Posted: 07/07/2004 | Author: Kenneth Green
Summer Brings Out The Global Warming Alarmists
Summer is now in full swing and the annual pastime of tracking the temperature gauge is about to begin. If this year is anything like recent years, as the mercury goes up, so will the proclamations from environmental activists that the past decade has been the warmest on record – evidence they say of human-induced global warming.
The sad reality is that despite billions of dollars spent digging into the science of climatology, and chasing the wild goose of Kyoto, nobody knows how much the earth is likely to warm, where it will warm, where it will cool, or what the impacts of that warming or cooling might be. That’s because, for want of decent long-term data, much of climate change science is the product of overly simplistic models of how the climate works, paired up with even more simplistic assumptions about what human society will be like in the future.
Let’s put things in perspective. We have about 150 years of surface temperature recordings, and only about 25 years of satellite records. Neither data set was gathered with forethought toward trying to observe the impacts of human activity on the climate. The records are imperfect. Some were taken with inaccurate hand-painted thermometers that moved around a lot. Some were taken in the sun, some in the shade, some over land, some over water, some at higher altitudes, some at lower altitudes, some in high solar-activity years, and some in low-solar activity years, some on tall boats in high wind, some on low boats in low wind – the list of data problems is endless.
Yet even assuming we’ve adjusted for all that, how much information is really in 150 years of data about Earth’s four billion years of post-formation climate? Well, if you lived to be 100, you could derive as much information about your average pulse rate over your entire life by measuring your heartbeat every few seconds for…two minutes. That’s right, two whole minutes. You see, two minutes out of the 53 million minutes of your hundred-year life is the equivalent of 150 years of temperature readings out of Earth’s four billion year history.
So, what does it really mean that the last 10 years have been warmer than average compared to the last 150? Nobody knows. What would it mean if your pulse was a teeny bit faster than average for the last few seconds in your two minute pulse experiment?
The lack of meaningful, accurate, long-term data on global and regional temperatures leaves us dependent for understanding on computerized models of the climate. But such models are plagued by a host of problems such as incomplete understanding of many physical climate processes, dubious assumptions about the reaction of climate systems to either greenhouse gas levels or additional warming, still more dubious assumptions about the future of greenhouse gas emissions, technological development, world economic growth, and more. Richard Lindzen, a respected meteorologist with MIT, finds so little merit in modeled predictions of future climate that he has likened them to “children’s exercises.”
It’s time that climate alarmists stopped trying to abuse the science of climate change to scare up a global energy-rationing scheme that offers little gain, for a lot of pain.