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latter figure. But, of course, you can't put a tax on water vapor or lambaste
your favorite industrial villains for producing it, and so water vapor never
gets mentioned in the polemics. Even professionals uncritically buy the
publicized line. An astronomer reports that in an impromptu survey, six out of
ten of her fellow astronomers replied "carbon dioxide" when asked what was the
major greenhouse gas.
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Twiddling with Models
So where does the idea come from that humans are upsetting the climate in ways
that are already visible and about to spiral out of control? Just about
exclusively from computer models. And despite the
awe that many hold for anything that comes out of a computer, these are not
yet models that can demonstrate realism or reliability to any great degree.
They were created as research tools to investigate their usefulness in
climatic simulation, and while such application no doubt has potential, that
still closely describes the situation that exists today. The physics of
planetary water vapor and the effect of clouds is not well understood, and so
the models are unable to correctly represent the largest part of reality.
Known phenomena such as the ocean transport of heat from the tropics to the
polar latitudes are ignored, and the computational units used to simulate the
dynamics across the Earth's surface might be as coarse as squares 500 miles on
a side. But given the sheer complexity of the interactions taking place, this
is to a large degree unavoidable even with the most advanced computers and
methods available today. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy director of the Mount Wilson
Observatory, points out that to reliably simulate a climatic change over
several decades, an ideal computer model would need to track 5 million
parameters and apply ten million trillion degrees of freedom. Nevertheless,
the outputs from programs that do exist which can
146
only be extrapolations of the assumptions built into them are treated as
authentic predictions.
Thus, focusing on CO effects, models being used in 1990 postulating a doubling
in concentration
2
by the year 2100 showed a global warming typically in the order of 4 C. When
the effects of o concomitant increases in other gases were factored in, this
became 6.5 C. On top of this, some theorists o proposed that "biogeochemical"
feedback could double that figure yet again to the range 12 C 14 C, o o with
the warming in the polar regions twice the average or more, rivaling the 33 C
natural greenhouse o effect. However, as the models became more sophisticated,
the base temperature rise being predicted
147
as due to CO in 2100 had reduced progressively to 3 C by 1992 and 2 C by 1996.
2
o o
One TV production brought it all vividly to life by portraying a 2050 in which
it had all happened, with the world ruled by a "Planetary Management
Authority" that invades South America to redistribute that land; beef so
heavily taxed that the staple diet is "cactus potatoes," genetically
engineered to grow in the desert that was once America's grain lands; and
Florida slipping away beneath the waves. This
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wouldn't have been so bad had it been portrayed as a piece of doomsday
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science-fiction entertainment, but it was advertised as if it were a science
documentary.
Meanwhile, in the Real World . . .
Predictions of what will happen decades in the future or at the end of the
century can't be tested, of course. But what can be tested are results from
the same models of what temperatures ought to be today, given the known
changes in the atmosphere that have taken place in years gone by. And when
this is done, the models are found not to do too well.
Accurate measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations through the last
century are available.
There's no dispute that it has risen from the region of 280 parts per million
(ppm) at the end of the nineteenth century to 350 ppm by the close of the
twentieth, an increase of 25 percent, attributed mainly to the burning of
fossil fuels. When the "carbon-dioxide equivalent" of other gases is factored
in, the effective figure comes closer to 50 percent. Depending on whose model
one takes, this should have resulted in a temperature rise of 1 C to 2 C. Of
this 0.5 C should have occurred during the period 1979
o o o
2001.
The most precise measurements available for comparison over that period are
from the
Tiros-N
satellites, which yield a figure of 0.08 C a sixfold discrepancy. Other
analyses of satellite- and o
149
balloon-based measurements show no increase at all. Ocean measurements tend to
be sparse and scattered, but a joint study of thousands of ships' logs by MIT
and the British Meteorological Office indicate no change in sea-surface or
marine-air temperature
in the 130 years since 1856. Land-based measurements do show some increase.
However, 150
meteorological stations tend to be located at places like airports and on
urban rooftops that become centers of local hot spots created by expansion and
development going on around them over the years.
When allowance is made for such "heat island" effects, the figure that emerges
as a genuine global temperature rise through the twentieth century is of the
order of 0.5 C.
o
Even if off from the predictions by 400 percent, this 0.5 C rise is seized
upon by the global o warming lobby as being due to the CO increase, hence
proving the theory. And as is inevitably the case
2
when the aim is to advance an agenda in the eyes of the public, anything that
appears to fit is embellished with visibility and publicity, while equally
irrelevant counter-examples are ignored. Thus, the hot summer of 1988, when
the Mississippi was unusually low, was blamed on global warming, as was the
record
Mississippi high in 1993. Then the unusually mild 1998 winter in the Eastern
United States was singled out as the long-awaited global warming
"fingerprint," while the winter of 1996, when New York City froze under an
all-time record of 75.6 inches of snow, was forgotten. Hot years through the
eighties and nineties were singled out, but not the all-time lows in Alaska
and subzero conditions across Scandinavia and in Moscow. Nor was it mentioned
that North America's high was reached on July 10, 1913, when
Death Valley hit 134 F, Africa's in 1922, Asia's in 1942, Australia's in 1889,
and South America in o
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1905.
A huge fuss was made in early 2002, when the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica
broke up into a
mosaic of icebergs; but nothing about it's being part of a peninsula that
projects into open water that isn't even inside the Antarctic Circle where
such an event is inevitable and had been expected or that the remaining 98
percent of the continent had been steadily cooling and accumulating ice. In
October 1998
an iceberg the size of Delaware 92 miles long and 30 miles wide broke off from
Antarctica and was described by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration as "a possible indicator of global warming." But
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