By Brian Carnell

Thursday, June 14, 2001

Much of the mainstream media coverage of the recent National Academy of Sciences report about global warming saw the report as a slam dunk against George W. Bush's skeptical view of the problem. An editorial from the Minnesota Star Tribune offers a typical example,

Take the request concerning work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that has issued three voluminous and increasingly dire reports on world scientific consensus. Global warming "skeptics" -- quibblers is a better word -- assert that IPCC's summaries not only simplify the underlying research but intensify its conclusions. The academy reviewers, who included a prominent global-warming dissenter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found otherwise.

This sort of nonsensical claim makes sense only if you assume that whoever wrote this editorial didn't actually bother to read the NAS report. The concern from skeptics about the IPCC report has never been the voluminous scientific reports, but rather the brief "Summary for Policymakers" that the IPCC issues which contain claims that go far beyond what has been established by the scientific reports.

The NAS report concludes that while the summaries are consistent with the underlying scientific data, they essentially remove all of the uncertainties to make global warming claims appear stronger and more certain than they actually are. Page 22 of the NAS report, for example, concludes among other things that,

Confidence limits and probabilistic information, with their basis, should always be considered as an integral part of the information that climate scientists provide to policy- and decision-makers. Without them, the IPCC ‘Summary for Policymakers’ could give an impression that the science of global warming is ‘settled’ even though many uncertainties still remain. [Emphasis added]

Even if they did not have time to read the entire report, certainly the folks at the Minnesota Star Tribune could have taken the time to read the first page of the report where they would have found the following,

Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments upward or downward.

In fact the NAS report makes clear that though there is cause for concern about human impacts on global warming, there are also enormous uncertainties and unresolved issues which need to be taken into account when crafting public policy on this issue. Pretending those uncertainties exist only in the minds of "quibblers" is not an reasonable way to proceed when deciding how to proceed.

Source:

Report gives Bush no new weasel room. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 10, 2001.

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