Some of my more alarmist friends have called into question me citing of Professor Gray as a critic of the current global warming mania. Professor Gray, considered the best in his profession, has been criticized because his predictions for hurricane season have been less than accurate in 2006 and 2007. No, we can’t accurately predict the severity of hurricane season a few months in the future. Meteorologists can not accurately tell me if it is going to rain in Atlanta this Wednesday. But apparently scientists know exactly what the temperature is going to be 100 years from now.
I am by nature skeptical. I challenge and investigate.
My beliefs on global warming are pretty close to the scientific consensus, to the extent there is a consensus. But the scientific consensus isn’t that the oceans are going to rise 7 meters by 2050, per Al Gore.
Just because someone develops a computer model that uses a constant rate of growth of CO2 that is more than double what scientists agree on, and it gets widely publicized by the doom obsessed media, does not make it the scientific consensus. In fact, much of the reported gloom and doom about global warming is the result of computer models that use values that can’t be defended. These computer models are unable to correctly model the movement of water vapor and other weather systems. They are just not sophisticated enough. They don’t back tested validly.
Right now there is no scientific consensus on the impact of global warming on Greenland’s glaciers. Patrick Michaels examines two papers published in the same scientific journal. Using the same satellite data one determined that the glaciers were melting while there other determined they were not. The former used a computer modeling approach while the latter supplemented their data gathering with empirical measurements. Who is right?
People that would question the wisdom of the Kyoto accord, which would plunge the developed world into recession and deny developing countries industry and electricity, while not achieving a change that can be measured, are labeled “Holocaust deniers” by the religious faithful.
The scientific consensus is only the “truth” until someone comes along and proves it wrong. If scientists just voted and were always right there would have been no need for Watson & Crick, Hubble, Einstein, Currie, Pasteur, Volta, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, or Archimedes.
It seems that the degree of scientific consensus on the extent, cause, and future of global warming is being exaggerated.
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