Speaker Nunez Draws the Line on AB 32 on Global Warming—Will Only Send Governor a Bill That is Enforceable and Supported by Environmental Community

Al Gore’s argument is that the globe is warming and human-emitted CO2 is causing this warming. Gore is promoting a hoax along with Michael Moore, George Soros and a long list of scientists who receive big research money from the government (i.e. our tax dollars) to study these things.

To ‘prove’ global warming, Gore's key evidence is that the Arctic pole and glaciers in the Northern hemisphere are melting. The arctic pole and glaciers are melting, but that does not prove that the globe is warming.

Objective scientists (who have no skin in the game) refute Gore and his friends as well the science claims of global warming and rising sea levels. The current furor over “global warming” is pure politics and greed – to create a crisis in peoples’ minds, and get money to study it or to advance a political agenda.

It is neither a fact nor is it a consensus of scientists that the earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Nor is it a fact that more CO2 is bad for the earth. It is a fact that the amount of CO2 produced by humans has an insignificant effect on global temperature. Human generated CO2 has less effect than the error in the measurement of the greenhouse heating effect caused by water vapor/clouds. Water vapor/ clouds have huge temperature effects, far more than all other greenhouse gases combined, but so far water vapor and cloud effects are too complex to model.

In fact, the northern polar regions are melting and at the same time the southern polar regions are gaining more ice; although scientists do not yet know why this is happening, this natural balance between the polar regions results in the overall sea levels around the globe remaining about the same. Furthermore, according to the U.S. National Research Council and the American Academy of Science in June 2006, the global temperature has increased only 0.6 degrees in the last century, hardly something to get hysterical about, much less hobble California industry.

It is not warmer that it has ever been. A period centered around 1000 AD lasting until about 1600 AD (so about 400 years ago) was at least as warm as it is now, and this warm period was followed by a long bitter cooling period, from around 1600 AD until 1850. The first decade of the seventeenth century was notable for exceptionally cold conditions worldwide. Beginning in 1600/01, a cluster of volcanic events occurred. The cold period saw rapid growth of glaciers and some parts of North America and Europe were snow bound year round. The cold period is called the little ice age. You may remember the history of the bitter winters of Napoleon’s march into Russia, or the bitter winters of the American Revolutionary war period.

Knowledgeable climatologists continue to show that Gore and his alarmist followers are wrong. These scientists include Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William M. Gray, Colorado State University’s professor of atmospheric science; and Sallie Baliunas, senior scientist at George C. Marshall Institute and co-host of TechCentralStation.com; and Willie Soon, a physicist in the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Lindzen’s April 12 Wall Street Journal article, “Climate of Fear,” debunks the alarmists’ claims and is a good layman- level overview for those who want the key facts. For details on the climatology and politics, read Lindzen’s “Understanding Common Climate Claims,” available on the Internet.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, former director of the National Weather Satellite Center and renowned atmospheric scientist from George Mason University, says concerns about "global warming" -- most prominently emanating from presidential hopeful Al Gore -- may be a lot of hot air. Dr. Singer led a group of 17,000 scientits in a petition to the US Senate calling for the Senate to reject rather than ratify the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. The Senate rejected the Kyoto treaty for good reasons and so should California.

Unlike surface-based temperatures, global temperature measurements of the Earth's lower atmosphere obtained from satellites reveal no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. The slight trend that is in the data actually appears to be downward. The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions and from El Niño. The programs which model global warming in a computer say the temperature of the Earth's lower atmosphere should be going up markedly, but actual measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere reveal no such pronounced activity.

The atmosphere is extremely complex. Because of this, finding the correct explanation for the behavior we observe is complex as well. Virtually all scientists will agree that a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere should have some effect on the temperature of the Earth. But it is much less certain how or if we will recognize the effects of this increase. There are several reasons:

First, the influence of a man-made doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is small compared to the Earth's natural cooling rate, on the order of only a percent. Second, there is a much more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, namely water vapor. Water vapor over the Earth is extremely variable, both in space and in time. Third, the ways in which clouds and water vapor feed back and ultimately influence the temperature of the Earth are, at best, poorly understood. Fourth, convective overturning of the atmosphere - poorly represented in computer models of global warming - primarily determines the temperature distribution of the surface and upper troposphere, not radiation balance.

AB 32 is badly misguided legislation that will lead to recession and unemployment in California and have no significant effect on global warming.

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Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested--a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences--as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union--formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.

All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

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