According to a recent report aired by Fox News reporter and analyst Brit Hume, a leading “climate scientist who is part of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), now says computer models cannot predict future climate – and he says the IPCC is not in the climate prediction business.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287437,00.html
The report quotes Dr Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Reserch, a prominent leader in many of the IPCC’s published climate assessments, and a vocal proponent of theories assigning responsiblity for the global warming to human-based carbon emissions.
The report states that in a recent posting to a nature magazine blog, Dr. Trenberth now asserts that “the UN’s dire forcasts about the dangers of global warming are NOT climate predictions” [emphasis added].
Rather, according to Hume, Trenberth now states that the IPCC forecasts are instead “‘what-if’ projections that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. And he [Trenberth] admits the computer models don’t even consider things such as the recovery of the ozone layer.”
“The current projection method,” Hume reports Trenberth as now writing, “can not work for many aspects of climate, especially those related to the water cycle. The science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate.”
What? The science is “not done”? I thought that the evidence was all in and the matter was settled!
In another article by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, global warming proponent Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is reported as saying that “the problem with most computer models, especially when compared to their predictions of past observations, [actually] underestimate how bad global warming is. That’s because they see too many rainy days, which tend to cool temperatures off.”
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007May10/0,4670,HotFuture,00.html
Rainy days mean more clouds blocking the sun and more solar heat used to evaporate water, Druyan is reported in the article as saying.
In the article Dr. Trenberth agrees that there is an established link between rainy and cooler weather, and hot and drier weather. The link between dryness and heat works, he says, but Trenberth is a littled troubled by the computer modeling done by Druyan, and points out that recently many areas of the United States have been wetter, and cooler, than expected.
Wetter and cooler, that is, than was predicted by the “computer models” also being used to calculate the long-term effects of continued global warming.
Other researchers have also pointed to the liklihood that increased temperatures and artic ice melt will result in increased levels of atmospheric moisture, due to accelerated evaporation and biological activity.
Given the link between moisture and coolness stipulated by both Trenberth and Druyan, many researchers expect that the resulting increased cloud cover will itself create a natural mitigation of global temperature increases, even without the natural cyclical reduction in solar activity expected in the next few decades.
Increased atmospheric moisture in colder northern regions will also tend to lead to increased snowfall during the winter months, increasing the solar reflectivity of those areas, and further increasing the cooling effect.
Another scientist, Chris Landsea, who has worked on several reports published by the IPCC, withdrew from the project that produced the much-ballyhooed IPCC report released in February 2007, according to another report.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250980,00.html
Chris Landsea, an expert on hurricanes and typhoons, reportedly said that “the report is being motivated by ‘preconcieved agendas’, and [that] some of the conclusions are ’scientifically unsound’”
In the same report, IPCC report co-author and Penn State geosciences professor Richard Alley is quoted as saying that “The newly released report reaffirms the strong scientific evidence that human activities are changing the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, and that this is warming the climate and affecting it in other ways.”
“Strong evidence for the dominant role of warming,” Alley continued in the report, “which is primarily being caused by human activities” is the reason for “widespread reductions in the Earth’s ice, including snow, river and lake ice, sea ice, permafrost, and seasonally frozen ground, mountain glaciers and the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antartica.”
In the report, Trenberth readily admitted that a graph that he used during recent Congressional testimony showing an upward trend in global temperatures, used as it’s starting point the year 1850, which was at the very end of a previous 500-year cooling period.
The graph showed a meager 1-degree net change in over a 150-year time span.
Also according to the report, during the hearings, Rep Dana Rohrabacker questioned co-chairwoman of the IPCC Susan Solomon as to what percentage of “greenhouse gasses” are caused naturally rather than by human beings.
Her response, according the article, was that carbon dioxide emissions are the biggest contributor to greenhouse gasses, and are “caused almost entirely by human beings.”
Pressed again for specific numbers, the article reports that Solomon responded “since 1750, .. greater than 90 percent of the INCREASE [emphasis added] is caused by human activities.”
Neither answer addressed the question posed of how much naturally-occurring “greenhouse gasses” are present in the atmosphere, as compared to the amount attributed to human sources.
In the article, Rohrabacher cited figures indicating his understanding that only 5-10 percent of current atmospheric greenhouse gasses (including carbon dioxide) can be attributed to human-based emissions, hardly overwhelming, even if the level of human contribution has increased by 90 percent over the past 250 years.
“We’ve seen this over and over again, where they are trying to claim an almost unanimous consensus among scientists and it’s not true. Usually that tactic is nothing more than just trying to stampede people [rather] than answer serious criticism,” concludes Rohrabacher in the article.
