmentalism”). So I told my brother-in-law that mixing a few genuine experts in with a lot of people with largely irrelevant expertise that is not spelled out is an intellectually bankrupt way to pad the letter’s implied authority. I added added that the arguments they make are nothing new for contrarians to say. Besides that, I’ve never noticed that the global warming authorities at AGU or AAAS meeting wear more expensive shoes than the rest of the earth scientists. The “doing it for the money” trope is not impossible to imagine (I heard that the old War on Cancer increased the number of papers saying they were about cancer), but it’d be tough to verify. Finally, unexplained is why these 16 people sent this letter to the journal now, and whether any larger organization is behind the signature gathering.
Other reax: At Climate Progress, Joe Romm takes cudgel in hand. He reveals that the journal turned down an article/letter on the same topic, signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences. Well of course – who has room for 255 signatures? Sixteen is so much more manageable. Late Addition: at the NYTimes’s DotEarth, Andrew C. Revkin, dives into the letter’s reference to Nordhaus’s work. Nordhaus tells him, much as I expected when writing the passage above, that the letter “completely misrepresented my work.” Thank you Andy for calling Nordhaus and getting actual info. Beats my surmising, even if it agrees with your confirmation. Also just in, the Union of Concerned Scientists‘s Peter Frumhoff dissected the journal letter.
2) Another story making the rounds on climate change is that the recent pause in global warming is now official, sort of, via the Met Office in the UK, and that even if the sun’s output flags a bit in coming decades global warming’s long term trend upward will hardly change as a result.
The most strident, and professionally well done if one is talking only about the writing style, is in the Daily Mail, by David Rose, under the hed Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again). It is so bad yet good (ie persuasive) that the Met Office rushed out a News blog complaint over its errors, and the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein, at the Wonkblog, added his voice to the retort: No, the Thames isn’t about to freeze over. Another debunker is at the Union of Concerned Scientists‘s News Center.
One odd thing about Rose’s story, despite his suggestion up top that NASA thinks another Little Ice Age may soon be upon us, is that the Met Office thinks that is bosh and Rose says so deeper on. Plus, the head’s implication that NASA thinks the Thames may freeze over has absolutely no backup in the story itself. The following illogic appears to have occurred: A: NASA scientists say dimming in coming decades might equal that of the Maunder Minimum during the Little Ice Age, B: The Thames froze during that time, ergo C: It would freeze again. In other words, Mr. Rose and his headline writer made up that part about the Thames freezing all by themselves.
Aside from all that, there is just out a study from the University of Colorado declaring the pivotal trigger for the Little Ice Age was volcanic activity under the Atlantic. Solar output also fell,, but one infers that it wasn’t the only factor. Late Addition: the BBC‘s Richard Black reported already today on the Volcano-Global Cooling study.
Grist for the Mill: Met Office Press Release ; Univ. Reading Press Release ;
– Charlie Petit
Leave a Reply