What if global-warming fears are overblown?

Gee, is that even possible? I thought the "evidence is in" and "the science is settled?"

Lest anyone think my prior post is nothing but mere invective, read this interview by Fortune magazine's Jon Birger of veteran climatologist and IPCC contributor John Christy (who has no ties to "Big Oil"). Birger learned that...

...the surface temperature readings upon which global warming theory is built have been distorted by urbanization. Due to the solar heat captured by bricks and pavement and due to the changing wind patterns caused by large buildings, a weather station placed in a rural village in 1900 will inevitably show higher temperature readings if that village has, over time, been transformed into small city or a suburban shopping district, Christy says.

The only way to control for such surface distortions is by measuring atmospheric temperatures. And when Christy and his co-researcher Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist now teaching at UA-Huntsville, began analyzing temperature readings from NOAA and NASA satellites, they found much slighter increases in atmospheric temperatures than what was being recorded on the surface. Christy and Spencer also found that nearly all the increases in average surface temperatures are related to nighttime readings - which makes sense if bricks and pavement are in fact retaining heat that would otherwise be dispersed.

Birger concludes by asking Christy,

What about the better-safe-than-sorry argument? Even if there's a chance Gore and Hansen are wrong, shouldn't we still take action in order to protect ourselves from catastrophe, just in case they're right?

Christy: The problem is that the solutions being offered don't provide any detectable relief from this so-called catastrophe. Congress is now discussing an 80% reduction in U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2050. That's basically the equivalent of building 1,000 new nuclear power plants all operating by 2020. Now I'm all in favor of nuclear energy, but that would affect the global temperature by only seven-hundredths of a degree by 2050 and fifteen hundredths by 2100. We wouldn't even notice it.

Hat Tip: A colleague of jg's college-professor dad who emailed the link to him with a note, "Maybe you were right all along." Click 'Continue reading' to see what dad said to him in reply.

(Is Fortune Magazine considered an MSM outlet?)

Richard,

Of course I am right, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever. The computer models used to predict climate change and the computers used to run them are not sufficient to model what is already known and mitigating factors that we would call negative feedback, that makes the climate systems stable, are not well understood and are almost completely neglected. Whenever one of these “climate researchers” want to publish a paper all they have to do is alter a parameter in their computer program and speculate about the results. The government funds practically no research to on climate research other than to prove man is causing it; which he isn’t. Anyone in this research community including John Christy who says anything counter to the “accepted facts” is all but ignored. John Christy is too high profile to have his funds cut-off; he is the Government’s token critic. The present administration has much it wants to do and uses climate crises to cry wolf. Hopefully, the inmates will ultimately be put back into their cages and sanity will reign. Maybe it will happen before they bankrupt the country, but I am not at all hopeful.

Deleterious Anthropogenic Warming of the Globe Posted by JohnGalt at May 22, 2009 6:48 PM