Attacking the media and scientists for reporting to Americans that their CO2 emmissions are changing the climate, the Republicans on the James Inhofe lead US Senate Committee on Environment and Public works issued a press release today citing the usual handful of climate skeptics/deniers.
Below, I quote then refute each claim made in the press release. The blockquoted portions are from the "Majority Press Release" linked above.
The AP also chose to ignore Gore's reliance on the now-discredited "hockey stick" by Dr. Michael Mann, which claims that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century, and that the 1990's were the warmest decade in at least 1000 years. Last week's National Academy of Sciences report dispelled Mann's often cited claims by reaffirming the existence of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. See Senator Inhofe's statement on the broken "Hockey Stick." (http://epw.senate.gov/... )
In fact, this goes explicitly against results just released by the National Academy of Science vindicating the "hockey stick" and the Mann study as "plausible." The Republicans on the committee are now misrepresenting the outcome of the NAS report that they themselves commissioned. Here is what the report concluded specifically: "The Research Council committee found the Mann team's conclusion that warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years to be plausible, but it had less confidence that the warming was unprecedented prior to 1600; fewer proxies -- in fewer locations -- provide temperatures for periods before then." LINK. That hardly counts as "discreditting."
An even more detailed discussion of the "hockey stick" can be found on realclimate.org. Of particular note is the fact that the Mann study is not the only peer-reviewed study showing exceptional warming trends.
Gore's claim that global warming is causing the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro to disappear has also been debunked by scientific reports. For example, a 2004 study in the journal Nature makes clear that Kilimanjaro is experiencing less snowfall because there's less moisture in the air due to deforestation around Kilimanjaro.
Every single tropical glacier on earth is receeding, including many that do not have changes in precipitation and humidity due to deforestation. Kilimanjaro may be receeding because of both warmer temperatures and deforestation. Here is a National Geographic article in which the authors of the study mentioned discuss how a variety of factors including global warming are causing the Kilimanjaro glaciers to disapear. In that article, Dr. Stefan Hastenrath describes how these factors are combining with warmer temperatures to drive the disapearance: "The warming increases humidity, and as the air gets more moist, it hinders evaporation. The energy saved from evaporation is instead spent on melting. That might seem like a good thing--to stop evaporation of the glaciers--but it's certainly not. Melting is eight times more energy-efficient than evaporation, so now, with global warming, the glaciers are disappearing eight times faster than before."
Bob Carter--"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
Carter loses credibility for grossly overstating his criticism. There is room for further discussion of some of the points made in Gore's movie, but it is not grossly out of line with science in any respect. If Gore is an "embarassment to science," then the following organizations are also "embarrasments to science" for endorsing the consensus view that more greenhouse gasses means more greenhouse effect:
A joint statement from the the following acaedmies of science:
* Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Bazil)
* Royal Society of Canada
* Chinese Academy of Sciences
* Academié des Sciences (France)
* Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
* Indian National Science Academy
* Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)
* Science Council of Japan
* Russian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Society (United Kingdom)
* National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)
* Australian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
* Caribbean Academy of Sciences
* Indonesian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Irish Academy
* Academy of Sciences Malaysia
* Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
* Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Here are additional statements from American and Canadian professional scientific organizations:
* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
* State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
* Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)
* American Geophysical Union (AGU)
* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
* American Meteorological Society (AMS)
* Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
(Hat tip to A Few Things Ill Considered.)
Richard Lindzen--"A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse."
I'm suspicious that Lindzen has not seen the film. Gore is very careful to make the case that the present change is unprecedented in the past 600,000 years and that it is driven by human activity. He doesn't ignore the fact that there are both positive and negative natural forcings. Lindzen is the one ignoring (assiduously even) the fact that in addition to natural forcings there can also be anthro forcings, such as dumping billions of tons of excess greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
"...A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it."
In his unpublished review of Oreskes meta-study, Peiser makes several seemingly intentional mistakes to get different results. He presents himself as if he were trying to duplicate her results, but does not use her original search terms and (most notably) includes non-peer reviewed work. Here is a more detailed response to Peiser.
Dr Roy Spencer--"...Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?"
Dr. Tim Ball--"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology"
Spencer and Ball contradict the findings of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment compiled by 300 researchers of the climate and ecology of the Arctic. Spencer tries to refute the fact that the present warming is due to increasing the greenhouse effect by increasing greenhouse gasses by pointing out that it was also unusually warm in the Arctic in the 1930s. This is the familiar fallacy of supposing that like effects always have same causes. Ball's attempt is just kind of silly. I don't recall Gore citing a specific study in the film, and as the ACIA shows there is not just one study showing the Arctic warming trend.
The Reps on the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Piublic Works lead by Inhofe want it both ways; first they quote Spencer saying that the Arctic warming is precendented then they have Ball saying that the warming isn't even happening. They need to get their story straight. Here is what NASA (apparently and "embarassment to US science") said in a 2003 report on Arctic warming: "Experts have long regarded Earth's polar regions as early indicators for global climate change. But until the last few years, wide ranging, comprehensive research about overall polar conditions has been challenging to conduct. Now a more than twenty-year record of space based measurements has been analyzed by researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Based on their findings, evidence of a warming planet continues to grow." LINK. Since 2003, more evidence of the warming Arctic has accumulated. Indeed, April of 2006 was warmer than any May ever recorded.
It is time to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and time for the anti-science Republicans to stop this stuff where they mine right-wing editorials on global warming for quotes from the mere handful of skeptics/deniers that are left. It's no mistake that these same names (Lindzen, Ball, Spencer, etc.) turn up over and over again. Out of thousands of climate scientists, these are the only ones left for the politically motivated deniers to turn to.