The debate about climate change has been a passionate one, with arguments falling into three general categories:
1) the planet is definitely warming, the chief culprit is humans pumping pollution into the atmosphere and nations across the globe must immediately get on board a plan to reduce their carbon footprints
2) there is evidence the planet is warming but it’s difficult to tell how much humans are responsible for it, and
3) the planet is not warming at all and the science is not settled.
CLIMATE CONUNDRUM: The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up but the earth’s temperatures have remained flat for the last 15 years.
Amid all that sound and fury comes an article in The Economist, the business and political weekly magazine based out of London.
The headline sounds boring enough: ‘Climate science: A sensitive matter’ but in the little more than one week since it came out, nearly 2.000 comments have been generated on the magazine’s website.
Why?
Because reporting in The Economist has a history of falling into Category No. 1 but the article sounds a lot like what the advocates of Category No. 2 have been saying.
A number of climate change scientists — whom some critics have labeled “alarmists” — have warned that the increase in CO2 emissions in recent years will inexorably lead to a subsequent rise in global temperatures, leading to a “greenhouse effect.”
Skeptics in Category 3 — whom critics in Category 1 have labeled as “denialists” — have questioned and rejected that assumption.
Now here’s the issue and the conundrum The Economist article brings up: Between 2000 and 2010, some 100 billion — with a “b” — tons of carbon have been pumped into the atmosphere yet in the last 15 years, the air temperatures on the earth’s surface have remained flat.
What’s up with that?
If the climate models of those in Category 1 were correct, then the temperatures would keep rising at dramatic levels.
“This lack of new warming is a surprise,” the article says, adding that this “mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now.”
From the March 30, 2013 issue of The Economist
While The Economist says the contradiction “does not mean global warming is a delusion,” the article also adds this zinger: “If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch.”
And that has everybody in Categories 1, 2 and 3 — as well as environmentalists and oil and gas producers with their own rooting interests — in a tizzy.
And it reminds New Mexico Watchdog of an interview we did with climatologist Dr. Patrick J. Michaels in 2011, who told us, “The surface temperature of the planet is a little bit less than a degree Celsius warmer than it was a hundred years ago and people have something to do with it,” Michaels — a critic of those in Category 1 — said. “They don’t have everything to do with it.”
Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute – and another critic of those in Category 1 — was in Albuquerque last Friday (April 5), and told New Mexico Watchdog that while “It’s amazing how long it’s taken for this fact (increase in carbon but flattening of temperatures) to take affect,” he thinks The Economist story may change how the media report climate stories.
“This isn’t going to change the views of the general public,” Ebell said. “They’re skeptical of claims of the alarmists but the bi-coastal elites … may change their thinking a bit. If they become less certain of themselves, it will change the debate.”
Maybe.
Dr. Reto Knutti of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich said “there are several lines of evidence, where the observed trends are pushing down, whereas the models are pushing up, so my personal view is that the overall assessment hasn’t changed much.”
Here’s the article in The Economist.
Here’s an “it’s about time” post on “PowerLine” — a conservative website.
Here’s a “this doesn’t change anything” article in The Guardian newspaper in London.
Here’s video of Ebell’s presentation in Albuquerque, courtesy of the Rio Grande Foundation.
And here’s the 7-minute video interview we did in 2011 with Pat Michaels, who says cap and trade policies don’t work:
