Scott Spiegel

Paul Krugman says of the U.S. Representatives who recently voted against the climate change bill: “[I]if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians… carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided… they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.”

Well, that’s what one Australian Senator, Steve Fielding, recently did in advance of the Australian Senate’s vote on a national emissions trading scheme.  In addition to a fact-finding trip to the U.S., Fielding prepared a series of questions for Australia’s “Minister for Climate Change and Water,” Senator Penny Wong:

Is it the case that CO₂ increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period?

Wong: “When climate change scientists talk about global warming they mean warming of the climate system as a whole, which includes the atmosphere, the oceans, and the cryosphere (ice, snow and frozen ground)…  [A]t time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend…”

Then how do we know warming is happening?  Do we know which factors are “masking” atmospheric warming and to what extent?  If not, how do we know atmospheric cooling isn’t taking place, and natural variability in the other direction isn’t “masking” that?

Wong adds, “[T]he year 1998 was unusually warm…  [T]he use of a highly unusual year to begin the trend analysis will also give misleading results.”  What about the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which emissions increased yet atmospheric temperature cooled?  Were the 1940s “a highly unusual decade”?

On ocean temperatures: “[O]nly about five percent of the warming since 1960 has taken place in the air…  Most of warming [sic] since 1960 (about 85 percent) has happened in the oceans.”

In an article last year, NPR reported, “Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message.  These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years” and have even cooled.  Their explanation: “[H]eat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air”—you remember, the air that Wong admits has absorbed only 5% of all warming.

NPR continues: “One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded—and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.”  No doubt these same scientists would have been just as vigilant in calling into question their entire data collection operation had it produced exactly the results they had predicted!

NPR: “The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.”

Let’s see: the Earth has its own atmospheric intermediaries that can nullify the entire influence of mankind on Earth’s temperatures—or not, depending on factors no one understands; and just to be safe, we should destroy industrial civilization.  How about we postpone the obliteration of 21^st century living standards until climatologists get sick of playing with their cute diving robots and start measuring things that actually affect the climate?

With respect to the cryosphere, Wong writes, “Since 1998 there has been continued decline in Arctic sea ice, reduction in the area of snow and frozen ground, melting of glaciers and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.”

In May 2009, Czech physicist Luboš Motl documented that “global sea ice remains substantially above the normal” level for the month.  According to engineer Dennis Chamberland, as of 2009, glaciers are growing in: Norway, Canada, France, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Switzerland, Kirghizstan, and Russia.  Glaciers are growing in New Zealand, including all glaciers in the Southern Alps.  In the U.S., glaciers are growing in Colorado, Washington, California, Montana, and Alaska.  In Antarctica in 2007, ice had grown to record levels since data collection began.  Greenland’s icecap is growing at the rate of 7.2 miles a year.  Science magazine reported in 2005 that the Greenland ice sheet is growing thicker.

So Wong seems to have comprehensively flunked Fielding’s Question #1.

Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998… was not unusual in either rate or magnitude as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history?

Wong: “[B]etween ice ages and warm inter-glacial periods temperatures increased by 4 to 7°C.  However this was a gradual process taking approximately 5,000 years…  Globally, the Earth has already experienced warming of 0.76°C since 1850…”

The period from 1850-2009 is 1/30^th the length of the 5,000-year period Wong references.  Presumably global temperatures over 5,000 years fluctuate.  So how do we know the global warming from 1850-2009—a “blink of an eye” by Wong’s standard—will continue at the same rate?  How do we know we’re not approaching a local maximum and that temperatures won’t start to decline soon?

Is it the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming… followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?

Wong: “It is not the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature…”  Rather, simulations collectively predicted an increase “on average.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to see which models predicted what actually happened and which didn’t, and what the models that were right predicted from 2008 on.

John Brignell recently compiled a list of 598 outcomes of global warming cited by environmental alarmists.  A few include: anxiety attacks, childhood insomnia, depression, early marriages, extreme changes to California, flesh-eating disease, heart attacks, lawsuits increasing, and psychiatric illness; all of which I propose had a causal influence in Michael Jackson’s death.

Maybe there’s a U.S. Senator brave enough to question and research the science of global warming before the Senate’s vote on the climate change bill.  If this thing is real, we can’t afford to lose too many more celebrities.