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Skriven 2007-02-25 20:26:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Global Warmning
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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI4NTc0YWMzNTA3ZjRmYmJiMDRjNmI5MGEwZTFhM2
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Inconvenient Truths
Novel science fiction on global warming.

By Patrick J. Michaels

This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming
documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.


The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very
soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenlands 630,000 cubic miles of
ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the
year 2100.

Wheres the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent
Policymakers Summary from the United Nations much anticipated compendium on
climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes
medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of
between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gores film exaggerates the rise
by about 2,000 percent.

Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration
of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric
methane concentration hasnt changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel
Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCCs methane emissions
scenarios as quite unlikely.

Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.s new projection is about 30-percent lower
than it was in its last report in 2001. The projections include a contribution
due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed
since 1993, according to the IPCC, but these flow rates could increase or
decrease in the future.

According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland
was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000
yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows
that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

Was is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper
showing that the recent acceleration of Greenlands ice loss from its huge
glaciers has suddenly reversed.

Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any
support for Gores hypothesis. Instead, theres an unrefereed editorial by NASA
climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change  edited by
Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had
to choose the right balance between being effective and honest about global
warming  and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.

These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to do
something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that
Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be
down to eight years!

It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about
various solutions for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every
signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per
half-century. Thats too small to measure, because the earths temperature varies
by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto  i.e., less than
nothing  for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have
only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought
experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we
replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the
next decade. But its well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American
corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline
consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to
measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up
its food supply to please a political mob.

And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently,
only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even
the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total
emissions by 7-percent below present levels  resulting in emissions about
20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

And theres other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions
reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we cant
even do Kyoto?

When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And its
not just Gores movie thats fiction. Its the rhetoric of the Congress and the
chief executive, too.

  Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato
Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming
by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

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