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Climate Theory Questions Deserve Answers
April 8, 2010
In many minds, the effects of human industry on the environment are unquestionable: The burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, that are causing the climate to change.
This view, popularized in the film “An Inconvenient Truth” and further strengthened by a Nobel Prize-winning report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has spurred a global wave of industry regulation and tax-subsidized investment in “green” technologies.
In this country, pending regulation of CO2—either through action by the Environmental Protection Agency or Congress—could cause the cost of energy to climb sharply.
But some recent revelations appear to have cracked the bedrock certainty of the theory that mankind is affecting the Earth’s climate.
A February 15 story in The Washington Post says flaws in the IPCC report, “ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel’s work but also in projections about climate change.”
That story came just a day after one in the London Daily Mail quoting scientist Phil Jones, whose “hockey stick” graph made the case that the Earth was headed toward significant warming, saying that he could not locate crucial information he used to build his theory to share with critics. In addition, the paper quoted an interview with the BBC in which Jones said there had been no “statistically significant” warming in the past 15 years.
In this country, research led by a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published recently in the prestigious journal Science, concludes that as much as a third of the warming trend observed in the 1990s was due to water vapor in the stratosphere, not greenhouse gases, as was the assumption.
Reports such as these show what a messy business is science. Conclusions are made and revised all the time. There is still a scientific consensus that human activity drives climate change. But questions about these conclusions and the data that led to them deserve examination.
The U.S. is about to make a long-term and costly commitment about our energy future based on these theories. Shouldn’t we be sure they are a close interpretation of reality?
Please share your thoughts about U.S. energy policy with the people who are making the decisions. Call or write your elected representatives. Join with almost half a million fellow co-op members in the grassroots campaign “Our Energy, Our Future” that is having an effect on the debate in Washington.