Investor's Business Daily, May 15th, 2007
Climate Change: It turns out that the global warming theorists have missed on another of their predictions. Shouldn't that be a deeply harmful, if not fatal, blow to the credibility of their argument?
For years some climatologists have said that global warming would actually cause northwest Europe to cool or possibly even fall into a small ice age.
They believed that the North Atlantic Current, part of the Gulf Stream that brings warm water from the equator across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, might come to a halt due to the greenhouse effect.
"The concern had previously been that we were close to a threshold where the Atlantic circulation system would stop," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration senior scientist Susan Solomon told the New York Times.
"We now believe we are much further from that threshold, thanks to improved modeling and ocean measurements," she added. "The Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current are more stable than previously thought."
While they don't see the North Atlantic Current shutting down entirely, the scientists believe that it will slow. But that won't be enough to make it even uncomfortably cold in Europe. Global warming in general, they say, will be enough to offset the effects of a weakened warm current.
So let's get this straight: The greenhouse effect, the theory that gas emissions trap heat near the surface, won't be strong enough to close down the North Atlantic Current. But it will be strong enough to warm Earth. At least this is what they're thinking today.
At what point will the alarmists concede that maybe they've been wrong about global warming? This isn't the first time their models have been wrong about climate change. Their mid-1990s predictions of temperature increases that were supposed to arrive in the current decade were too high.
James Hansen, the NASA scientist who is largely responsible for the global warming hysteria, knows as well as anyone that general circulation models spin out projections that are not reflected in the real world. His model predicted a 0.45 degree Celsius (0.81 degree Fahrenheit) rise in global temperature between 1988 and 1997.
But it was off by a factor of four. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change records show that ground-based temperatures had increased by only 0.11 degree Celsius.
Hansen's projection didn't fare well when compared with other measurements, either. In fact, it looks downright silly.
Weather balloons measuring temperatures in the lower atmosphere indicate a decline of 0.36 degree Celsius for that period. Satellite surveys, the most reliable form of measurement we now have, taken from the same atmospheric stratum also show a decline (0.24 degree Celsius).
As they say, garbage in, garbage out. It appears that in an effort to convince the public that our fossil-fuel-burning ways will lead to an environmental calamity, some trash has been fed into the models.
For one example, the surface temperature data used in the models represent only a portion of Earth; temperatures from large parts of the globe are not used because they are not recorded.
The database, to cite another problem, provides temperatures from a short span of time. The Fraser Institute's "The Science Isn't Settled" from 2004 tells us that "most of the record of surface temperatures covers less than 50 years and only a few stations are as much as 100 years old."
Nor do the models deal adequately with variables such as water vapor, clouds and aerosols, all of which can impact temperatures.
"Even though water vapor makes up 97% of all greenhouse gases by volume," says "The Science Isn't Settled," " it is almost completely ignored by climate models, which focus primarily on CO2 and methane."
The problems with the models are too numerous to untangle in this space, but the fact is they do exist. Yet Al Gore has the nerve to jet around the world telling everyone that there is a scientific consensus that global warming is happening and man is the cause.
At some point, though, the global warming argument will collapse under the weight of failed assumptions.
Then what? The eco-alarmists already have tried and failed with their dire predictions of a coming ice age. Maybe next time their warnings will be for a danger that actually exists.
