10/27/00 8:55 a.m.
Earth to the Rescue
Political science at play in new global-warming news leak.

By Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine and editor of Earth Report 2000.

n an election that will turn on razor-thin margins, what do you do to win? Buy votes? Stuff ballot boxes? Pander ever more shamelessly to seniors? No, evidently you leak a top-secret draft version of the summary to the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report. And it's done precisely when the candidate who made his reputation as a global-warming catastrophist is about to embark on several days of campaigning on environmental issues.

As reported in yesterday's New York Times and Washington Post, the draft summary concludes that the addition of carbon dioxide to the earth's atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels has "contributed substantially to the observed warming over the past 50 years." Not satisfied with that relatively mild phraseology, Oregon public-radio reporter Christy George opined on the public-radio program Market Place that "no one knows what temperature increase might trigger a doomsday destabilization in which multiple earth systems fail." Indeed, no one does.

A curious aspect of the leaked summary is that it boosts the upper range of possible global-temperature increases from the 4.8 degrees Celsius that the IPCC scientific and technical review panel agreed on last March to 6 degrees Celsius, according to University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels. This must have been done during the preliminary government review process this past summer. Evidently the scientists weren't alarmist enough.

The 1995 IPCC report predicted that global-temperature increases over the next century might range from 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit to as much as 6.3 degrees. The leaked report apparently raises the range from 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly 11 degrees. This increase is supposed to result from reductions in sulfates released into the air by power plants and factories. According to climate modelers, sulfate pollution has brightened clouds which have reflected sunlight back into space keeping the surface cooler than it would otherwise be. Once air-pollution-control efforts remove the sulfates from the smokestacks, they will no longer shade the surface leading to higher temperatures.

What's interesting about this analysis, according to Patrick Michaels, is that the climate models were jiggered in the first place by including sulfates because their initial predictions of warming were so far off. Having no other way to plausibly account for the much cooler than predicted temperatures, the modelers arbitrarily stuck in a sulfate factor to make their models come closer to the temperatures found in the real world. Michaels claims that no one has in fact actually measured sulfates in the atmosphere comprehensively. He adds the only relatively good measurement of sulfates was done off the east coast of the U.S. where sulfate levels were found to be only 20 percent of those used in the models. So, it's no surprise that when one removes the sulfates, the models return to their original high predictions. The problem is, according to Michaels is that the real world and the models diverge.

One of the leading models incorporating sulfates relied upon by the IPCC predicts that the troposphere in the Northern Hemisphere will warm more slowly than the Southern Hemisphere. After all, the Northern Hemisphere is where the vast majority of the world's polluting power plants and factories are located. So one might expect, as the model predicts, that a relatively sulfate-free Southern Hemisphere would warm faster than the sulfate-shaded Northern. However, that's not what is happening.

Even the IPCC's own surface-temperature records for the last 20 years show that Southern Hemisphere is warming at a rate of 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade which is substantially less than the 0.24 degrees Celsius per decade rate the IPCC claims for the Northern Hemisphere. When one looks at 20 years of highly accurate global-satellite-temperature data, one finds that the Southern Hemisphere is cooling slightly at a rate of 0.04 degrees Celsius per decade and the Northern Hemisphere is warming at a rate of 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade. In other words, at least with respect to the satellite data, the direction of the hemispheric temperature changes is exactly the opposite of those predicted by the model. Meanwhile, keep in mind that the climate models relied upon by global-warming proponents still predict that the atmosphere should be warming faster than the surface, yet exact opposite appears to be occurring.

The bottom line is that humanity's activities are contributing to some climate change. Climate change is a serious issue that will take decades of hard scientific research to resolve, however, what seems to be happening, according to an article in the January, 2000 issue of Climate Research is that the warming is being channeled into the winter nights and specifically into the coldest air masses over Siberia and North America. Driving the temperature up from 40 degrees below zero to 30 degrees below zero is a substantial change, but is unlikely to be regretted much by the inhabitants of Yakutsk or the Klondike.

The New York Times coyly reports that the IPCC report leaker told it that he had done so because he "was eager to have the findings disseminated before the meetings in the Hague" where climate change negotiators will congregate later this year. Of course, it couldn't have anything at all to do with the election cycle in the United States, could it?