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1/29/01
10:40 a.m. By
Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies |
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The IPCC bills itself as the world's authoritative body on climate change, but it isn't. In fact, there are very few climatologists in the IPCC, or, for that matter, among the U.S. representatives to the Shanghai meeting, who could have objected if they chose to. That includes the director of the U.S. global change research program, Mike MacCracken, and Rosina Bierbaum, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Neither has any academic training in atmospheric science. And then there was the head of the IPCC itself, Robert T. Watson, a chemist. He started out with the Natural Resources Defense Council and, prior to his U.N. position, was in Bierbaum's White House job. Along the way, in 1992, he predicted an ozone hole in the Northern Hemisphere, stampeding the U.S. Senate into a ban on CFC refrigerants. The hole never appeared but the law remains. Maybe climatological expertise was not necessary because Shanghai was all about politics. The meeting closed promptly at 1: 00 a.m. Shanghai time on January 21. Because of the time-zone difference, that's high noon, Saturday, January 20 in Washington — precisely the point at which Bierbaum's and MacCracken's authority expired. Approving the Shanghai nonsense was the final Clinton legacy, after all the executive orders, land grabs and pardons. The basis for the 11ºF warming forecast was not even close to science, which requires theory validated by observation. Rather, it was the result of one of 245 calculations run by the IPCC, based upon seven different "story lines" about our energy future and varying assumptions about the role of society's emissions in determining global temperature. The "story lines" can be traced back to a report written by Tom Wigley, a federal climatologist, but whose work in this area was originally published by the Pew Foundation Center on Global Climate Change in July 1999. Pew has advocated for ratification of the onerous Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Wigley's scientific claim to fame is resurrecting the decades-old notion that something must be interfering with global warming because all the greenhouse-warming-driven computer models state it should be much warmer than it is. That "something" is sulfate aerosol, a compound that goes into the air along with the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, as coal is combusted for energy and heating, or as forests burn. But this is not science because no one has ever measured the global cooling effect of sulfates! In fact, recent estimates of its effect range from NASA scientist James Hansen's 1997 statement that they may exert a slight warming effect, to NASA scientist James Hansen's 2000 statement that they must exert a planetary cooling effect at least double the observed warming of the last century. How does this IPCC "story line" drive such a big warming? It assumes that, suddenly, the world largely stops burning coal for power production and it stops burning forests. In addition, large scale natural fires (often caused by El Nino) are suppressed; otherwise, these would take up the slack from what we stopped burning. But that's not enough. This story line has to assume that the effect of sulfates is currently a maximum cooling. The evidence goes against this view. If the IPCC reflected the true state of the scientific art, it would acknowledge the legion of calculations coming from Texas A&M University, which prove that cooling from sulfates is small at best. Or, that sulfate-cooled climate models, on average, still predict 10 times too much warming when averaged over the bottom layer of the atmosphere known as the Troposphere. No, instead, Clinton administration representatives sat on their hands while atmospheric science got murdered; however, they might not have possessed enough training to tell the difference between atmospheric science and airy fiction. Nor did they object when in a final insult to the truth, IPCC's Bob Watson said that, "A country like China has done more, in my opinion, than a country like the United States to move forward in economic development while remaining environmentally sensitive." That's nonsense. Air and water quality in China is about the worst in the world, and in the United States it is about the best. On a per-unit-GDP basis (the only fair way to equalize things), the United States also produces fewer greenhouse gases than almost every nation on earth. But that was the U.N.'s Watson, a former Clinton employee, speaking where science got shanghaied, in front of Clinton administration representatives, who sat mute as their clock expired. One would hope that the Bush administration will put an end to these scientific charades. |
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he United Nations and
the outgoing Clinton administration shanghaied global-warming science.
That's the most charitable assessment of the preposterous pronouncement
at the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting
in Shanghai, China, which said surface temperature could warm an average
of 11ºF this century.
