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Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works. Lindzen Posted on 06/11/2001 04:50:12 PDT by 13 TroutStalker By Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on climate change. Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. CNN's Michelle Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that the report represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them. As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. For example, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this. Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. But -- and I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions. One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states, the climate is always changing; Two centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned with global cooling. Distinguishing the small recent changes in global mean temperature from the natural variability, which is unknown, is not a trivial task. All attempts so far make the assumption that existing computer climate models simulate natural variability, but I doubt that anyone really believes this assumption. We simply do not know what relation, if any, exists between global climate changes and water vapor, clouds, storms, hurricanes, and other factors, including regional climate changes, which are generally much larger than global changes and not correlated with them. Nor do we know how to predict changes in greenhouse gases. This is because we cannot forecast economic and technological change over the next century, and also because there are many man-made substances whose properties and levels are not well known, but which could be comparable in importance to carbon dioxide. What we do is know that a doubling of carbon dioxide by itself would produce only a modest temperature increase of one degree Celsius. Larger projected increases depend on "amplification" of the carbon dioxide by more important, but poorly modeled, greenhouse gases, clouds and water vapor. The press has frequently tied the existence of climate change to a need for Kyoto. My own view, consistent with the panel's work, is that the Kyoto Protocol would not result in a substantial reduction in global warming. Given the difficulties in significantly limiting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a more effective policy might well focus on other greenhouse substances whose potential for reducing global warming in a short time may be greater. The panel was finally asked to evaluate the work of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, focusing on the Summary for Policymakers, the only part ever read or quoted. The Summary for Policymakers, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world's foremost climate scientists. The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research activities in climate science, but it is not specifically directed at policy. The Summary for Policymakers is, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives (many of whom are also their nations' Kyoto representatives), rather than of scientists. The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence. Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty -- far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge -- and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Thanks for the Post TroutStalker 45 5 Posted on 06/11/2001 05:09:05 PDT by 46 LinnieBeth 47 Reply | 48 Private Reply | 49 To 1 | 50 Top | 51 Last 52 To: TroutStalker The Summary for Policymakers . The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence. I tried to get a copy of the full report from the NAS website to no avail. I also emailed them and asked for a copy and got no response. The first link will take you to a page where you can get it in PDF or HTML formats. For some reason the environmentalists have come to believe that the environment should be static. Ask any semi-literate high school student whether it would be natural if we could stop all species from extinction when it is the norm. But if the press would report the truth they wouldn't even have that. From the last one, my comment: As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. But Lindzen knew that such would happen -- it always does. Media hacks can't be bothered to read the whole report -- first, they wouldn't understand it and second, they are writing fast or taping quick, for deadlines. Finally, they are pre-disposed towards the "green" view anyway. When this report came out last week, I quoted a paragraph from the press release: The committee said the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global warming that has occurred in the last 50 years is likely the result of increases in greenhouse gases accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community. However, it also cautioned that uncertainties about this conclusion remain because of the level of natural variability inherent in the climate on time scales from decades to centuries, the questionable ability of models to simulate natural variability on such long time scales, and the degree of confidence that can be placed on estimates of temperatures going back thousands of years based on evidence from tree rings or ice cores. This quote, from the press release itself, clearly supports Lindzen's argument above that the report does not say what the media says that it does. Lindzen's minority view -- that global warming, if real, hasn't been yet positively linked to man-caused greenhouse gas emissions -- was slapped down in committee by Cicerone, the panel's chairman. The Academy gives enormous power to the chairs of committees to craft the final report in whatever way they want to. Dissenters are left with nothing, except maybe some weasel word language somewhere in the body of the report. Of course, since it is the WSJ ( a "known" conservative organ), it can be safely ignored. BTW, I usually search using 'source:"Wall"' and 'source:"WSJ"' rather than a headline search since the headlines often vary. Looks like I better do 'source:"OpinionJournal"' as well. I also noticed some woman on O'Reilly doing the same thing by always referring to p...
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