H-E-Double-Hockey Sticks?
By Michael R. Bowen (10/04/03)
The Union Leader recently published a guest column urging our representatives to support restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. In his opening paragraph, the author states flatly that all reputable scientists agree that global warming is a real phenomenon.
But do they? No, they do not. There is a large and growing number of competent scientists who question global warming, and they point out many flaws in the science supporting the theory. And what of those hundreds of prestigious scientists who sign petitions and lend their names to newspaper ads urging President Bush to sign the Kyoto accord? Almost none of them are climate or weather experts; a little background investigation shows that most of them are experts in other fields. These are mainly people who have accepted what they have been told. When you solicit the opinions of experts in the field, however, you find much less uniformity. Moreover, it's worth noting that even Japan, home of Kyoto, recently decided not to sign the accord. Not because they don't believe in global warming, but because they recognize that the accord would do next to nothing to address the problem, and next to everything to cripple industrialized economies.
How can a layperson make sense of the global warming debates? After all, it's a full-time job to study climate change, and most of us already have full-time jobs of our own. I can suggest a reasonable proxy measure of the quality of global warming science, however. If you don't have the time to study the science itself, try studying the behavior of the scientists. You'll find it isn't very scientific.
Science is ideally a search for truth. The true scientist, then, will welcome the disproving of his pet theory as much as he would welcome its vindication. Either outcome brings us closer to the truth, which is what science is supposed to be after. But in the global warming debates, open inquiry is not welcome. Those who have spoken out against the theory have seen their reputations smeared and their careers sidetracked. A case in point is Bjorn Lonborg, Danish statistician and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. He has been subjected to intense vilification from the scientific community, the very people who should welcome his work with open arms. Or would, if truth was what they really sought.
A more recent example comes from the work of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Canadian scientists who took a second look at the famous "hockey stick" graph of temperatures from 1400 to 1980. That famous graph, from the 1998 study by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, shows an abrupt spike in temperatures occurring in the late 20th century, and looks like a hockey stick lying on its back. It has been the basis for the pronouncements of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it galvanized Senator John McCain to push for controls on greenhouse emissions. McIntyre and McKitrick had the audacity to obtain the original data rather than swallowing someone's summary. This year they published their conclusions: that the authors of the hockey stick graph mishandled the data, and that their work contains "collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components, and other quality control defects." When these errors are corrected, the hockey stick disappears and in fact, the data suggest that things were considerably warmer in 1500 than they are now. McIntyre and McKitrick, showing more judgment and humility than the hockey stick researchers, caution that this doesn't prove that things really were warmer in 1500; but it does prove that this central global warming study is not credible. In good scientific form, these researchers have submitted their results for peer review, and have solicited comments from Mann, Bradley and Hughes. So far, McIntyre and McKitrick appeared to have been given the brush off, although the publication of their paper will force Mann et al, to respond.
And what of the U.N.? Their own global warming experts are far from unanimous. Consider this quote, taken from the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC:
"In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled in non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible." (emphasis mine)
Then they proceeded to do just that, specifying with great precision how many degrees of global warming we can expect.
Is global warming real? Maybe. Maybe not. Since there are data to support and to refute the theory, that's all any honest scientist can say right now. Anyone who tells you that there is no reasonable doubt, and that all reputable experts accept the theory, is actually telling you that he doesn't know what he is talking about. And that's not the kind of person whose advice I'm willing to take when he proposes to turn my life and my nation's economy upside-down.
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