I’m in an interesting dilemma. I’m just finishing up a book on
global warming and nuclear power. The premise is this:
A. Global warming is a serious problem that should be
solved.
B. Nuclear power is the only way we’re going to solve it.
It’s a simple premise that defies both liberal and conservatives
— fair enough. But ultimately it could get both on the same side.
Then we might get something done in the country. Environmentalists
hate nuclear but they worry about global warming more.
Conservatives pooh-pooh global warming but they do like nuclear
power. So maybe we could get going on a nuclear economy that would
at least free us from coal (the worst polluter) and maybe
eventually cut into our imported oil.
When I came to the chapter on global warming, the argument
seemed fairly cut-and-dried. I employed the graph put out by the
United Nations International Panel on Climate Change in 2000. It
shows global temperatures staying on a very even keel over the last
1,000 years until suddenly jetting upward into unknown territory
since 1980. What could be simpler? Global warming is real.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, this graph is commonly
referred, in good Silicon Valley fashion, to as the “hockey
stick.”
Two months ago I tested the waters by writing a Spectator.org
column
called “Endorse Kyoto.” As I expected, a lot of people wrote in
denouncing me for giving in to the liberals on global warming. What
I didn’t expect was that many alert readers clued me in to
something that has emerged over the last five years — the hockey
stick is a fraud.
THE BIG PROBLEM FOR GLOBAL WARMING alarmists is a period called
“The Medieval Warming,” which occurred from about 950 A.D. to 1350
A.D. It’s well known from the history books. The Vikings colonized
Greenland in 982 A.D. and stayed until 1425 A.D., when the cold
weather and permafrost drove them out. While there they mapped the
northern coast of Greenland, which is now encased in ice (although
it’s slowly melting). Leif Ericsson, blown off course while headed
for Greenland in 1000 A.D., discovered “Vinland” — probably Nova
Scotia — where he found wild wheat and grapes growing in
abundance. Today the land is barren.
In fact, the IPCC had known about the Medieval Warming all
along. In 1996 it published a temperature graph that clearly showed
the Medieval Warming. There wasn’t any dispute at that point.
What happened? Somehow a Ph.D. student at the University of
Massachusetts named Michael Mann did some fancy things with some
tree-ring data from California in 1998 and came up with the “hockey
stick.” Such a blatantly ahistorical effort would have only raised
eyebrows under ordinary circumstances, but it turned out to be just
what the UN wanted — proof that global warming was unprecedented!
The IPCC made the hockey stick the centerpiece of its 2001
Climate Report. Bill Clinton also used it as the
centerpiece of his 2000 National Report on Climate Change.
The government of Canada sent a copy of the graph to every
household in the country. In the end, the IPCC appointed Mann
editor of its Journal of Climate — not bad for a lowly
Ph.D. student.
Slowly the criticisms trickled in. Two Canadian statisticians,
Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, examined Mann’s algorithms and
found that any random data plugged into the equations
produced the same hockey stick. The hockey-stick fraud was also the
subject of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.
The Hudson Institute has just published an excellent book,
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, chronicling
the whole controversy and more. Authors S. Fred Singer and Dennis
Avery present their own counter-theory — that the earth goes
through regular 1,500-year cycles of warming and cooling, driven by
the fluctuating intensity of the sun. There was a Roman Warming
from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D. — and of course the well-documented
Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850, when Europe nearly froze to
death.
All this is part of the guerrilla warfare that is going on
between proponents and skeptics of global warming. Dennis Deming, a
climate scientist at the University of Oklahoma, recently told the
Senate about his experience in the field:
In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic
journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole
temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in
North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article
appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio.
He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the
warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung
up on me.
With the publication of the article in Science, I
gained significant credibility in the community of scientists
working on climate change. They thought I was one of them…. One
of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of
climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that
said: “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
All this was very encouraging news. While I was researching all
this, temperatures on the East Coast were in the '60s and '70s and
people were sunbathing in January. I still miss winter, but it was
encouraging to know that we had been through this once before and
the world didn’t fall apart, as generally predicted by alarmists.
Greenland may become habitable again, but at least Miami isn’t
going to be underwater.
THERE WAS ONLY ONE PROBLEM: What about my book? I was willing to
make a concession on global warming in order to try to win liberals
over to nuclear energy and now the whole thing had fallen
apart.
I spent a very intense two weeks in study. There’s lots of
literature on both sides and of course alarmists and skeptics each
accuse each other of the most nefarious skullduggery.
Environmentalists are now pillorying Exxon of spending $16 million
trying to refute global warming. Each side is at the point of
trying to outlaw the other’s opinion.
What finally occurred to me is that maybe both are right. It’s
possible that the sun forces a 1500-year cycle of warming and
cooling and that recent carbon emissions from industrial
civilization are exaggerating the pattern. That would suggest
there’s nothing too unusual about the recent pattern (everybody
agrees it’s getting warmer), but carbon emissions could still be
playing a part.
I finally found a handful of scientists who support this view.
One is Nir Shaviv, a very intelligent Israeli astrophysicist who
has written the following on ScienceBits.com:
The truth is probably somewhere in between, with
natural causes probably being more important over the past
century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be
more dominant over the next century. Following [the]
empirical evidence… about 2/3’s (give or take a third or so) of
the warming should be attributed to increased solar activity and
the remaining to anthropogenic causes.
The others are S.K. Solanki of the Max Planck Institute and M.
Fligge of the Institute of Astronomy in Zurich, who have done
extensive research on solar activity and show that it corresponds
very closely with temperature changes. In particular, their data
explains the slight
decline in temperatures from 1956 to
1970 — a period that carbon-emissions advocates have a great deal
of trouble in explaining.
Solanki and Fligge are generally acknowledged by both sides to
be very objective chroniclers of the solar theory. Yet when I read
one of their leading papers, I found this:
Since approximately 1975 the situation is clearly
different…with solar irradiance showing a comparatively much more
modest rise than air temperature….[U]nless the influence of solar
variability on Earth is very strongly non-linear, at least this
most recent temperature increase reflects the influence of man-made
greenhouse gases or non-solar sources of natural
variability.
So I’m back in business. As far as I’m concerned, both sides have a
point. Yes, there was a Medieval Warming and yes, the sun is the
main agent of temperature change, but something is also happening
with carbon emissions that is pushing us into unknown territory.
It’s worth doing something about it.
I hope this convinces both sides to take another look at nuclear
power.
