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Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2009 Archive / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
Putting a Global Warming Canard on Ice
February 27, 2008
One
of the canards that global warming deniers have been trotting out for
years goes something like this. "Back in the 1970s, all the scientist
were predicting that an ice age was imminent. Now, all the scientists
say that global warming is coming. Since they were so wrong 30 years
ago, why should we trust them now?" Or words to that effect.
Climatologists and lay people who follow climate science closely have
known all along that this objection is utter nonsense. It's an urban
legend that arose from misreporting of carefully nuanced discussion in
the scientific literature at the time about the direction of climate
trends. That misreporting took place in the popular press -- what
famous climate skeptic Rush Limbaugh likes to call the "drive-by media."
The canard has had legs in the drive-by media - e.g., see George Will's
Washington Post column of December 22, 2004 -- so an inordinate amount
of time has been expended trying to knock it down.
Now, a climate scholar has released the results of a survey of
circa-1970s climate research papers that may finally let the air out of
this myth's tires for good. Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic
Data Center found that fewer than 10 percent of the papers supported
the hypothesis that the earth was headed for a cooling cycle.
Forty-four leaned toward a warming cycle, while the remaining 20 did
not go in either direction.
Climate scientists at that time were fully aware that burning fossil
fuels could load with the atmosphere with enough carbon dioxide to
bring on global warming. But they didn't have enough evidence then to
say for sure. There wasn't enough data to justify such a conclusion,
and the analytical tools they had at their disposal simply were not up
to the job of modeling the climate's maddening complexity.
The '70s were a cool decade. Buffalo natives will never forget the
monster blizzard of 1977. So ears were bound to perk up at scientists
talking about ice ages, even if they carefully emphasized that, due to
insufficient information, any projection they made wouldn't be worth
the paper it was printed on.
Things are much different today. Since the 1980s, climate scientists
have been gathering data from the far ends of the earth and thousands
of points in between. Supercomputers used for running climate models
today are as far removed from their clunky '70s ancestors as a Formula
One race car is from a donkey cart. Scientists have developed multiple
lines of evidence to substantiate their conclusion, as reported in last
year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, that global
warming is "unequivocal" and chances are 9 in 10 that human activities
are the cause.
Time would be much better spent discussing climate solutions than
watching reruns from the 1970s. This year's presidential campaign
between John McCain and whoever emerges from the Obama-Clinton slugfest
is one such opportunity.
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