McNider and Christy: Why Kerry Is Flat Wrong on Climate Change
It was the scientific skeptics who bucked the 'consensus' and said the Earth was round.
Updated Feb. 19, 2014 7:31 p.m. ET
In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John
Kerry
assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the "Flat Earth
Society" for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He
said, "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists" and
"extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts."
But
who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts? In
ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus,
and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among
today's scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on
climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry
suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to
declare that the world is round?
Most of us who are skeptical about
the dangers of climate change actually embrace many of the facts that
people like
Bill Nye,
the ubiquitous TV "science guy," say we ignore. The two
fundamental facts are that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have
increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat before it can escape into
space.
What is not a known fact is by
how much the Earth's atmosphere will warm in response to this added
carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created
by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who
believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by
these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a
complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds
will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of
heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.
We
might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so
consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate
modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always
overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what
we see in the real climate.
For
instance, in 1994 we published an article in the journal Nature showing
that the actual global temperature trend was "one-quarter of the
magnitude of climate model results." As the nearby graph shows, the
disparity between the predicted temperature increases and real-world
evidence has only grown in the past 20 years.
When
the failure of its predictions become clear, the modeling industry
always comes back with new models that soften their previous warming
forecasts, claiming, for instance, that an unexpected increase in the
human use of aerosols had skewed the results. After these changes, the
models tended to agree better with the actual numbers that came in—but
the forecasts for future temperatures have continued to be too warm.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a speech on climate change in Jakarta on Sunday.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The modelers insist that they are
unlucky because natural temperature variability is masking the real
warming. They might be right, but when a batter goes 0 for 10, he's
better off questioning his swing than blaming the umpire.
The
models mostly miss warming in the deep atmosphere—from the Earth's
surface to 75,000 feet—which is supposed to be one of the real signals
of warming caused by carbon dioxide. Here, the consensus ignores the
reality of temperature observations of the deep atmosphere collected by
satellites and balloons, which have continually shown less than half of
the warming shown in the average model forecasts.
The
climate-change-consensus community points to such indirect evidence of
warming as glaciers melting, coral being bleached, more droughts and
stronger storms. Yet observations show that the warming of the deep
atmosphere (the fundamental sign of carbon-dioxide-caused climate
change, which is supposedly behind these natural phenomena) is not
occurring at an alarming rate: Instruments aboard NASA and National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Association satellites put the Mid-Tropospheric
warming rate since late 1978 at about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or 1.3
degrees Fahrenheit, per 100 years. For the same period, the models on
average give 2.1 degrees Celsius, or 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit, per 100
years (see graph).
The models also fail
to get details of the past climate right. For example, most of the
observed warming over land in the past century occurred at night. The
same models used to predict future warming models showed day and night
warming over the last century at nearly the same rates.
Past
models also missed the dramatic recent warming found in observations in
the Arctic. With this information as hindsight, the latest, adjusted
set of climate models did manage to show more warming in the Arctic. But
the tweaking resulted in too-warm predictions—disproved by real-world
evidence—for the rest of the planet compared with earlier models.
Shouldn't modelers be more humble and open to saying that perhaps the Arctic warming is due to something we don't understand?
While
none of these inconsistencies refutes the fundamental concern about
greenhouse-gas-enhanced climate change, it is disturbing that "consensus
science" will not acknowledge that such discrepancies are major
problems. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's
beginning, that largely self-selected panel of scientists has embraced
the notion that consensus on climate change is the necessary path to
taking action and reducing man-made carbon emissions around the world.
The consensus community uses this to push the view that "the science is
settled" and hold up skeptics to ridicule, as John Kerry did on Sunday.
We
are reminded of the dangers of consensus science in the past. For
example, in the 18th century, more British sailors died of scurvy than
died in battle. In this disease, brought on by a lack of vitamin C, the
body loses its ability to manufacture collagen, and gums and other
tissues bleed and disintegrate. These deaths were especially tragic
because many sea captains and some ships' doctors knew, based on
observations early in the century, that fresh vegetables and citrus
cured scurvy.
Nonetheless, the British
Admiralty's onshore Sick and Health Board of scientists and physicians
(somewhat akin to the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
dismissed this evidence for more than 50 years because it did not fit
their consensus theory that putrefaction (or internal decay) caused
scurvy, which they felt could be cured by fresh air, exercise and
laxatives.
"Consensus" science that
ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or
promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not
endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps
government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The
recent
Obama
administration announcement that it would not provide aid for
fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions
of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and
Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.
We
should not have a climate-science research program that searches only
for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor
government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their
inconvenient, fact-based views.
Messrs. McNider
and
Christy
are professors of atmospheric science at the University of
Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological
Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice
President
Al Gore.
Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al
Gore.
Correction: An earlier
version of the attached chart on global temperatures transposed the
labels for the balloon and satellite lines.
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