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Evidence could turn climate legislation on its head

Houston Chronicle photo: Antarctic sea ice is above the long-term average.

 

 

 

The debate over climate change is gearing up in Congress. According to the Sacramento Bee, Congressman Henry Waxman’s bill, which would institute America’s first cap and trade system, will likely face a vote in the House sometime this summer.

 

If the evidence has a say in the coming congressional debates, Representative Waxman’s hysteria-driven bill should disappear into obscurity. The data suggesting that the world won’t face climate-induced disaster is mounting, and the global warming proselytizers should soon have to find a new pet catastrophe.

 

A recent study published in the Journal Nature reported that ice in Antarctica has been growing at a rate of 100,000 square kilometers per decade for the last 30 years. And while we’ve heard of every instance of melting ice in the Antarctic over the past few years, the amount of ice in the most southern part of the world “has increased overall,” according to ABC News’s report on the study. These findings are also consistent with data recently released by the National Snow and Ice Data Center which indicate that global sea ice extent is above the 30-year average.

 

Nonetheless, many scientists still accept The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) prediction that future warming will result in dangerous amounts of melted polar ice. But that prediction is problematic according to research conducted in 2007 by former NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer. Published in The Journal of Climate and Geophysical Research Letters, Dr. Spencer’s results suggest that the IPCC may have to revise its temperature projections downward to account for the mitigating effects of clouds on warming caused by carbon emissions. While the IPCC assumes that clouds tend to amplify global warming, Spencer points out that “it is well known in the climate business that the average effect of clouds on the climate system is one of cooling.” If the IPCC’s temperature projections exaggerate the amount of warming for this century, then the consequences of that warming are also exaggerated.

 

But the death knell for the doomsayers came in the form of a paper published last May which forecasted no increase in the earth’s temperature “over the next decade.”  The authors, researchers from Germany's Leipzig Institute of Marine Science, argued that temperature variations in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will “offset the projected anthropogenic warming.” Some readers are likely thinking that this is a minuscule period of time and long-term temperature projections are what we should be focusing on. The significance here, however, is that combined with the lack of warming since 1998 we’ll soon have 20 years without an increase in global temperatures. Not one of the IPCC’s climate models predicts 20 years without an increase in global temperatures. This information should raise serious doubts about the reliability of the climate models that are used to predict the drastic warming scenarios. As Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels points out, this effectively means that “there is no scientifically credible model for future warming.”

 

Before the environmental lobby and their allies in congress are allowed to foist dubious climate legislation on the country, lawmakers ought to take a second look at the data. If they do, the evidence just might turn the global warming hysteria on its head.