Coloring the Debate Over Global Warming
Over at TechCentralStation.Com, Nick Schulz has a classic example of how ostensibly objective reports on global warming are driven by political reasons to gloss over problems and disputes about global warming science.
Schulz points to the The National Assessment of the Potential Consequence of Climate Variability and Change, a report on global warming developed during the Clinton administration. This report was in turn used as the basis for the National Academy of Sciences’ recent Climate Action Report which has garnered no small amount of debate.
The original draft of the report included to graphs that showed computer projected temperatures for the United States based on two separate computer models developed at the Canadian Climate Center and the Hadley Center respectively.
Now the National Assessment wanted to use both models and presented maps showing future temperature. The problem is that along with not accurately modeling historic temperatures, the Canadian Climate Center and Hadley Center models disagree amongst themselves about future temperatures in the United States. The Canadian model predicts that the most extreme temperatures will occur in the western United States, whereas the Hadley model has the Western United States relatively cool with the highest temperatures concentrated in the Midwest.
The draft originally contained two multi-colored maps that made the different predictions of the two models obvious (these can be viewed in Schulz’s article).
Of course that can’t be tolerated, so in the final version of the report, those maps were taken out and replaced with maps that relied on a different color scale whose effect is to minimize to the naked eye the differences between the two projections (again, see the maps in Schulz’s article).
As Schulz writes,
This stunt throws into question the whole assessment process. Roger Pielke, a respected atmospheric scientist at Colorado State who was involved with the drafting process at the time, said, “I’m disappointed in the whole process. This has been the most closed, unhealthy scientific process I’ve ever been involved in.”
Sounds a lot like the scientific method has been replaced with marketing methods to sell global warming to the public.
Source:
Coloring Climate Change. Nick Schulz, TechCentralStation.Com, June 28, 2002.
Tags: Global Warming