That Which Slaps Bush Gets Legs

[Wayne E Baisley]

I thought this item in the May/June 2001 Newsletter of the ASA and CSCA
(US and CA groups of Christians in the sciences, respectively) was
interesting.  Bottom line is, no surprise, that scientists can be
political.  Those would be the ones you hear from.

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Christian in Atmospheric Science Denies Warming

The preponderance of opinion in the scientific community is that the
average temperature of the earth has been increasing.  Filter out the
high-frequency dips and peaks in the data, and the temperature versus
time curve has a positive slope.  Or does it?  The issue is
controversial.  This article emphasizes the case against global warming,
or at least, against the extent of some popular claims made about it. 
Future coverage will include more of the better-known claims for
warming.

Speakers at ASA 2000 presented compelling evidence for global warming. 
But not all scientists have concluded similarly.  In fact, thousands
have joined the Petition Project, P.O. Box 1925, La Jolla, CA
92038-1925,(http://www.oism.org/pprojectls33p37.htm) headed by Frederick
Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences.  The petition
states, in part:

  There is no convincing scientific evidence
  that human release of carbon dioxide, methane,
  or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will,
  in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic
  heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption
  of the Earth's climate.  Moreover, there is
  substantial scientific evidence that increases
  in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many
  beneficial effects upon the natural plant and
  animal environments of the Earth.

When the list is reduced to those with the requisite scientific
expertise, the number is still significant.  A few dozen leading
meteorologists have signed a declaration
(http://www.sepp.org/statment.html) declaring, in part: 

  Such policy initiatives derive from highly
  uncertain scientific theories.  They are based
  on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic
  global warming follows from the burning of
  fossil fuels and requires immediate action.
  We do not agree.

The issue deserves a further look because it obviously is not only of
academic interest; global political powers are applying the issue to
affect major policies in the developed countries that interact with the
energy issue and with the global economy.

For many scientists in disagreement, the argument is over the extent of
warming and its causes.  The National Academy of Sciences published a
report on January 2000, put out by the National Research Council, titled
"Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change." (National
Academy Press.  Washington, DC).  It identifies the geographic regions
of warming and cooling during the last 20 years.  Surface measurements
of East Africa show no warming trend and weather satellites show a
pronounced atmospheric cooling trend there.

The figure (shown below) is taken from the George C. Marshall Institute
website at: http://www.marshall.org/guide.htm  It shows changes in
yearly average surface temperature sampled worldwide, reconstructed for
land and sea surface (solid line, University of East Anglia Climate
Research Unit [CRU]), and land only (dashed line, NASA-Goddard Institute
for Space Studies [GISS]).  The temporary warming in 1997-98 is a
natural and unusually strong El Nino event and biases the estimated
warming trend upward.

<Chart 1 -- see website>

Other data (also on the GCMI webpage), taken from satellites, shows
warming as a questionable conclusion.  The next figure (below) shows
changes in monthly average lower tropospheric temperature between
latitudes 82°N and 82°S through August 1999, from satellite Microwave
Sounding Unit (MSU) measurements.  These data have been corrected for
the recently reported effects of, for example, satellite orbit decay. 
The temporary warming in 1997-98 is a natural and unusually strong El
Nino event.

<Chart 2 -- see website>

The satellite data were reported by J. R. Christy, R. W. Spencer, and E.
S. Lobl, in "Analysis of the merging procedure for the MSU daily
temperature time series," Journal of Climate 11, 2016 (1998), and by J.
R. Christy, R. Spencer, and W. D. Braswell in "MSU tropospheric
temperatures: Dataset construction and radiosonde comparisons," in the
Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 2000.

Writing in Discover magazine (vol. 22 no. 2, February 2001), author
Elizabeth Royte begins "The Gospel According to John," with this byline:

  When this world-class atmospheric scientist
  insists there's no such thing as global warming,
  is he talking science--or religion?

John Christy is a Huntsville, AL Baptist and professor of atmospheric
science at the U. of Alabama.  Some of his fellow church members, the
article states, "may even know that he puts more faith in evolution as
an explanatory theory than in creationism.  But only those closest to
Christy know the extent to which his science and his religion are
intertwined-and how much his double life has helped shape the most
heated scientific debate of the past 20 years."

Christy is on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
established by the United Nations about a decade ago.  Christy for years
has doubted the global warming claim and has grown more skeptical.  The
IPCC was established and is run and funded by the UN Environment Program
(UNEP).  As Steven Milloy reported in the Washington Times (Feb. 13,
2001), in an article titled "Dirty new warming secret,"

  There is no new science in the IPCC's scarier
  assessment.  Looking for a way to turn up the
  heat, the IPCC merely cranked some more extreme
  human emission scenarios into the computer, to
  crank out a hotter world 100 years from now.

Before the IPCC announcement, Christy declared the opposite: "The usual
predictions show escalating atmospheric temperatures, and we're just not
seeing that rise.  This indicates that the cause of recent surface
warming may be due to factors other than human activities."

Christy's opposition to the IPCC declaration is rooted not only in
global satellite and weather-station data, but in his Christian
convictions.  Twenty-seven years ago, he was a missionary in the Kenyan
village of Nyeri, in the highlands outside Nairobi where he saw
first-hand how energy policies of the powerful nations devastated
developing communities dependent on fossil fuels.  "Disrupting the lives
of those whose existence is too often literally hanging by a thread
causes the kind of suffering that the average policy maker or activist
never sees," he told the House Small Business Committee in 1998.

Because of the difficulty of obtaining accurate ground-based temperature
data, no less that of the troposphere, Christy began to work with Roy
Spencer, a satellite meteorologist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, gathering data from polar-orbital satellites.  The
two meteorologists' contribution was to find a way to determine
tropospheric temperature from the satellite data.  But they found that,
instead of heating like a greenhouse, since 1979 the lower troposphere
had warmed only 0.2 degree Fahrenheit, whereas the surface had warmed
between 0.48 and 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit.  The disparity led Christy to
the thesis that prevailing climate models were wrong.

When his work was published in 1990, it was attacked on detailed
technical grounds (satellite drift, orbital decay, instrument
temperature, etc.)  Industry public relations officers happily
distributed his statistics while environmentalists denounced it.  "I'm
more upset with environmental advocacy groups who lie about my data, who
say it's inaccurate" he says.  One employee of NASA's Mission to Planet
Earth program, which studies climate change, told him, "I'm paying
people to come at you with bricks and bats."

Christy and Spencer went to work on the faults.  As the Discover article
reported:

  For months on end, the men identified and
  quantified possible sources of error, applied
  nonlinear-trend reconstruction algorithms, and
  corrected least-squares regressions.  They
  calibrated one satellite against another and,
  finally, validated their corrected numbers with
  readings from radiosondes-weather balloons that
  have been collecting data worldwide since 1958.
  In the end, he says, the errors fell to less
  than a tenth of a degree for the 20-year period.

Their rigor was eventually recognized when, in 1996, they were awarded
by the American Meteorological Society for "fundamentally advancing our
ability to monitor climate." The next year, the Hadley Centre for
Climate Prediction and Research in England independently verified their
data.  "We have nine data sets and they're absolutely confirmed,"
Christy says.  "They're dead-on."

Ironically, while Christy's data have won praise, his conclusions have
not.  In a report released on January 12 last year, the National
Research Council declared that the disparity between surface and
troposphere temperatures is probably real, but that it's difficult to
say why it exists or what it means.

Of greater irony are the conclusions of the 1,000-page IPCC document
that lists Christy himself as a co-author, that the burning of fossil
fuels has "contributed substantially to the observed warming over the
last fifty years," in contradiction to Christy's research results.

Another irony: IPCC member, James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies believes that the atmosphere will continue
to warm based not on satellite but current radiosonde data.  But most of
the warming, as Christy points out, "occurred in the early part of the
20th century, before humans had boosted concentrations of greenhouse
gases."  Christy lists other possible influences on temperature
readings: sunspots, volcanic eruptions, El Ninos, variations in
aerosols, water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane from living
creatures.  While northern hemispheric temperatures have been slightly
higher in recent years, southern hemisphere temperatures have been
lower.

Better models and improved understanding of how particulates affect
climate has sustained the majority of scientists, such as Brandon
MacGillis of the National Environmental Trust: "In legitimate climate
circles, there is no debate on the way humans have warmed the planet. 
It's happening."

Christy does not take issue with the value of reducing toxic emissions
like methane, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide: "I care about our
environmental problems," he says, "if they're scientifically based and
put into perspective with global environmental problems.  But what I see
is people in the Northeast and the West trying to control how others
live." He says the environmental effects of curbing greenhouse-gas
emissions "are likely to be minuscule," while the social effects could
be disastrous.

Many competing hypotheses are debated as they are studied; that's
completely ordinary in the scientific community.  Global climate,
however, has a major political side to it that affects the usual
objectivity of scientists.  The situation is summed up by Royte, in
noting how only twenty-five years ago, the scientific consensus was that
the planet was cooling:

  Such reversals underscore how remarkably young
  the study of climate change is.  Twenty-five
  years ago, atmospheric scientists fretted about
  global cooling.  Today scientists agree that
  Earth's surface is warming, but they can't
  reach a consensus on exactly how much and why.
  The more scientists study the atmosphere, the
  more complicated it appears.

To probe further, access the following websites:

- IPCC Working Group I: http://www.meto.gov.uk/sec5/CR_div/ipcc/wg1
- John Christy's work:  http://www.atmos.uah.edu/atmos/christy.html
- NASA Goddard Institute of Space Sciences Global climate modeling: 
http://www.giss.nasa.gov

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On a related note, a friend of mine who does consulting on PR & market
research says that the term 'greenhouse gases' is falling out of favor
among the green/left-leaning lobbying groups.  Greenhouses have neutral
to positive connotations, so the phrase isn't threatening enough.

Trust no one,
Wayne

Dateline Kyoto:  IPCC Links Global Warming To Group's Own Flatulence