Last Friday our school’s head invited a speaker to address the student body on climate change and environmental activism. This well-intentioned young man presented a video that consisted of excerpts from Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth along with cute animations that highlighted the “excesses” of Western society (such as the aggregation of private property), followed by Utopian promises of a “green tomorrow.”
This young man was adamant… “The earth has a fever,” capitalism, free-markets, social injustice and meat are at the root of the problem but, working together, we can do something about it before it’s too late! I thought about his message and although I could challenge his positions on any number of different levels I am having the hardest time accepting his underlying premise… that human-caused global warming is leading to disastrous, but reversible, planetary consequences.
Why? Well, I am skeptical of global warming alarmism simply because even though global CO2 levels have continued to slowly rise predicted global warming rates have not been observed. In fact, since 1998, we have experienced a global cooling trend. Take it back a little further and other data indicate no net warming for the past sixty-eight years.
The Atmosphere. If you take a look at the temperature record as measured by satellite and radiosonde (weather balloons) as opposed to just surface temperatures you will see that we have gone through nearly two decades without any warming of the upper troposphere. There are no climate models that predict an absence of warming for nearly twenty years.
The Oceans. Then we look at the oceans since water is a very efficient heat sink. The Argo Project is a huge global array of more than 3,000 free-drifting profiling buoys that measure the temperature and salinity of the upper 2,000m of the world's oceans. First deployed in 2003, Argo now gives us continuous monitoring of the upper ocean with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection. Result? No net warming of the oceans has been observed in the first six years of the program measurements.
The Polar Ice Caps. Another prediction was that the polar ice caps would melt as CO2 levels rose to produce accelerated warming (you remember… that image of Al Gore’s hapless polar bear struggling to climb onto a melting ice flow). But again, satellite observations have shown no net change for more than thirty years.
In September of 2007 there was an observed anomaly. The Arctic ice cap lost nearly 25% of its normal pack. The global warming proponents said this was finally hard evidence of climate catastrophe to come. But just one year later 12% of that icepack had recovered and by September of 2009, one year later, there was another 12% increase so that the ice loss of 2007 in the northern polar regions has all but fully recovered.
An interesting thing about global climate change is that its effects should be global. So even though there was some ice loss in the Northern Hemisphere there was a corresponding increase in the Southern Hemisphere. Just three weeks after that Northern minimum of September 2007 there was an ice cover maximum recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. And last year, there was less of a summer ice-melt in the Antarctic than has been measured in thirty years of satellite observations.
Hurricane Seasons. We have been told by the IPCC, Al Gore, and others that we could expect to see an increase in hurricane activity… not just in the number of hurricanes but also in their intensity as global temperatures increased. Again, this has not been observed. In 2005 the Gulf Coast was hammered by hurricane Katrina. New Orleans, a city built largely below sea level, was flooded when the levees failed. We were told that storms like this would become more common. Four years later we have witnessed some of the quietest hurricane seasons in memory. OK, now without resorting to Google, can you even name another hurricane since Katrina?
Settled Science. When my biology or physics students do a lab they propose a hypothesis… an educated guess. When their observations fail to agree with their hypothesis my students are taught to keep an open mind and question if the hypothesis was flawed or maybe there was something wrong with the experiment or perhaps with their data collection methods. Could there have been other factors that were affecting their observations that were unaccounted for? What they are taught not to do is declare “this is settled science” and call their hypothesis a fact.
So is dangerous anthropogenic global warming “settled science?” Hardly. Is there room for skepticism? Absolutely! And yet climate change alarmists attack skeptics with an almost religious, unthinking fervor. They are referred to as “deniers” and demonized. In the old days the words “apostates or heretics” would have been appropriate for those who expressed doubts and challenged the established orthodoxy. They point to the “consensus of a thousand scientists” the way zealots point to the harmonious chanting of a priestly class. They say climate systems dynamics are too complicated and too difficult to explain to the average person much the way that we are told religious texts carry hidden meanings and that dogma must not be questioned by the faithful lest they risk the damnation of their immortal souls.
The late Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I don’t propose to raise the bar that high. I simply ask that the global warming proponents match their predictions to observations. In other words, if the local TV weatherman always predicts rain, every now and then it should rain! Until then, I will choose to remain a skeptic.
