The fraud was that the National Academy of Sciences report SUPPORTED Kyoto. As usual, Big Media, (and you) got it completely wrong:The Press Gets It Wrong:
Our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty.
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Monday, June 11, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a
report on climate change, prepared in response to a request
from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an
implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. CNN's Michelle
Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that
the report represented "a unanimous decision that global
warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is
no wiggle room."
As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state
that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks
that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but
rather that the report represent the span of views. This the
full report did, making clear that there is no consensus,
unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and
what causes them.
As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the
hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the
report. The summary began with a zinger--that greenhouse
gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of
human activities, causing surface air temperatures and
subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before following
with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full text
noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating
long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this.
Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and
agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite
confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5
degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that
atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past
two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse
gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many,
the most important being water vapor and clouds).
But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a
position to confidently attribute past climate change to
carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the
future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions,
agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost
nothing relevant to policy discussions.
One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states,
the climate is always changing; change is the norm. Two
centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was
emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the
Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty
years ago, we were concerned with global cooling.
Distinguishing the small recent changes in global mean
temperature from the natural variability, which is unknown, is
not a trivial task. All attempts so far make the assumption
that existing computer climate models simulate natural
variability, but I doubt that anyone really believes this
assumption.
We simply do not know what relation, if any, exists between
global climate changes and water vapor, clouds, storms,
hurricanes, and other factors, including regional climate
changes, which are generally much larger than global
changes and not correlated with them. Nor do we know how
to predict changes in greenhouse gases. This is because we
cannot forecast economic and technological change over the
next century, and also because there are many man-made
substances whose properties and levels are not well known,
but which could be comparable in importance to carbon
dioxide.
What we do is know that a doubling of carbon dioxide by
itself would produce only a modest temperature increase of
one degree Celsius. Larger projected increases depend on
"amplification" of the carbon dioxide by more important, but
poorly modeled, greenhouse gases, clouds and water vapor.
The press has frequently tied the existence of climate
change to a need for Kyoto. 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. Given the difficulties in
significantly limiting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a
more effective policy might well focus on other greenhouse
substances whose potential for reducing global warming in a
short time may be greater.
The panel was finally asked to evaluate the work of the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
focusing on the Summary for Policymakers, the only part ever
read or quoted. The Summary for Policymakers, which is seen
as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus
of thousands of the world's foremost climate scientists.
Within the confines of professional courtesy, the NAS panel
essentially concluded that the IPCC's Summary for
Policymakers does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S.
government.
The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research
activities in climate science, but it is not specifically directed
at policy. The Summary for Policymakers is, but it is also a
very different document. It represents a consensus of
government representatives (many of whom are also their
nations' Kyoto representatives), rather than of scientists.
The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise
uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which
there is no evidence.
Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of
authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and
propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done
with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a
reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make
rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that
there is still a vast amount of uncertainty--far more than
advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge--and that the
NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant
to.
Mr. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, was a
member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on
climate change.
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