Even though I laud her work in Third World agriculture in the Philippines, Mary Parks' op-ed, "An up close look at climate change" (March 30 commentary) showed a lack of understanding of the importance of looking at climate at large. I guess the title should have tipped us off.She cites reports from the local residents that the weather is "more extreme now." That recently, weather seems changed and more stormy.
But the problem is that weather in the last five or 10 years doesn't make for overall climate change. Plus, her information is quite localized. It is the broad brush of global temps over decades and centuries that is more useful . . . even if it is inconvenient that global temperature rise has levelled with some indications of possibly heading downward; and that by now, the anthropogenic global warming crowd's model projections are way off.
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But we've seen all this before.
Some of you may remember the ice age scare of the 1970s. The New York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek reported the concern of scientists, many agreeing that we were at real risk for heading into an ice age. Even The Washington Post had a screaming headline: "Colder Winters Herald Dawn of New Ice Age." Well, so much for consensus being always right.
But, you can't blame them. Back then, NOAA revealed a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968, and a significant drop in sunshine energy. In 1971, Dr. S.I. Rasool of NASA and Columbia University proclaimed that the world could be "as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age."
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In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end leading into the next ice age."
What? How could such scientific leaders be so wrong, and with such a consensus? Even if there were some agendas behind the alarms, the fact stands that they were wrong.
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But wait. Surely, with 97 percent of scientists all agreeing now, can't we be confident? Well, this number partially came from a University of Illinois professor who sent a two-minute online survey to 10,257 scientists which got 3,145 responses, of which only 5 percent were actual climate scientists. The authors focused on only 79 respondents who described themselves as climate science experts. Out of many thousands of experts in this area, coming up with a 97 percent figure with such a small working figure is ludicrous.
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"97%" also came from AGW alarmist John Cook of the blog site Skeptical Science who published a paper claiming a review of nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. Cook reported that he and his colleagues found that 97 percent of the papers that expressed a position on human-caused global warming "endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming." But investigative reporting by Popular Technology revealed that Cook's study is clearly littered with falsely classified papers, making its conclusions baseless and its promotion by those in the media misleading.
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Forbes cites a new survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis. "By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. An interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists."
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Meanwhile, the lead author of the U.N. IPCC climate report, Harvard professor Robert Stavins, now won't even sign it because he says it has been so altered that, in his words, it "affects the credibility of the IPCC."
So, while I'm sorry parts of the Philippines are reporting more strong storms, the U.S. "lately" has been enjoying a time of very below-normal numbers of tornados and major hurricanes. It all shifts around over time. What may be more interesting is how a National Weather Service graph of global ground temperatures over the last 10 years has shown a clear drop in temperatures from above normal to near normal. That is global, and that is a trend to watch.
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But we've seen all this before.
Some of you may remember the ice age scare of the 1970s. The New York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek reported the concern of scientists, many agreeing that we were at real risk for heading into an ice age. Even The Washington Post had a screaming headline: "Colder Winters Herald Dawn of New Ice Age." Well, so much for consensus being always right.
But, you can't blame them. Back then, NOAA revealed a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968, and a significant drop in sunshine energy. In 1971, Dr. S.I. Rasool of NASA and Columbia University proclaimed that the world could be "as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age."
-
In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end leading into the next ice age."
What? How could such scientific leaders be so wrong, and with such a consensus? Even if there were some agendas behind the alarms, the fact stands that they were wrong.
-
But wait. Surely, with 97 percent of scientists all agreeing now, can't we be confident? Well, this number partially came from a University of Illinois professor who sent a two-minute online survey to 10,257 scientists which got 3,145 responses, of which only 5 percent were actual climate scientists. The authors focused on only 79 respondents who described themselves as climate science experts. Out of many thousands of experts in this area, coming up with a 97 percent figure with such a small working figure is ludicrous.
-
"97%" also came from AGW alarmist John Cook of the blog site Skeptical Science who published a paper claiming a review of nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. Cook reported that he and his colleagues found that 97 percent of the papers that expressed a position on human-caused global warming "endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming." But investigative reporting by Popular Technology revealed that Cook's study is clearly littered with falsely classified papers, making its conclusions baseless and its promotion by those in the media misleading.
-
Forbes cites a new survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis. "By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. An interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists."
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Meanwhile, the lead author of the U.N. IPCC climate report, Harvard professor Robert Stavins, now won't even sign it because he says it has been so altered that, in his words, it "affects the credibility of the IPCC."
So, while I'm sorry parts of the Philippines are reporting more strong storms, the U.S. "lately" has been enjoying a time of very below-normal numbers of tornados and major hurricanes. It all shifts around over time. What may be more interesting is how a National Weather Service graph of global ground temperatures over the last 10 years has shown a clear drop in temperatures from above normal to near normal. That is global, and that is a trend to watch.
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Click for PowerPoint realistic
view of Global Warming and Climate Change and Real Record Weather Events and Sea
Level Rise History and Glacial Retreat
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