"Dear Guest, We are committed to energy and resource conservation. Energy conservation helps reduce the effects of global warming, acid rain, and smog, and protects our natural resources."
That gentle note was placed on my pillow in the Hilton Towers hotel room in Washington earlier this year.
"More than 160 countries, including all other major industrialized nations, reached an accord November on implementing the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty on global climate change. Under it, dangerous greenhouse gases would be reduced by 2010, to the benefit not only of our current generation but of also of many generations to come. A recent paper by the National Academy of Sciences made it unequivocally clear that global warming is real and that human actions contribute in considerable measure to the greenhouse gases that cause warming."
So intoned Stephen M. Wolf, the chairman of US Airways, in a confident but highly misleading statement in the January issue of Attache magazine while my flight was guzzling its share of gasoline hovering back and forth between Boston and DC.
"Global warming, not of [the poor's] making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust."
So lectured 110 Nobel Laureates -- from physicists to poets - claiming that "global warming and a weaponized world" shall be the "most profound danger to world peace" in the next hundred years.
What is going on here? At every turn it seems I am bombarded with environmental doom and gloom scenarios. This is all the more odd since there is very little in the current climate science that justifies such rhetoric.
For example, the Earth will warm or cool regardless of what the hundred Nobel Prize winners think or do. Indeed, ascertaining the impact of CO2 on current and future climate is still largely an enterprise driven by immature science contained in climate models. All climate models have failed in their efforts to emulate the relevant observations of the current climate. Therefore, no matter how anxious we are, clear causal links of carbon dioxide emissions to global warming are yet to be identified.
While running the climate models endlessly and projecting the pattern of computerized change into the future can certainly produce scary warnings - providing fodder for hotel operators, airline CEOs and Nobel laureates alike - it is not likely to provide any realistic guidance on how to deal with the risks and benefits of potential future global warming. Confusion and alarmism are the price, however, to be paid later by society. As well as economic hardship.
Most objective analyses evaluating the future restricted CO2-emission scenarios reveal heavy economic burdens to be visited upon the economies of the industrialized and developing world. Unfortunately, these facts don't factor into the concerns of the green pessimists, including the Nobel laureates who on December 7, 2001 issued their declaration in order to maximize the "negative aspects" of CO2's possible global warming effects and touted concerns over "historical climate injustices." Why they do not consider an energy restriction scheme such as the Kyoto protocol an "economic injustice" - certainly one of "historical" proportions - remains to be seen.
After all, we've had good news lately. On January 9, 2002, two University of Alabama scientists, John Christy and Roy Spencer revealed that "global temperature for 2001 was 0.06 degrees C warmer than the 20-year average (1979-1998)" or "the ninth warmest (and the 15th coolest) since satellite instruments started gathering global climate data."
And, new scientific reports are showing that the Antarctic continent has been cooling for the last 35 years, a fact contrary to the predicted global warming.
This news undermines the U.N's weather agency and the United Kingdom Met Office, which declared, prematurely, "2001 temperatures to be high" and "much of the temperature change is down to human influence."
While there is much uncertainty in climate science, in the scientific discussions over global warming there is, however, at least one sure scientific fact: man-made global warming has not been confirmed at all from available records. So cheer up Hilton, cheer up US Airways, and cheer up distinguished Nobelists: the truth is out there, and he is getting his pants on.
Dr. Willie Soon is a Physicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MS 16 Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, email (Internet):
This article was taken from TechCentralStation website. Pay a visit to their EnviroScience page!.
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