Coloring Climate Change

Coloring Climate Change


By Nick Schulz	06/28/2002

TCS

To get a sense of how compromised and politicized climate science has become, you don't have to look far. Just examine the lengths to which key documents were doctored to distort public perceptions.

The most recent example to come to light regards The National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, or NAS, for short.

The NAS, developed during the Clinton administration, attempted to forecast what will happen if global warming occurs. It has served as the basis for parts of a National Academy of Sciences' report to President Bush last year on the state of climate science and, most recently, for the highly controversial Climate Action Report from the Environmental Protection Agency.

In fact, environmental groups trumpeted CAR as new evidence of the damage global warming will cause the nation, and members of Congress are using it to pursue stringent new emissions standards, including controls on non-toxic carbon dioxide (CO2).

But the NAS, on which the action report was based, was doctored in ways that suggest bias in its findings. Those who crafted and published the critical study monkeyed around with some of their graphs in an effort to fudge the results of what they found.

Now, the whole climate change debate is bogged down in so many studies and reports and charts and graphs and claims and counter claims that it's enough to make anybody's eyes glaze over and just tune out completely. But we can boil the NAS's heart down to two key elements. The report says "The two primary
models used to project changes in climate in this Assessment were developed at the Canadian Climate Centre and the Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom."

So, according to the report, what the Canadian and Hadley models predict is what will happen in the United States.

But then something happened that perhaps the report's draftsmen didn't anticipate. The Canadian and Hadley models predict very different trends around the United States for future warming. In the original draft of the NAS report, the graphics for future warming appeared like this:

Anyone sizing this up can see that the two reports make vastly different predictions. Indeed, the climate scientist Kevin Trenberth has pointed out that "the two models used are quite different and give different results." (TCS's Willie Soon discussed how both models don't accurately reflect past climate measurements, calling into doubt whether they will do a good job of predicting future climate trends).

During the public comment period after the original draft was developed, several scientists pointed out that the disparity between the two models' future forecasts cast doubt on the predictive capacity of the models.

So what happened? Well, the official final report maintained matter of factly that "(b)oth the Canadian and Hadley model scenarios project substantial warming during the 21st century" and then illustrated this warming with two new graphs.

Now, this is the sort of trick that would make a college sophomore blush. The report's publishers in essence acted like students with a 10-page paper due who found they only had seven pages, so decided to mess around with the margins and font sizes and line spacing in an effort to make seven pages become - magic! - 10. That's childish in college; it's reprehensible in official government reports. What could they possibly have been thinking, other than that by changing color scales on these graphs it diminishes the sense of disparity between the models? When you don't get your preferred predetermined outcome, that's no matter, just change the graphics ("We need more red. Red looks hot. Make both of the charts look really red so people know the country will get hot, hot, hot.").

This stunt throws into question the whole assessment process. Roger Pielke, a respected atmospheric scientist at Colorado State who was involved with the drafting process at the time, said, "I'm disappointed in the whole process. This has been the most closed, unhealthy scientific process I've ever been involved in."

And that "unhealthy scientific process" lives on in the form of the new CAR report to the United Nations, a report that is unscientific at its core - due to its reliance on the National Assessment - and is also hostile to economic growth and wealth generation.

Climate science has been hijacked by activists who are compromising the scientific method and using smoke and mirrors and juvenile term paper tricks in a cynical effort to fool the public. It is time for the Bush administration - in the form of its EPA chief Christie Whitman - to take back the research and reporting process from shamans and sophists and put it back in the hands of dispassionate scientists where it belongs.

URL Next Door -- The Census on Marine Life is one of those great big scientific efforts - like going to the moon or mapping the human genome - that will prove a major milestone for human understanding once it is finished and will go a long way to help making the world a better, healthier place. It is scientific inquiry at its most noble (no games with the data or graphics allowed). Take a look at what these folks are up to. This effort is partly the brainchild of Jesse Ausubel who is among a handful of the most important environmental scientists working today.

This stunt throws into question the whole assessment process. Roger Pielke, a respected atmospheric scientist at Colorado State who was involved with the drafting process at the time, said, "I'm disappointed in the whole process. This has been the most closed, unhealthy scientific process I've ever been involved in."

And that "unhealthy scientific process" lives on in the form of the new CAR report to the United Nations, a report that is unscientific at its core - due to its reliance on the National Assessment - and is also hostile to economic growth and wealth generation.

Climate science has been hijacked by activists who are compromising the scientific method and using smoke and mirrors and juvenile term paper tricks in a cynical effort to fool the public. It is time for the Bush administration - in the form of its EPA chief Christie Whitman - to take back the research and reporting process from shamans and sophists and put it back in the hands of dispassionate scientists where it belongs.

Bump and ping

And lets not forget this golden oldie.

Newsweek
April 28, 1975 Studies

The Cooling World
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Reprinted from Financial Post - Canada, Jun 21, 2000

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