Prominent physicists counterblast recent Wall Street Journal climate op-ed
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0159
Three physicists — well-known, outspoken critics of climate scientists’ consensus — write in a letter in the 14 August Wall Street Journal, ‘Let us debate and deal with serious, real problems facing our society, not elaborately orchestrated, phony ones, like the trumped-up need to drastically curtail CO2 emissions.’
With their letter, Roger W. Cohen, William Happer and Richard S. Lindzen seek to rebut a recent WSJ op-ed that, contrary to past practice on those opinion pages, affirmed the consensus and called for cost-effective solutions. The op-ed’s author, the business-minded environmentalist Fred Krupp, cited drought and record heat but scorned attribution of weather to climate change, yet — as reported in this venue earlier — argued that this summer’s hotter and wilder weather requires fundamental change in conservatives’ scientific, political and economic outlooks.
As Andrew Revkin observes in his Dot Earth blog at the New York Times, recent weeks have seen ‘a stream of coverage and commentary on the relationship of ... drought episodes to global warming.’ The 12 August Times, for example, offered three scientists’ commentary ‘Hundred-Year Forecast: Drought’ , which asserted:
Until recently, many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a ‘threat,’ sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires.
But Cohen, Happer and Lindzen are having none of that. They cite recent U.S. Senate testimony by John R. Christy, Alabama’s state climatologist. In his one-page summary, Christy speaks of ‘speculative model output,’ repeats the common allegation that weather-station settings corrupt temperature-taking, praises the benefits of carbon, and charges that the full range of scientific climate judgments is regularly scanted. The summary begins:
It is popular again to claim that extreme events, such as the current central U.S. drought, are evidence of human-caused climate change. Actually, the Earth is very large, the weather is very dynamic, and extreme events will continue to occur somewhere, every year, naturally. The recent ‘extremes’ were exceeded in previous decades.
The WSJ prohibits op-ed responses to op-eds, but sometimes, as in this case, prints op-ed-length letters. Under the headline ''Climate Consensus’ Data Need a More Careful Look’ — complete with scare quotes around the phrase climate consensus — Cohen, Happer and Lindzen begin with mild mockery:
Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp speaks of ‘the trend — a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather.’ We have seen quite a few such claims this summer season, and Mr. Krupp insists that we accept them as ‘true.’ Only with Lewis Carroll’s famous definition of truth, ‘What I tell you three times is true,’ is this the case.
The three physicists cite and link to a graph showing ‘the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s year-by-year data for wet and dry years in the continental U.S.’. They interpret:
From 1900 to the present, there are only irregular, chaotic variations from year to year, but no change in the trend or in the frequency of dry years or wet years. Sometimes there are clusters of dry years, the most significant being the dry Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. These tend to be followed by clusters of wet years.
Despite shrill claims of new record highs, when we look at record highs for temperature measurement stations that have existed long enough to have a meaningful history, there is no trend in the number of extreme high temperatures, neither regionally nor continentally. We do see the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s setting the largest number of record highs, at a time when it is acknowledged that humans had negligible effect on climate.
The three argue that tornado and hurricane data work against any establishment of climate-change-caused trends. They continue:
Lurid media reporting and advocates’ claims aside, even the last comprehensive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report noted that ‘archived data sets are not yet sufficient for determining long-term trends in [weather] extremes.’ Yet this has not stopped global warming advocates from using hot summer weather as a tool to dramatize a supposedly impending climate Armageddon.
They declare false the notion that only political conservatives disbelieve the consensus:
[S]ome of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include the politically liberal physics Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever; famously independent physicist and author Freeman Dyson; environmentalist futurist, and father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock; left-center chemist Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the German environmental movement, and many others who would bristle at being lumped into the conservative camp.
‘Humanity has always dealt with changing climate,’ they observe near the end.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.