For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are still treated with almost biblical reverence. IPCC scientists’ predictions, based on a complex series of scientific models, that man-made global warming is real and will continue to get worse are no longer questioned in the media and the halls of academia.
So what happens when someone like Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University Professor Mojib Latif, climate modeler and lead author for the IPCC who made significant contributions to the panel’s last two five-year reports, admits that the earth is actually entering a cooling phase and that temperatures haven’t warmed in nearly a decade?
In a speech three weeks ago at the U.N.’s World Climate Conference in Geneva, Latif predicted that we may be headed into a period of climate cooling that could last until 2030. He didn’t disavow the theory that the destructive man-made global warming predicted by the climate models he contributed to is caused by greenhouse gases.
He simply moved the goal posts, saying that the global warming the IPCC predicted would resume after this newly acknowledged period of cooling. The problem is that none of those IPCC models predicted this upcoming period of cooling, or the lack of warming over the last decade.
But for years, those same models were treated as gospel by the media. The newest IPCC reports were always given page-one billing by newspapers, including The Charlotte Observer, and their findings treated as virtually indisputable.
So Latif’s admission was roughly the equivalent of the discovery of an authentic biblical text that debunked the Immaculate Conception, yet insisted Jesus was still the son of God, not of man.
And it was treated by the media in this country roughly the way you’d expect — near-dead silence. But Latif isn’t a lone wolf or a skeptic who can be marginalized or ignored, as other well-credentialed critics of the accuracy of the U.N.’s climate models have been. He’s just a guy caught in an increasingly sticky situation that gets more embarrassing each month as study after study exploring global cooling is published.
Inside the pages of the world’s foremost scientific journals, the absence of warming and the possibility of global cooling is being debated by people with credentials every bit as impressive as Latif’s. The question of what is causing the absence of warming, whether it constitutes a trend that will last decades or is just a short-term blip, and what went wrong with the computer climate models and climate theory that missed it has now been the subject of dozens of studies by scientists. As with everything related to the intricacies of global warming, there are dozens of theories the public hasn’t heard much about — because most people don’t read scientific publications like Geophysical Research Letters — and no concrete answers.
But here and there, small acknowledgements of science’s ongoing puzzlement over the matter are turning up in the media, despite the lack of widespread coverage of the flaws in the IPCC’s models.
“Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field,” National Geographic warned in 2008. “But this summer’s forecast — and unusual early melting events all around the Arctic — serve as a dire warning of how quickly the polar regions are being affected by climate change.”
Last week, the publication reversed course.
“This year’s cooler-than-expected summer means the Arctic probably won’t experience ice-free summers until 2030 or 2040, scientists say,” the magazine reported. “Some models had previously predicted that the Arctic could be ice free in summer by as soon as 2013, due to rising temperatures from global warming.”
Just how flawed are the U.N. IPCC models? That’s another unanswered question that’s currently being ignored by Congress and the White House as they push “cap and trade” anti-climate-change legislation through the U.S. Senate.
Figuring that out before cap and trade becomes law would be helpful, because while the predicted impact of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere is now up for debate, the devastation the bill would wreak on the economy isn’t.
The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan arm of the federal government that analyzed the cap and trade bill, reported two weeks ago that it would reduce the country’s gross domestic product by as much as 3.5 percent by 2050, essentially making a slightly worse version of the current economy permanent.
The bill would lower household wealth, increase joblessness, decrease wages and lead to higher costs of producing goods and reduce domestic savings and investment.
And all of this in reaction to science that may have already been debunked by temperature data from the last decade?
Perhaps the greatest irony here is EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s admission before a Senate environmental committee in July that the carbon reductions the bill would cause won’t affect global carbon concentrations in the atmosphere as long as other nations like India and China continue to pollute.
Here’s to hoping scientists sort it all out before Congress votes.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 6, 2009.
