Jack Kelly: Facts and global warming

A prominent scientist says the media got it wrong

Sunday, June 17, 2001

Is the media misreporting of global warming a product of bias, stupidity, carelessness, or all three? Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT and one of 11 scientists who wrote the report the National Academy of Sciences sent to President Bush last week is among those who wonders why journalists always seem to get the facts wrong.

CNN's Michelle Mitchell, whose coverage was typical, said the NAS report represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."

		Jack Kelly is national affairs writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com).

None of this is true, said Lindzen in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

"Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens," Lindzen wrote. "It is a reprehensible practice which corrodes our ability to make rational decisions."

A big problem is that journalists rarely report what the scientists themselves said in the NAS report, or in the earlier report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, relying instead on misleading summaries prepared by political aides.

"The Summary for Policymakers, which is seen as endorsing [the UN treaty drafted at] Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world's foremost climate scientists," Lindzen said. "The NAS panel essentially concluded that the IPCC's Summary for Policymakers does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. government."

Scientists agree that global mean temperatures are half a degree Celsius (a little more than one degree Fahrenheit) warmer than they were a century ago; that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing for two centuries, and that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas likely to warm the Earth, Lindzen said.

But, he said, there is no agreement on whether the warming is caused primarily by CO2 emissions, whether it will continue, or whether it would be harmful if it did.

"One reason for this uncertainty is that the climate is always changing," Lindzen said. "Two centuries ago, much of the Northern hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. During the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned with global cooling."

Dr. Sallie Baliunas of Harvard thinks changes in the magnetism of the sun are chiefly responsible for changes in the climate on Earth.

"When the sun's magnetism is strong, the sun's energy output is higher and the Earth is warmer," she said. "We can reconstruct [temperature records for the] Northern Hemisphere about 250 years or so. The ups and downs of temperature match almost exactly the ups and downs in magnetism."

Baliunas doubts that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide contribute much to global warming.

"The acid test of all this is the last 22 years of satellite measurements made of the lower layer of air of the Earth," she said. "That layer of air should be warming quite rapidly. It's where the greenhouse effect should be taking place. That layer has not seen a big warming trend. We've seen a little bit of warming of the surface, but it can't be caused by that carbon dioxide effect in that atmospheric layer, which has no warming."

Even if global warming is being caused by man-made emissions, there is little likelihood the Kyoto treaty, if fully implemented, would do much about it, Lindzen said.

"The press has frequently tied the existence of climate change to a need for Kyoto," he said. "The NAS panel did not address this question.

"My own view, consistent with the panel's work, is that the Kyoto Protocol would not result in a substantial reduction in global warming."

But if implemented in its present form, Kyoto would sandbag the U.S. economy. It would require the United States to reduce its power production by as much as 25 percent, which would have a much more devastating effect than did the Arab oil embargo after the Yom Kippur war.

Prior to leaving for Europe, President Bush outlined a plan for meeting carbon dioxide emissions goals in the Kyoto treaty without causing a depression. The plan deserves a respectful hearing, but is unlikely to get it from a news media which either cannot recognize the truth, or is unwilling to report it.