Posted on 04/03/2009 6:07:15 AM PDT by shortstop
A recent full-page newspaper ad from the libertarian Cato Institute takes issue with President Barack Obama's convictions about global warming.
The ad cites then-President-elect Obama's Nov. 19 statement: "Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear."
"With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true," the ad states in bold letters. Below that is a statement they say was signed off on by more than 100 named scientists.
"We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events. The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect."
Global warming is a complicated subject, and we're not going to flesh it all out here. But we did want to address the underpinning of this ad, the claim that "there has been no net global warming for over a decade now."
First off, we should note that while there are some who disagree about the existence of global warming, the overwhelming consensus among scientists who study the climate is that it does, and that humans are worsening it.
The definitive statement on global warming comes from a 2007 study by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from more than 130 nations. They concluded that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level." The group also concluded that there is "very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming."
The problem with the assertion in the Cato statement is that it is impossible to make meaningful conclusions about climate trends based on looking at a 10-year window, said Richard Heim, a meteorologist at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center Climate Monitoring Branch.
People tend to think of global warming as a steady trend upward, Heim said, but that's not how it works. if you were to look at long-term trends, like a century, it looks more like steps. Temperatures wil rise for a few years, then level off or even go down a little bit, then go back up. That's why you've got to look at temperatures over many decades, he said.
And if you look at the trends over the last 100 years, Heim said, "the overall linear trend shows clear, unequivocal, unmistakable warming over that period."
Take a look for yourself at the NOAA graph of 100 years of global temperatures.
Now, over the last dozen years, he said, global temperatures have largely plateaued. That's consistent with the trends. Typically, he said, climates will go up, then plateau until they reach a tipping point, and then rise again.
"What you are seeing in the last eight or 10 years is kind of like one of those steps," Heim said. "The fact that it's not getting warmer doesn't mean we are not experiencing global warming. You can't talk about global warming over a 10 year period. The time scale is too short."
When you grab short time frames, say 10 years, it's easy to cherry-pick starting points that are particularly high or low to make your argument one way or the other. But even if you did select a 10-year frame — as cited by Cato — it would show a slight warming over time, Heim said. If you looked at just the last eight years, it would look flat. In fact, if you looked at the last four years, it would seem to be cooling.
"But this is crazy," Heim said. "You have to look at the big picture."
Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist who was a reviewer on the IPCC study, called the Cato argument that there has been no global warming over the last 10 years "fatuous and false."
"What if I said there that been no global warming for an hour? You would rightly tell me that this was too short a period for it to meaningful," Schmidt said. "The same is true for a 'decade'. But even so, it is false."
Schmidt directed us to a graph showing the 10-year climate trends using the four main temperature indices. The line bounces up and down like a lie detector graph, but the overall lines all trend upward .
"To be clear, the globe has warmed for the last decade," Schmidt said. "You can get different results if you pick out your start dates carefully, a practice known as cherry-picking since it is trying to use the data to say something other than what it generally shows, but you are much better off looking at the longest time scales you have (such as these from NASA )."
Cato cited a study on the internal variability of the climate system to support its claim. But the paper, from Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis, doesn't dispute the long-term trend of climate change, Schmidt said. He cited this conclusion from the paper: "If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability."
Said Schmidt: "Quoting this paper to support a claim that global warming has stopped is like quoting Ronald McDonald in support of vegetarianism."
In conclusion, most scientists who study climate say that cherry-picking a 10-year window is inappropriate. But in this case, cherry picking exactly 10 years (Cato said a decade) still doesn't support their claim. We rate this claim False.
Try this link: http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/apr/01/cato-institute/cato-institutes-claim-global-warming-disputed-most/
Not so. Some are saying we are experiencing global cooling, and many that believe we have global warming realize it is caused by the sun and not man.
The problem with journalists today is that they still think they live in a world where people only get their information from newspapers and magazines (mostly run by liberals). But that isn't the case, as they are now just another voice among many to choose from. We no longer have an embargo on information.
THe planet will war, the planet will cool...
happened before we got here, will happen after we are all gone
Here’s the point I bring up with people. Supposedly, George Bush was disasterous for global warming. How did the earth get cooler during his two terms. If his policies were so bad, why is there absolutely no effect on the temperatures, and in fact they are lower than when he came in to office.
During that longer time period, temperatures have moved up and down suggesting that man is not the cause of global temperature change.
If you can't hit the broad side of a barn at 25 feet, you're not going to hit the target at 100 meters!
The exact same argument can be legitimately applied to the 100 year window these scientists are using.
Heck, they can’t even get today’s weather report right, how can they predict what will happen in 10 years, much less 100.
Mr. St. Pete Times Editor:
Why the hurry to defend Obama; what’s in it for you?
I make oatmeal every Saturday morning, and I bet I could study the process and predict when the pot will boil over to within a few seconds. I can't predict what side of the pot the mess will slop over on, or the pattern made by the various sized bubbles. So where weather occurs and how large the storms are isn't very predictable a long way out, but the overall situation in a simple system like my oatmeal pot is. However, the weather system is very chaotic and it isn't or at least it is extremely difficult. At any rate, they've missed! They've done curve fitting from past data, added their "Global Warming" bias and flat out missed the target. The climate models, all 20 of them are not to be believed.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/rulings/promise-broken/
Quite so, but it is not limited to journalists. My magazine of choice is Sky & Telescope and last month carried an article disputing the suns influence on GW. I wrote a multi-page rebuttal that I hope gets published. The facts within the article were sketchy and oft times wrong. For a scientific magazine to publish such poorly researched material is disgraceful.
BTW, excellent user name!
The Big Lie continues. The UN panel of scientists could not reach a consensus and did not sign the report. The IPPC ten had the bureaucrats sign the report causing a number of the scientists to resign in protest.
Yet the article's author spends several paragraphs disputing dissention over unclear facts?
Seems to me the article is evidence against its own theme.
Quoted in the article: “The fact that it’s not getting warmer doesn’t mean we are not experiencing global warming.”
Flash forward to and temperature is inarguably cooler than on Day 1. Without a doubt, we are on a long-term cooling.
I will worry about global warming when, and only when ole mother earth warms up to the same temperature she was when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Two lies are generally not as good as one lie.
In this case, the first person they questioned said that temperatures vacillate, and that the last decade of cooling is to be expected, but that there is a long term, 100 year trend of warming.
The second person they question denies that the last decade of cooling is happening at all.
So which is it, if either?
I am reminded of the Dilbert comic, in which a disgruntled employee asks Dilbert why he didn’t return his telephone message.
Dilbert first says, “I didn’t get the message”.
But then he says, “Not only that, but you weren’t there when I tried to call you back.”
Man Made Global Warming *theory* advocates have two frequent problems with their arguments.
The first is that their theory is set in concrete. No changes or modifications can be tolerated. So when some part of it is shown to be blatantly false, they will argue in a panicked fashion against that discovery. They will attack its methodology, those scientists responsible for it, those who report it, and anyone who argues on its behalf. Most importantly, they will refuse to permit it to alter their falsified models.
Importantly, and even more rigidly, they defend their solutions as the *only* solutions possible. MMGW must be addressed *their* way, with the shifting of vast amounts of wealth and power. If some scientist invented a way to cool the Earth’s climate substantially for $1.50 total, he would be their most hated enemy and they would do anything to destroy him.
Their solutions are the same for any problem, however, be it the world overpopulation panic of the science fraud Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, the use of the pesticide DDT, deforestation, or anything else, their solution always is the same, demanding the shifting of vast amounts of wealth and power.
The other major problem with their methodology is that they can give no example, at all, of when MMGW does NOT exist. If the Earth is warming, or if it is cooling. If sea levels are rising or falling. If the ENSO is El Nino or La Nina, for them it *always* means Man Made Global Warming.
There is no case in which MMGW is not happening, at least in the hundreds or thousands of years time frame. Which is a nonsensical argument.
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