Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Global warming disaster claim is rubbished
A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an article in the magazine Nature which predicted global warming will cause between 15 and 37 percent of the Earth’s species to go extinct by the middle of this century unless immediate and drastic action is taken. After studying a sample of plants and animals around the globe, and then using computer programs to predict twenty-first century global warming, the authors claimed more than a million species will disappear by the year 2050. However, some serious flaws in the article have now been pointed out.
“There are a massive number of glaring problems� with the study, observed Virginia state climatologist Patrick Michaels, who is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels says theories on global warming have had a troubled career, starting with an article in Nature itself.
“In 1996, conveniently a day before the U.N. conference that gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol, Nature published a paper purporting to match observed temperature with computer models of disastrous warming. It used weather balloon data from 1963 through 1987. The actual record, however, extended (then) from 1958 through 1995, and when all the data were used, the troubling numbers disappeared.
“Since that famous incident, people have been very leery of what major scientific journals publish on global warming. The Thomas extinction paper only throws more fuel on an already roaring inferno.�
Michaels points out many specific flaws with the article’s methodology and basic assumptions. Among them:
~ The article’s best-case scenario projects warming of 0.8º C in the next 50 years and produces an extinction of roughly 20 percent of the sampled species. But surface temperatures already have risen this amount in the past 100 years ... and there is no evidence of massive climate-related extinctions.
~ Global climate models, in general, predict a warmer surface and an increased rate of rainfall. That scenario leads to expansion of global rainforests, where the greatest number and most diversity of species exist. Trading virtually lifeless polar ice sheets for expanding tropical rainforests creates a future climate with a general character that is more, not less, hospitable for biodiversity.
~ Temperatures have been bouncing up and down a lot more than 0.8ºC during the past several hundred thousand years. The Nature article’s published methodology implies there are large extinctions for each and every increment of change, whether the temperature goes up or down. Applying that method to all the temperature changes that have taken place would suggest just about every species on Earth should be extinct.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an article in the magazine Nature which predicted global warming will cause between 15 and 37 percent of the Earth’s species to go extinct by the middle of this century unless immediate and drastic action is taken. After studying a sample of plants and animals around the globe, and then using computer programs to predict twenty-first century global warming, the authors claimed more than a million species will disappear by the year 2050. However, some serious flaws in the article have now been pointed out.
“There are a massive number of glaring problems� with the study, observed Virginia state climatologist Patrick Michaels, who is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels says theories on global warming have had a troubled career, starting with an article in Nature itself.
“In 1996, conveniently a day before the U.N. conference that gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol, Nature published a paper purporting to match observed temperature with computer models of disastrous warming. It used weather balloon data from 1963 through 1987. The actual record, however, extended (then) from 1958 through 1995, and when all the data were used, the troubling numbers disappeared.
“Since that famous incident, people have been very leery of what major scientific journals publish on global warming. The Thomas extinction paper only throws more fuel on an already roaring inferno.�
Michaels points out many specific flaws with the article’s methodology and basic assumptions. Among them:
~ The article’s best-case scenario projects warming of 0.8º C in the next 50 years and produces an extinction of roughly 20 percent of the sampled species. But surface temperatures already have risen this amount in the past 100 years ... and there is no evidence of massive climate-related extinctions.
~ Global climate models, in general, predict a warmer surface and an increased rate of rainfall. That scenario leads to expansion of global rainforests, where the greatest number and most diversity of species exist. Trading virtually lifeless polar ice sheets for expanding tropical rainforests creates a future climate with a general character that is more, not less, hospitable for biodiversity.
~ Temperatures have been bouncing up and down a lot more than 0.8ºC during the past several hundred thousand years. The Nature article’s published methodology implies there are large extinctions for each and every increment of change, whether the temperature goes up or down. Applying that method to all the temperature changes that have taken place would suggest just about every species on Earth should be extinct.
