By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, October 31, 2000

One of the most amusing parts of the 2000 presidential campaign was watching Republican candidate George W. Bush question global warming orthodoxy, which might have been interesting if it weren't obvious that he didn't know what he was talking about (as Cathy Young recently wrote in an article generally supportive of Bush, he couldn't make a halfway decent argument for celebrating Mother's Day.)

On the other hand liberal and left journalists have jumped all over Bush, and Gore to some extent, for not taking global warming seriously. Bob Herbert is typical of this crowd (though to be fair he is relatively even handed in presenting Bush and Gore's respective policies on the matter). In Warmer and Warmer, Herbert insists that a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report establishes once and for all that human beings are causing the world to get warmer and warmer as he puts it, and asks, "Is anyone paying attention?"

Unfortunately, journalists such as Herbert as just as mind numbingly stupid as Bush, basically never getting past the two page press release summaries of the IPCC's heavily politicized summary of its own findings. Can the IPCC really reliably predicted a 2 to 11 degree warming? Of course not. Don't take it from me, though -- the IPCC report itself concedes that computer climate modeling is still more guesswork than science. In the conclusions to its summarization of the scientific facts on global warming, the draft IPCC report notes:

In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-liner chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible.

Of course that doesn't quite pack the same punch as "the world is warming, the world is warming." Average global temperatures clearly increased slightly in the 20th century and are likely to increase slightly in the 21st century, but the cause and the upper bound of future temperature change are both questions about which there is still far more heat than light.

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