The American Spectator

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Understanding the Heat

11.22.06 @ 12:01AM

WHERE DO I NOT SIGN?
Re: William Tucker's Endorse Kyoto:

William Tucker writes, "There are few places where conservatives have come off looking so foolish as their stonewalling on global warming."

Looking foolish to whom? Environmentalist wacko Left Coasters? Chablis-sniffing, frite-dipping Bruxellians? The last thing conservatives need to do is "mend fences" with Algore's legions of fantasists. Sorry, Mr. Tucker, but we've got more important things to do.
-- Doug Welty
Arlington, Virginia

Mr. Tucker posits for our fare du jour, a rather unpalatable turkey of an idea that Bush and America endorse the Kyoto Protocol, just to make things right with the rest of the world. Pray tell, from whence does this asinine notion, that we have to mend fences with the rest of the world, come from?

Well, I for one say nuts to all this and will wait until Thursday for mine, thank you very much. How trendy of Mr. Tucker to be so enamored with apocryphal anecdotes of global warming, why it's enough to make any Euro-American proud. In addition, he yammers on with the standard Leftist ad hominem screed, that conservatives don't know what they're talking about when it comes to global warming. I'll be the first to concede that when it comes to hot air, the Left knocks the stuffing out of the rest of us. But not to beat around the bush, when attempting to make mincemeat out of skeptics such as Messrs. Lindzen and Singer, Mr. Tucker conveniently fails to mention how other reputable scientists (more than just a few) have made a complete hash of Michael Mann's flawed "Hockey Stick Graph" that have Gore and U.N. member nations all atwitter. Lest we squash Mr. Tucker's hypothesis to a thin gruel, perhaps he can justify his theory in light of the Medieval Climate Optimum of the 9th-14th centuries that had temperatures higher than today's. O.K. enough of this.

A Happy Thanksgiving to all at TAS, writers and readers alike. You too Mr. Tucker, that is of course, if Thanksgiving isn't too American a holiday for you.
-- A. DiPentima

Thank you, William Tucker, for providing the first reasonable article on global warming ever to appear in The American Spectator. No doubt you will be subjected to attacks an ridicule. Perhaps you've been given the green light to speak honestly against some of the indefensible special-interest-protecting policies of the failed Bush administration. I hope your readers come to recognize that the White House's follies extended well beyond Iraq.
-- Abe Grossman
Pleasantville, New York

Okay. I suppose in order to keep us from going to sleep it's necessary to throw in an occasional left wing loony article. I won't even bother to cite all the evidence that has been gathered and published by reputable scientists and climatologists that totally refute the idea that global warming is occurring, or more importantly that the sum total of human activity can affect the climate of the world by more than a miniscule amount.

What is more important from the standpoint of what is supposed to be a conservative publication is an understanding that the Kyoto Protocol is merely a very thinly veiled attempt to cripple the economy of the United States. Further, it would erode our sovereignty by subjecting domestic commercial enterprises to international oversight. Sounds to me like something that all conservatives should embrace enthusiastically.

Could we please try to keep this kind of tripe off the pages of the Spectator?
-- Keith Kunzler

Probably no harm, maybe even some good, would come from signing up for Kyoto, as William Tucker suggests, but to get an idea of just how unscientific (and how political) the global warming scare really is, one should go to this well-documented article in the Telegraph (London) from May 11. Just a cursory reading, or a mere glance at companion graphs, and one learns that the earth was very much warmer during the three centuries 1100 A.D. to 1400 A.D. than it is at present. To get a perspective of just what utter non-sense the present campaign is based on, one need only divide 125 (the number of years for which we have had modern, recorded weather data) by 4 x 10 to the 8th power (the approximate age of the planet). The data cited by the Inconvenient Truthers is, to say the least, insignificantly tiny (not to mention poorly distributed).
-- Ty Knoy
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Mr.. William Tucker should be commended for his fight for nuclear power. From an economic standpoint, national security, as well as from an ecological perspective nuclear power is the best alternative to fossil fuels. However, I fear Mr. Tucker has fallen into the trap that many well-meaning people have when considering CO2 and our climate. Kyoto is a byproduct of CO2 science and Paleoclimatology. To sum up the argument concisely, those who favor Kyoto argue that the last two decades of the 20th century were the warmest in 1,000 years, and that 1998 was the warmest year of the Holocene Era. This warming isn't natural, but anthropogenic. Man caused this warming through the use of massive amounts of fossil fuels. These fossil fuels increased the CO2 count in our atmosphere, and this increased CO2 has over time trapped incoming solar radiation in the lower atmosphere. Hence, Global Warming.

This entire line of argument relies heavily if not exclusively on the now famous Mann-Bradley-Hughes 1998 temperature reconstruction (MBH98) for the last 1,000 years. Before MBH98, most paleoclimatologists believed there were three climate events since AD1000: the Medieval Warm Period (MWP AD850-1350), The Little Ice Age (LIA AD1350-1850), and our current era. Depending on which temperature proxies you used, the MWP was anywhere from 4 to 6 Deg C warmer than the 1000 year mean, the LIA was 5-7 Deg C cooler than the 1000 year mean, and since 1850 the temperatures have significantly warmed. MBH98 "smoothed" out both the LIA and MWP, and since 1990 a dramatic spike in temperatures occurred. Instead of a 1,000-year sine wave type graph, MBH98 shows a long smooth 980-year handle with a very shape 20-year blade -- much like a hockey stick, hence the hockey stick graph. The UN's IPCC as well as most research and scientific organizations bought into this without any major critiques. That is until 2003, when 2 Canadian statisticians (McIntyre and McKitrick) audited MBH98. I won't go into the details suffice to say that their critiques were met with a stone wall from the authors of MBH98, the peer review boards, and the major scientific journals. M&M found significant errors in MBH98's methodology (Principle Components Analysis), as well as their selection of temperature proxies (Bristlecone Tree rings). In June of 2006 the NAS published a report which while being polite to MBH98 authors, they called into question the selection of proxies, the accuracy of their temperature reconstructions before 1650, as well as data mining (polite way to say cherry picking the data). The NAS report returned the MWP and LIA back into the lexicon of climatology.

As for the year 1998 being one of the warmest years since 1850, well it was also the year we experienced one of the most intense ENSO(El Nino Southern Oscillation) events ever recorded Since 2003, MBH98 has come under such scrutiny, that its validity as a scientific representation of our climate is called into question. That is, the entire line of argument -that we live in an age of unprecedented man-made global warming is now in serious doubt. While one can point to extreme heat events like the European summer of 2003 (35,000 heat related deaths), one can also point to unprecedented cooling in both East Asia and Siberia, as well as many portions of the Southern Hemisphere.

Also, another obvious item should be noted, we have only taken accurate weather observations since 1945. While proxies can be constructed from everything from the price of wine and grain to tree rings, accurate measurements (both human and satellite) are very new. Paleoclimatologists use proxies because they are the best thing going. Some proxies are sensitive to temperature, some are sensitive to precipitation. Some events appear unprecedented, but in reality are not. Most of the glaciers in the Glacier National Park have only been around since the coldest part of the Little Ice Age (1648); they fact that they are melting shouldn't surprise anyone. As late as 1912, ships had to be very careful to avoid Icebergs which littered the North Atlantic -- that hasn't been a problem since 1945. However, Norse sailors during the 10th and 11th Century were able to navigate and fish over large portions of the North Atlantic. We also know that despite subsistence farming, there were no major European famines during the periods of 900-1200 (warmest of the MWP), famines became a reality in European life aft the 14th century -- that is when it started to cool. Significant global warming also occurred between 200BC and 200AD, but by 400AD-600AD there was significant cooling, especially in Europe and North Africa. To say what we are experiencing now is unprecedented is rather narcissistic (a hallmark of our age), and ignores the evidence to the contrary.

Letter to the Editor

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Taxes, Trade, Harry Reid, Social Security, Environment, Global Warming, Constitution, Law, Military, Iraq, Africa, Energy, Oil, Medicare