Investor's Business Daily, April 5th, 2007
Climate Change: Delegates from 120 nations have been in Brussels trying to finalize wording for the summary of an upcoming United Nations report on global warming. This is science? No, it's politics.
Scheduled for release this Friday, the summation of a report prepared by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being sold as the irrefutable authority on global warming.
But the truth is the delegates -- unelected bureaucrats who are not scientists -- can't even agree on what the 1,572-page report says and are having to negotiate the words that will be included in the final draft of the 21-page summary they're working on.
Disagreements reportedly center on how much confidence should be expressed in the science compiled in the larger document. According to one observer -- Hans Verolme, director of the global climate change program at World Wildlife Fund -- the "wrangling" is over the degrees of likelihood being attached to the summary's impact projections.
When it's finished, expect the summary to outline -- with a bold but misplaced confidence -- a gloomy future due to anthropogenic global warming, even if some of the delegates and the scientists who wrote the report might have some reservations. It's expected the summary will say scientists have, for instance, a 90% confidence in some of the alarming projections they have formulated.
The environmental lobby will jump hard and fast to call attention to the scenarios that are being rated as "likely" and "very likely" to occur. But cooler heads will note that it's foolish to claim that any scenario cooked up by politicians has a 90% certainty of occurring.
Yes, we can bank on the established patterns we're all familiar with and the physical laws that guide the universe. Claiming, however, that there's a 90% certainty that global warming is caused by man and will bring disastrous flooding is sheer hubris.
Green advocates want the public to believe that climate projection is an easy business. Of course, environmentalists say, we can know how warm it will be in 10, 25, 50, even 75 years. It's all in the computer models that predict climate change.
What, then, to make of the scientific uncertainty of La Nina -- the periodic cooling of the Pacific Ocean that causes weather havoc?
"A fog of unpredictability enshrouds when (La Nina) may strike and how strong it might be," says Reuters, noting the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's cannot say for sure what effect the weather phenomenon will have this year.
In fact, the NOAA's Climate Prediction Center's own models show there is "considerable uncertainty as to when La Nina might develop and how strong it might be."
Yet, it's only a few months away. Are computer models looking to forecast climate change decades from now any more accurate?
This is one reason why we say global warming theory is more about faith than science. There is more speculation than evidence, more hope in man's culpability than a clear-headed look at the facts that might disprove the scientific "consensus" that global warming movement leader Al Gore preaches.
On the original Good Friday, Earth went dark for three hours. The only darkness we see on this Good Friday, though, is that caused by the U.N. climate report, which brings light to nothing.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
