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- Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental
studies at the Cato Institute and author of The Satanic Gasses.
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- Junk science from Harvard, purveyed by a senior official
from the United Nations and printed on the front page of The New York Times.
Who would have thought such a thing possible?
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- James J. McCarthy, a Harvard oceanographer, recently
took a summer tourist cruise to the North Pole. When his ship, a Russian
icebreaker, followed open water ever northward (as icebreakers do), it
eventually wound up in a few-square-mile patch of water at 90 degrees North.
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- McCarthy didn't publish this in the peer-reviewed literature.
It would not have been accepted, because it is not at all unusual. Instead,
he called The New York Times, which dutifully ran a front-page story on
Aug. 19 by John Noble Wilford, whose first words were, "The North
Pole is Melting." The Times went on to note that "the last time
scientists can be certain that the pole was awash in water was more than
50 million years ago."
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- This is all nonsense, and especially troubling because
McCarthy is co-chair of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) section on "adaptation and impacts" of
climate change. The Times report is not science; we scientists don t take
a single observation of anything and then draw large systematic conclusions.
The famous Supreme Court decision on junk science, Daubert v. Merrell Dow,
identified this type of statistical irrelevancy as trash.
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- Why didn't McCarthy get online and check IPCC's own temperature
histories for the region? They are probably no more than four mouse clicks
away. Had he done so, he would have found that summer North Pole temperatures
are no different than they were for several decades in the early 20th century,
long before dreaded economic growth could have warmed the region.
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- Further, based on fossil evidence, most climatologists
think the period from 4,000 to 7,000 years ago averaged at least 2 C warmer
than the current era at high latitude. That's three millennia. It seems
pretty obvious that the summer polar ice back then would have been considerably
more abraded than it is today, and maybe even gone completely in certain
years. The climatic consequences? No one can find them, except that the
period was noteworthy for the flowering of agriculture and the rise of
civilization.
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- McCarthy could have also read the latest issue of the
scholarly journal Climatic Change, in which University of Colorado climatologist
Mark Serreze writes that not only has there been no net change in summer
North Pole temperatures over the last 70 years, there has been no change
in annual North Pole temperatures.
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- Times reporter John Noble Williams could have done this
too. Instead, after receiving a firestorm of criticism for the irresponsibility
of his first report, he tried to back down in a modified, limited hang-out
sort way. His August 29 Times article notes that McCarthy now "would
not argue with critics who said that open water at the pole was not unprecedented."
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- Instead, he went to the Serreze article and disgorged
another distortion: "The data scientists are now studying reveal evidence
that on average Arctic temperatures in the winter have risen 11 degrees
over the past 30 years."
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- This is more junk. Both Serreze and the IPCC winter data
show that a) 30 winters ago, in 1969, temperatures were around their lowest
for the entire 20th century, and b) the net rise since then is 1.5 C. In
terms of the departure from normal, they are currently running around 0.7
C above the standard reference mean, an inconsequential number. Wilford
picked a small region of the Arctic where temperatures rose a great deal
and said that this area applied "on average" to the entire Arctic.
But that warm spot is balanced by many areas in which temperatures have
fallen, which is how we achieve the unremarkable average change that has
been observed.
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- These things are not difficult to check. But it's easier
to unquestioningly print the pronouncements of a Harvard professor bearing
U.N. authority, even if he's speaking from a cruise ship with a sample
size of one. If I were McCarthy's dean at Harvard, I d be livid. And if
I were Robert Watson, head of the United Nations' climate panel, I'd find
a new co-chair for the section on "adaptation and impacts" before
the current one completely destroys the panel's credibility.
Comment
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- From Victor Fletcher vpflet@remoteviewing.com
- 9-14-00
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- Dear Patrick J. Michaels:
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- Unfortunately, for yourself and your CIA/polluter bosses
-- you don't challenge the fact of Arctic ice reported as only fifty-eight
percent as thick as it was thirty years ago. You don't challenge the reducing
perimiter of Arctic ice that has been reported for the last 30 years.
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- Sure, the temperatures don't change much on the surface
-- that's a red herring. Like other scientists with disinformation -- I
suppose you will tell me that the upper atmosphere temperatures haven't
changed -- therefore there is no global warming occurring while in the
meantime the U.S. is burning up from real climate change -- down here on
the surface.
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- I don't trust what you have to say at all -- in fact
I warn my contacts about your own propaganda here -- we all know think-tank
operations like yours protect polluters, ozone problems, etc.
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- If you had a balanced criticism I'd believe you -- but
you remind me of the lawyer who says: "Don't give me all the facts
-- they just get in the way."
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- -- Victor P. Fletcher Toronto Street News (tabloid) http://www.torontostreetnews.com
(website)
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